Retail Systematic Trading is now i26g, short for Independent Systematic Trading. This post records why, and what changed with the name. It supersedes the naming and domain decision in Choosing a Domain Name for My Trading Platform, which stays as it was written.
The Word That Was Wrong
In finance, “retail” means not institutional, which is accurate. It is also industry jargon, often slightly condescending, and outside finance it means shops. Worse, it describes the trader as small. What actually sets the platform apart is that the trader owns and runs the system.
The area heading on the ventures page made it worse: “Retail Systematic Trading (RST) Management” was left over from a time when several areas were named in parallel. With one area left, “Management” described nothing, and it put the abbreviation in the middle of the phrase.
What I Weighed
I kept “systematic” and “trading” and looked for a replacement for “retail”:
| Option | Why not |
|---|---|
| Self-directed | Well established, but mainly in American brokerage language, and it means “without an adviser” — about investing rather than trading, and true of anyone using a broker’s app |
| Quantitative | Better known, but it describes the modelling rather than the discipline of following rules, and it invites a comparison with hedge funds that an independent trader will lose |
| Algorithmic | Describes only execution by a machine, and sits in the neighbourhood of trading bots and get-rich-quick marketing |
| Investing instead of trading | A different activity |
Independent won: an independent trader trades their own capital rather than working for a firm, and the word also carries the platform’s principle of no vendor lock-in.
Why a Numeronym
“Independent Systematic Trading” is accurate but not a brand, and its abbreviation, IST, means nothing until it is explained. Brand words — Half Kelly, Turtle Rules, Ruledesk, and others — were distinctive, but further from the point.
A numeronym keeps the exact words and makes them a name: the first letter, the number of letters in between, and the last letter, as in i18n, k8s, or a16z. “Independent Systematic Trading” has 28 letters, so it becomes i26g. Developers recognise the pattern, the name encodes the product’s own description, and it is distinctive enough to stand on its own.
The Domains
The brand should be easy to promote and possible to sell, so it is independent of my company names, and i26g.com is the main address. The additional domains, i26g.sh and i26g.co, are registered defensively and point to i26g.com. rstplatform.sh was never really used and stays parked.
What Changed With the Name
- The model became the i26g Library: the knowledge around systematic trading, with the model at its core, so people can come in through any question rather than only through the platform. It covers methods and engineering, never recommendations of strategies, instruments, or trades.
- The platform became the i26g Platform, and custom development became i26g Custom Development.
- The control plane became part of the brand. The Application Control Plane was narrowed to the i26g Control Plane. It is given a bounded environment, checks that the environment meets its requirements, and manages everything inside it, from VMs and networks to the i26g Platform. A buyer of i26g gets what operates the platform. Handing the Trading Platform a Boundary describes how.
- The infrastructure stays mine. The Infrastructure Control Plane, which sets up that boundary, and the layer that runs my other workloads, are personal projects, described in My Laptop as Infrastructure Control Plane and Client. Selling i26g must never sell what runs my own operations.
Until it is spun out, i26g is developed under Alpha Phase Studio AB.
Renamed something you had already published? Leave a comment below, or get in touch — I would like to hear what made you change it. Follow my RSS feed to keep up with i26g as it develops.