Raghu Kumar Uses Games To Take Stress Out of the Trading Equation | Episode 350

Professor Game Podcast

Raghu is a serial entrepreneur and has been obsessed with the financial markets since the age of 16. After graduating from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he started his first company in 2006 - RK Trading Partnership - a proprietary trading company which actively traded the forex markets. He was able to turn $10k into more than $2M over a span of two years using low-latency, news trading strategies. Using the profits, he moved to India in 2008 · along with two other co-founders · and setup RKSV Securities, a retail stock brokerage, which eventually rebranded into Upstox. RKSV was also a proprietary trading firm and actively traded India·s stock markets, and Raghu led the prop desk division. After Upstox raised its Series A, the prop desk was shut down, and Raghu transitioned into a traditional co-founder role. In 2019, he stepped down from the Board of Upstox and left all operational duties, but remains Upstox·s largest individual shareholder. He took a long sabbatical, moved back to the US, and started thinking about his next venture. He wanted to create a new, bolder company, which could massively disrupt the financial markets at a larger scale than a typical stock brokerage. In 2020, he incorporated TradingLeagues, a disruptive, gamified offering for the financial markets. The goal behind TradingLeagues is to massively increase awareness and engagement with the financial markets at a global level by leveraging gamification. TradingLeagues launched globally in Dec 2023 and amassed more than 100k users. In his free time, he loves playing chess, being involved with his two young boys, and finding ways to keep his mind sharp.