We build the price
nobody was willing
to show you.
TradeStance is a trade-intelligence platform for importers, distributors, and commodity houses who are tired of pricing opacity. We collect, validate, and anchor every number we surface — so you buy on evidence, not on the friendliest quote in your inbox.
The market’s real price isn’t printed. It’s negotiated.
For decades, global commodity pricing has run on relationships, regional boards, and closed-door negotiations. If you’re a mid-market importer, you see a quote — not a range, not a benchmark, not the tariff, not the freight, not the supplier’s actual cost basis. Just a number, take it or leave it.
Trading houses with dedicated commodities desks sit on the other side of that table with 30+ data feeds and a team of analysts. That asymmetry is the opacity gap. We built TradeStance to close it.
“Deliver institutional-grade trade intelligence to every importer, regardless of scale.”
Three systems. One number you can trust.
Real-time global ingestion
Automated collectors across 35+ sources — LME, ICE, CBOT, UN Comtrade, FAO, IMF, TurkStat, USDA, Freightos, plus the IMF PortWatch congestion feed and Event Registry news. Every row timestamped, source-tagged, and passed through the Data Guardian pipeline.
The consensus engine
Multi-source median with weighted anchors, outlier rejection, and a DIA-LSTM forecast fusing 30-day price sequences with 128-dim news-sentiment embeddings. Drift watched daily. If MAPE breaches 5%, the model retrains the next morning.
Mathematical anchoring
Every landed price runs through the same formula: P_L = (P_F + C_L + C_S + C_I) × (1 + T) + D + F. No signal leaves the platform without passing pre/post assertions in the Guardian — duty, freight, insurance, and FX must all reconcile.
Born from a 4am phone call about a 3-ringgit rice spread.
Our founder ran a family trading business out of Malaysia for a decade. One morning a Vietnamese supplier quoted rice 3 ringgit cheaper than the week before — and we had no way to verify if that was a windfall, a mistake, or a warning. Phone calls, WhatsApp screenshots, three browser tabs open to government statistics boards. By the time we had an answer, the price had moved again.
The big trading houses had answered that question in 30 seconds. We wanted the same thing for everyone else.
Today TradeStance runs 15 country engines, 35+ live data sources, and a DIA-LSTM forecast retrained automatically when reality drifts from the model. The goal is the same as it was at 4am: tell me what the price really is, in a language I can act on.
Four habits that never leave the roadmap.
Evidence before opinion
Every number on the platform carries a source, a confidence interval, and a method. If we can’t show you the math, we don’t show you the number.
Ship before polish
A working signal in the hands of a customer beats a perfect signal on a whiteboard. We release weekly and fix in public.
The customer is the spec
Features start as a Slack message from a user. Roadmap is public; decisions are explained; users have a seat at the release review.
Compound, don’t churn
We optimise for the 18-month retention cohort, not the 2-week signup spike. Long-term customer outcome beats short-term vanity metric every time.
Small team. Global market. Opinionated about both.
Engineers, commodity analysts, and ex-procurement operators. Split between Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, and remote. We hire people who have had to explain a 2-ringgit discrepancy to a boss before, because those people know what “useful” actually looks like.
From spreadsheet to platform, in public.
- 12024 Q3The 4am phone callFirst prototype: a shared spreadsheet scraping commodity prices for the family trading desk.
- 22025 Q1First API + consensus engineFour country engines (MY, SG, TH, VN). Landed-cost calculator public at tradestance.com. First 30 importers on the waitlist.
- 32025 Q3The DIA-LSTM forecastDual-input attention model trained on 30-day price + 128-dim news embeddings. Drift watcher live.
- 42026 Q1Platform splitERP suite, Mail, Drive, Domains, Blog, and the unified auth hub at account.tradestance.com. 15 country engines.
- 5TodayAlpha, waitlist-onlyCurrently onboarding a small cohort of importers per week. Send us a note — we might have room.