About
About ARQNXS
DojiPad Institutional is built by ARQNXS, a trading software company founded in 2017 by Nigel van der Laan and based in Amsterdam and Barcelona.
Our design partner
A senior risk officer has been our design partner since the first gate item, the first release check.
Nigel van der Laan, founder
Nigel founded ARQNXS in 2017, and has been building trading infrastructure since then. His background is in biopsychology and neuroscience, the science of how the brain and body shape behavior, including decisions under pressure. He has traded since 2020, and order flow since 2023: he is a discretionary order flow trader himself. DojiPad comes from that combination. Most trading tools look at the result after the trade; DojiPad looks at how the decision is made, before the order.
How DojiPad started
DojiPad began as a trading journal for individual traders. It grew into a behavioral coaching platform for discretionary traders, built around DJ, DojiPad's AI coach. That platform runs at dojipad.com, and ARQNXS still makes it. The behavioral engine was proven first on the retail platform. It models each trader's own failure patterns. It checks plans before they are executed. It grades every prediction against the actual fills.
Trading desks needed one more thing: a firm can't send its traders' plans to an outside vendor. So DojiPad Institutional puts that engine inside the deployment setup that professional desks require: the firm's own cloud account. Nothing in your deployment calls back to ARQNXS. It adds what risk and compliance need: limit checks, breach predictions and a record of every decision. It also builds in the design decisions the desk's traders will accept. Until a firm connects its execution feed, each breach prediction is checked against the trader's next committed plan.
Early feedback from the risk side widened it from discretionary traders to rules based and algorithmic desks. Today DojiPad Institutional is available for a 30-day pilot on one desk.
Why we built it
The expensive mistakes in trading are rarely a lack of information. They are decisions made under pressure: sizing up after a loss, adding to a position past the plan, a limit nobody checked until the next morning. Every control a firm runs fires at the order or after it. The decision happens before both, and nobody keeps a record of it. DojiPad was built for that moment.
What other tools miss
Behavioral analytics review decisions after the fact, from trade history. Order systems check orders. Surveillance reviews trades. All three are useful, and none of them sees the decision while it can still change, against the firm's limits, with the trader's conversation kept private. That is the gap DojiPad was built for.
How we work
- FOUNDER-LED
- ARQNXS is founder-led and backed by private angel investors. The person who briefs you is the person who built DojiPad and the person who supports it, with no account-management layer in between.
- SUPPORT
Support comes directly from the founder, at any hour, with a response within one hour.
- FULLY LOCKED DOWN
- It runs fully locked down in your firm's own cloud account, set up by your own administrator. Nothing in it can send data out except to the Microsoft services it runs on, and we never hold your keys or have access to it.
- YOUR RECORDS DON'T DEPEND ON US
- Nothing in your deployment calls back to ARQNXS. If ARQNXS stopped operating, your data and records would stay in your own database, in your firm's own cloud account.
- UPDATES
- We publish each new version with upgrade steps and release notes; your administrator installs it. We never need access to your environment.
- HOW WE RELEASE CHANGES
- Every release must pass a gate: a set of acceptance items, checked live on the deployed build. Nothing is merged until it passes. This site follows the same rule. A list of every claim the site makes is kept with its code, and no claim goes live without a source.
- SECURITY EVIDENCE
- We don't hold SOC 2 or ISO 27001. DojiPad doesn't run on our systems; it runs in your firm's own cloud account, where the deployment produces its own evidence, reviewed live with your security team under NDA. We complete your security and due diligence questionnaires.
What DojiPad will and won't do
Our approach
Two principles decide what DojiPad will and won't do.
Why the trader's judgment comes first
A trading desk has exactly one asset: the judgment of its traders. Every control the firm buys should be measured against one question. Does it make that judgment better, or does it only hold it back?
Instruments, not autopilots
We build instruments, not autopilots. A wall produces compliance at the moment of the wall, and nothing afterward. A limit breach can be shown to the trader while the decision is still open. It comes with the trader's own record and the exact words of your firm's limits. That produces something a wall never can: a trader who catches the pattern themselves next time. One of these builds up over a career. The other has to stop the trader again tomorrow. We chose the control that builds up. The whole design of the system follows from that choice.
The trader stays in charge
Aviation did not become the safest way to travel by automating pilots out of the cockpit. It got there with instruments, checklists, and a culture where every decision leaves a record and every record teaches. That is the model here. The pilot flies the plane. The trader decides. The firm oversees. The system gives both of them full information before the order is placed. It also keeps an audit trail showing that they did. Judgment stays with the people who produce the returns. So does the accountability.
The fourth paper
“We built a system that could block trades. It never will.”
This is the title of the fourth paper in the series. Read the papers →
Company details
- COMPANY
- ARQNXS OÜ (Estonia), incorporation in progress
- OPERATING FROM
- Based in Amsterdam and Barcelona.
- CONTACT
- nigel@arqnxs.com
- ELSEWHERE
- arqnxs.com · dojipad.com