Annual Letter 2025 - TradingTransformer Technologies LLC

A Letter from our CEO

June 6, 2025

Hey there,

This is Liwei Wu (LinkedIn | Google Scholar). It has been a while since our last communication back in November 2023. In my last email, I admitted we were nowhere close to a B2B or B2C product. That, unfortunately, is still the case—and I truly appreciate that you filled out the interest form back then so I have your emails. However, I’m glad to share that I am starting to see evidence of real progress for our company in the field of investing.

Summarizing the past fiscal year, there are 2 milestones that are remarkable by any measures which clearly exceeded my own expectations:

First, 2025 YTD return reached remarkable 76.37% in U.S. stock market, outperforming S&P 500 index by over 70%! (See attached screenshot)
Second, the same method that has been working very well in U.S. stock market also have proven to work well in a totally different foreign market: generated 81.2% return in the Hong Kong stock market, outperforming the baseline Hang Seng index by over 50% in the same one year period, since my birthday last year's July.

Let me also talk about the history of how this entrepreneur journey actually started just in case anyone is interested. TradingTransformer Technologies LLC was legally incorporated exactly 2 years ago in Delaware today on 2023/6/6. The same week 5 years ago was my first week at LinkedIn, my first full-time job after PhD. The idea to crack the market using AI (and using transformers) occurred to me 6 years ago at 2019 in NYC. Back then I was amazed at the fact that AI revolution is evolving at faster and faster pace and my PhD advisor Prof. Cho (UCLA website) told me it is not worthwhile doing vision transformers research. I was only one not wanting to do finance jobs back then as undergraduate in Hong Kong but my bachelor final-year project was on extreme value modeling for Hong Kong stock market. That was my first time dealing with financial data but the lesson learnt there still holds very true today: not using leverage in any situations.

Looking back, I had no idea that the power of transformer or Large Language Model can be this big. Neither did I know that 6-year journey I just started is this gnarly, otherwise I for sure I would not have started this PhD final-year project (yeah that is what I thought back then). As one can easily see the irony, this so-called final-PhD-year project becomes another 6-year grinding PhD journey in the field of investing. I am still amazed at how time flies. A lot has happened since last communication on WSW AI company finder. That includes my role models in the field Jim Simons and Charlie Mungle passed away and Warren Buffett is retiring end of 2025. Also, today Elon Musk fought with Trump in a very public way. I also spent more time in China now.

Although I cannot say too much about the method itself for obvious reasons, I hope the lessons I learnt in this journey are useful for you to achieve your own success no matter what cool things you are working on. I know often it is not wise to share unsolicited advice but I am going to do it anyways because I thought it may be useful to some people.

One way to know your life is on really good track is to look back and find 80% of your life’s X was achieved within past 5 years, (X can be wealth relationship, or knowledge).
Staying focused on one thing that you are really good at and you find really promising really pays off! Looking back, the happiest days are those I woke up at 5 am, working on my own project before moving to LinkedIn job and continue working on it after full-time job till I went to bed during pandemic. The process of pursuit of knowledge is often more rewarding than materialistic gains that come with it.
Failing is not that scary after all. After failing every possible other way, the only way left must be the way that works! More importantly, life has ups and downs. Don’t ever lose hope and give up. Looking back years later, most terrible things at first look are not that bad after all and may even open new roads for you. It has occurred to me too many times. Without failing to enroll in the top-2 universities in China, I would not have studied in Hong Kong, traveled around the world, studied abroad in Cambridge and Wisconsin, and switched to AI in the end. Not being wanted by most professors in my first year of PhD gave me the chance to know my wonderful PhD advisors later who would join the same university in my second year. My most trusted partner "hit my head with bricks" from my back while I was in Hawaii and it was tough medicine to swallow, but that somehow worked out fine too and gave me out-of-the-box new insights on how financial markets work. Here is the Steve Jobs’ speech at Stanford: “you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future”. Going through the speech each time gives me new perspectives so I highly recommend reading it if you haven't already.

And let me know if you ever visit Shanghai in the near future. Maybe we can hang out together for fun.

Liwei Wu
CEO, TradingTransformer Technologies LLC
Shanghai, China
2025/6/6