In 2020, while the world was locked inside, I built Tradesimply — a live trading application in Excel. VBA and Zerodha's API. Real-time data. Commentary running in thirty languages.
When people heard what it was, the common response was the same one line, over and over: "You cannot build a trading application in Excel."
I built a trading application in Excel.
What it actually did
Tradesimply wasn't a template with some formatting on top. It was a working tool — a live NSE data feed wired straight into a spreadsheet through Zerodha's API, with buy, sell and freeze trading functions built entirely in VBA. Prices moved in real time. The commentary layer read the movement out loud, in Hindi and English, and the language logic behind it could run in up to thirty languages. All of this in 2020, before Excel 365's dynamic-array functions — the features that make "live" spreadsheets easy today — even existed.
At the time, fintech startups were raising millions of dollars to build exactly this kind of live trading experience. I built the same underlying idea with VBA, a spreadsheet, and the discipline of twenty years spent inside Excel every single day.
Why it wasn't really about trading
Tradesimply was never really the point. The point was proving, to myself as much as anyone, that Excel — a tool most people treat as a glorified calculator — can hold a live API connection, real-time logic, and a commentary engine, built entirely in VBA, if you're willing to sit with it long enough to make it work.
That's the same instinct behind everything on this site. A Power BI dashboard is Tradesimply's live-data instinct, aimed at a finance team instead of a stock ticker. A Python script pulling marketplace data through an API to catch a ₹37 lakh fraud pattern is the same API-integration discipline that once pulled Zerodha's feed into a spreadsheet. An n8n or Zapier workflow that runs itself every morning is the same idea Tradesimply proved in 2020, before any of those tools were part of the picture — a workflow that doesn't wait for a human to trigger it.
The tool changes. The discipline of turning raw, live data into something a person can act on in one glance doesn't.
7AM & Realtime CFO™ exists because of the same discipline — a live feed of numbers, verified before anyone sees them, delivered the moment they're needed instead of three weeks later. Tradesimply was the proof, years before the product had a name.