Rance Masheck — Founder
From building stock education brands in the 1990s to founding a trading analytics platform acquired by TD Ameritrade to leading 140+ integration programs for thinkorswim — decades of experience across trading education, platform development, and brokerage technology. Now building the trading platform that partners deploy under their own brand.
Roots in Trading Education
Before building platforms, Rance was in the trading education business. Starting in the mid-1990s, he founded and grew a stock education company operating under the Star Trader and Spread Trader Edge brands — teaching active traders how to navigate the markets.
In 2003, the parent company behind Teach Me To Trade — one of the largest stock and real estate education companies at the time — acquired his business. Rance stayed on to run the stock education division, working with thousands of students across multiple brands.
That experience shaped everything that came next. Working that closely with traders every day made one thing clear: the tools available to retail traders were nowhere near good enough. The platforms were fragmented, the analytics were shallow, and nothing connected the full trading workflow. Rance decided to build something better.
OPUS — Where It Started
That conviction led Rance to found OPUS (Options Positioning and Utilization Systems) — a platform built to give retail traders the analytical tools that had previously been available only to institutional desks. OPUS delivered advanced options analytics and decision-support capabilities that didn’t exist anywhere else in the retail market.
The platform grew to tens of thousands of users and became widely adopted by trading educators and experienced options traders. TD Ameritrade acquired OPUS in 2007.
Inside TD Ameritrade
Following the acquisition, Rance joined TD Ameritrade in leadership roles focused on trading platform technology and brokerage integration. He also designed and helped rewrite the margin engine used by TD Ameritrade, enabling the platform to support complex options margin calculations that were far ahead of what most retail platforms offered at the time.
When TD Ameritrade acquired thinkorswim, Rance led the business-side coordination of more than 140 technical integration programs required to bring the thinkorswim platform into the TD Ameritrade ecosystem.
That work helped establish thinkorswim as one of the first retail trading platforms capable of supporting sophisticated options strategies at scale — a platform that went on to become the industry standard for active traders.
The Insight That Changed Everything
Working inside a major brokerage revealed a fundamental tension in the industry.
Brokerage platforms are designed to support the brokerage’s business model — not to help traders evaluate and improve their performance. A true trading journal and performance analytics system reveals behavioral patterns and weaknesses. Over time, traders become more selective and disciplined. That improves their outcomes — but it may reduce trading frequency. Brokerage-owned platforms are rarely incentivized to build tools that lead to fewer trades.
This is why no brokerage has ever built a serious trade journal. And it’s exactly why Rance built iVest+.
Founding iVest+ — 2012
In 2012, Rance founded iVest+ to build the platform he’d seen the industry fail to create: one designed around the entire trading workflow, not just order execution.
Most trading platforms focus on the moment a trade is placed. iVest+ was designed to support everything before and after that moment — from opportunity discovery through deep research, trade structuring, execution, position management, journaling, and performance analysis. Every step connected. Nothing falling through the cracks.
A core design philosophy is visual decision-making. Financial markets produce enormous amounts of data. iVest+ presents that information visually so traders can assess situations quickly without manually interpreting raw numbers. The result is a platform that doesn’t just execute trades — it helps traders improve their process and decision-making over time.
Few people have worked across trading education, platform development, brokerage technology, and partner deployment. That combination of experience is what makes iVest+ possible — and what allows Rance to help partners accelerate from idea to live platform.
Why Partners
The same insight that drove iVest+’s design also shaped its business model. Trading educators, communities, and fintech companies face the same problem Rance saw inside the brokerage world: the tools available to their users are fragmented, generic, and owned by someone else.
iVest+ is built for partners to deploy under their own brand. Educators, newsletters, and fintech platforms use it to give their audience a complete trading experience — charting, options analytics, research with four proprietary scores, trade journaling, and 8 AI-powered features — all under their name. Partners like OTA, TRADEway, and Life Surge already run their own branded versions of the platform.
How We Operate
iVest+ has been 100% self-financed since 2012. No venture capital. No debt. No board of directors pushing for short-term metrics at the expense of long-term product quality.
This structure exists by design. It means the company can focus on building the right product and the right partnerships — not chasing quarterly growth targets for investors. Partners work directly with the people who design and build the technology. There are no layers of account managers or committees between you and the team that can actually make things happen.
More than 14 years after founding the company, Rance continues to guide the vision and development of the platform while working directly with partners and firms looking to deliver better trading technology to their users.
In addition to powering partner platforms, iVest+ also operates Market Gear — a direct-to-consumer trading platform built on the same technology. Market Gear serves individual traders and investors directly, and stands as a living proof of concept: the same platform, features, and experience that partners deploy under their own brand, running in production every day.
As Seen On
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