Marcos Boschetti was on his way to a PhD in microelectronics when a chance encounter with financial markets changed everything. What followed was the creation of Nelogica, a company that processes more than 80% of Brazil's local order flow. In a recent conversation, Boschetti reflects on the company's origins, the universal nature of trading behavior, the democratization of market access and why generative AI has reduced the time from a trading idea to live execution.
Our conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity. The full interview can be found here.
Give us the history of how you got here and how Nelogica came to be.
My original plan was actually to fly to Europe, pursue my PhD and build a career in advanced microelectronics. But right around that time, my co-founder showed me the markets and suddenly there was something that combined psychology, math and statistics all at once. We fell in love with it. We gave up everything and started the company, with everyone around us saying it was never going to work. No funding, no contacts. But we knew what we wanted to build. To this day, I wake up every morning wondering what's going to happen next and that's how dynamic this environment is.
For those who may not know Nelogica, describe what you do and how you fit into the Brazilian financial landscape.
We are not a broker and we are not a bank. We are purely a technology company. Our role is to build the infrastructure and the UX layer that powers modern trading and investing. On one side, that means the apps, the desktop terminals, the web systems. On the other side, it's the critical infrastructure — order management systems, market submission systems, portfolio execution tools. We sit in the space between the exchange, the broker and the end user, and we work to make that entire ecosystem operate more efficiently.
And by the numbers, how significant is Nelogica's reach in the local market?
Over 80% of local Brazilian order flow goes through our pipes or our front end. It's a very meaningful number. But I want to be clear — we don't do any of this alone. We need our partners: the financial institutions, the brokers, the exchanges. It's a complete journey that generates value for everyone in the ecosystem.
When you started, was there a specific gap you were addressing in the Brazilian market?
We were actually our own ideal customer profile when we started. We built the software for ourselves. We started trading, did very well in the first year and then in the second year, we gave almost everything back to the market. That led us to ask: how do we build something we can actually afford to use? At the time, sophisticated trading tools existed only for institutions. So we thought, let's build this for ourselves, and maybe democratize it a little along the way. We had no idea if there were two of us who needed it or 10,000. But we figured if it didn't work, at least we'd have the software for our own trading.
One of CME Group's objectives has been to bring our products to the Brazilian retail landscape. What does that mean for the Brazilian retail trader?
It means that for the first time, people in Brazil have access to instruments like oil contracts, S&P futures, and other products they've read about their whole lives but never had a practical way to trade. And over time, the products themselves have become more retail-oriented — the sizing is right, the capital barriers are lower, the margin requirements are more controlled.
The extended hours compared to what we have locally in Brazil are also a major draw. I think it's a positive, perfect storm: people want new products, they want new possibilities, they want to be exposed to U.S. tech markets and other instruments that complement what they already trade. CME products are becoming a part of how the Brazilian trader thinks about the market.
Is there a meaningful difference between a retail trader in Brazil and a retail trader in the United States?
A human being is a human being — in the States, in Brazil, in Italy, in Japan. A trader wants to make money. They want technology. They want access to liquidity. They want to be able to trade both sides. And they want volatility. That's universal. We have risk management tools available on our platform, and fewer than 3% of our users globally actually use them. But the users who do master those tools have incredible performance outcomes compared to other groups. And that same 3% pattern holds across every geography we operate in. Trading is a universal language. Math is a universal language.
CME Group has had a lot of success right-sizing products for retail traders — the Micro E-minis, the 1-Ounce Gold contract, the 100-Ounce Silver. How important is product sizing to you?
It's foundational. You need great technology, you need education and you need the right products at the right size — products where the price is easily understood, where volatility is present and where margin requirements are controlled, not unpredictable. CME is doing a great job on all of those fronts.
CME Group recently announced plans to launch Single Stock futures. How excited are you about that product for the Brazilian market?
Absolutely excited. Think about it – nearly every trader in Brazil has read about Tesla and knows what Elon Musk is doing. But what's the right instrument if they actually want to enjoy the ride, surf the movement? Finally they have an instrument that allows them to do what they want. To [trade], to go in and out with capital efficiency and at the end the circle is complete. I think it's going to be a home run.
How is Nelogica positioning itself for the AI revolution in trading?
I'm very optimistic about AI. For me, it's a super-productivity tool, amplifying what people can already do. The speed at which you can do research now is mind-blowing. On a practical level, we built a generative AI tool we're calling the Code Builder. You describe your trading rules or your hypotheses in English, Portuguese or any language you choose, and it generates executable code. You can back-test that code and start trading it, or upload it to a marketplace for others to use. The cycle from idea to live trade has gone from roughly a month to about five minutes. That's an extraordinary compression. Beyond that, we're seeing AI agents connect directly to execution infrastructure and that's going to drive meaningfully higher volume across the market. The cycles will be shorter, the strategies will turn over faster and the volume will increase.
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All examples are hypothetical interpretations of situations and are used for explanation purposes only. The views expressed in OpenMarkets articles reflect solely those of their respective authors and not necessarily those of CME Group or its affiliated institutions. OpenMarkets and the information herein should not be considered investment advice or the results of actual market experience. Neither futures trading nor swaps trading are suitable for all investors, and each involves the risk of loss. Swaps trading should only be undertaken by investors who are Eligible Contract Participants (ECPs) within the meaning of Section 1a(18) of the Commodity Exchange Act. Futures and swaps each are leveraged investments and, because only a percentage of a contract’s value is required to trade, it is possible to lose more than the amount of money deposited for either a futures or swaps position. Therefore, traders should only use funds that they can afford to lose without affecting their lifestyles and only a portion of those funds should be devoted to any one trade because traders cannot expect to profit on every trade. BrokerTec Americas LLC (“BAL”) is a registered broker-dealer with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, is a member of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Inc. (www.FINRA.org), and is a member of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (www.SIPC.org). BAL does not provide services to private or retail customers.. In the United Kingdom, BrokerTec Europe Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. CME Amsterdam B.V. is regulated in the Netherlands by the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) (www.AFM.nl). CME Investment Firm B.V. is also incorporated in the Netherlands and regulated by the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM), as well as the Central Bank of the Netherlands (DNB).
