About us
Built in Galați, designed for traders who ask hard questions
Ashford & Whitaker was founded on the principle that automation tools should explain themselves — to you, not just to the developers who built them.
Who we are and what we do
Ashford & Whitaker is a software firm based in Galați, Romania, specialising in automated trading infrastructure for retail traders and small professional desks operating in EU-regulated markets. We design, configure, and maintain strategy-execution bots that trade via broker APIs — across equities, FX pairs, and index CFDs — on behalf of clients who supply their own trading strategies. We do not manage money, we do not run pooled funds, and we do not sell signals. Our role is strictly technical: we encode your rules, run your backtests, apply your risk parameters, and keep your bot running reliably. Founded in 2019 by a team of four with backgrounds in quantitative finance and distributed systems, we have completed over 180 strategy builds for clients across Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Germany. Our office is on Str. Brăilei in central Galați, and we work with clients remotely across the EU.
How we work — and where we draw the line
Every project starts with a documented strategy intake: we write down exactly what you've told us, encode it, and send it back for your sign-off before any code goes live. We treat that specification document as a contract between your intent and our implementation. Our team of seven includes three strategy engineers, two infrastructure specialists, and two client-support specialists who handle onboarding and ongoing queries. We are not a signal provider, an asset manager, or a copy-trading platform. If a client asks us to guarantee a particular trading outcome, we decline — not because we lack confidence in our tools, but because market outcomes depend on variables no software can control. What we can guarantee is that the bot does exactly what the specification says, every time, and that you can verify this from your own dashboard at any hour of the day. We also do not accept projects where the strategy logic cannot be documented in plain language: if a rule can't be written down clearly, it can't be coded reliably.
The values that shape every build
Full transparency
Every decision your bot makes is logged in plain-language entries. You can audit any moment in your bot's operating history without asking us for help — the dashboard is yours to explore.
Specification-first builds
No code is written before the strategy specification is signed off. This single discipline eliminates the most common source of disputes between traders and their automation providers.
Honest scope limits
We tell clients clearly what their backtest cannot predict, what their risk controls cannot prevent, and what market conditions might make any automated strategy underperform.
“What surprised me most was the onboarding document. They wrote back with twelve clarifying questions about my strategy before they wrote a single line. That told me everything about how seriously they take the specification process.”
Georgiana V., options trader, Bucharest
Get in touch
We're based in Galați and work with EU clients remotely. Reach us by email or phone during business hours.
Send a message