Category: Robinhood

one for joining Robin Hood’s Q3 2026 earnings call. Whether you’re tuning into the live stream or here with us in Menllo Park, with us today are chairman and CEO Vlad Tennvive, CFO Shiv Verma, and VP of corporate finance and investor relations Chris Kaggel. Vlad and Shiv will offer opening remarks and then open the call to Q&A. During the Q&A portion of the call, we’ll answer questions from the audience, which includes institutional research analysts, finance content creators who may hold an ownership position in Robin Hood, and both institutional and retail shareholders. As a reminder, today’s call will contain forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from our current expectations, and we may not provide updates unless legally required. Potential risk factors that could cause differences, including regulatory developments that we continue to monitor, are described in the press release we issued today, the earnings presentation, and our SEC filings, all of which can be found at investors.roinhood.com. Today’s discussion will also include non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the GAP measures we consider most directly comparable can be found in the earnings presentation. With that, please welcome Vlad.

All right, thank you guys for coming. This is awesome and it’s great to see so many people in person. Uh we’re back at our headquarters in sunny Menllo Park. So, thank you again for being on this journey with us and and uh showing up in person and to everyone watching remotely. So uh as you probably know at Robin Hood we have a singular goal. We believe in ownership. We want to make everyone an owner and we think that broad ownership is actually essential to a free, stable and prosperous society. So in order to execute on this vision, we have our three-part strategy. So to recap that uh the first part we want to build the number one active trader platform. So we want to allow customers to own any tradable asset. Uh and really an active trader should feel like they’re at a disadvantage trading elsewhere. So we’ll have more about that later. Second, strategic arc number one in wallet share for the next generation. So we want to build our customers financial home and not just for them but for their families as well. Then the third number one global financial ecosystem. So take the ownership that we’ve been able to deliver and grow in the US and expand it everywhere around the world. Q3 we made a lot of progress. So our our product velocity continued across each of these three arcs and we saw strong business and financial results. So for for active traders again the idea is if you’re an active trader you’re at a disadvantage trading elsewhere. So uh what have we done for active traders? Last month we held our third annual Hood Summit event in Houston, Texas and we launched not one not two but 17 new products and new services to our customers. So I’ll hit a couple of highlights. uh Agentic trading which is near and dear to my heart literally I’m wearing the vest right now. So uh our Agentic offerings have really increased in scope uh over the the course of the year. If you remember we started with our MCP um which has grown quite well and now we’ve got aic trading directly in the app. So you no longer need to use your external tool like your cloud code or codeex. Um you can do it within the app. And we’ve also allowed customers to uh extend their MCP connectivity to Robin Hood Legend. So Robin Hood Legend is now in scope for our MCP connectors as well. So, we’re just continuing to make it easier for anyone to trade on our platform, whether it’s you directly or your agent. And while we’re still very early in the inapp capabilities and the harness tooling, we’ve been seeing really strong early adoption across the entire suite of Agentic products. So, customers have over 250 million in Agentic accounts. Remember, this is the accounts start at zero. So you have to make a choice to move money into them. And we look at the adoption curves both across usage and trading. And they’re sort of uh following an an accelerating curve which um gets us very excited about the future of these products. And as we continue to add more asset classes, more features, those curves appear to be steepening. Next, perpetual futures. So we became the first US broker to offer what we call true perpetual futures. So these are perpetuals powered by our global derivatives exchange Bitstamp and uh they settle continuously around the day. So 15minute settlement. Um we’re also working on adding earnings contracts to our prediction markets hub. I think this this will be particularly relevant for this audience because they’ll allow you to trade EPS and revenue on individual companies as well as you know KPIs that are company specific. And of course uh something I’ve been very excited about for quite some time. We announced 24/7 equity trading that’ll be coming to Robin Hood uh later this year. And again, this is something I I think we’ll be the first to offer this as well. And these are just a few of the many items we’ve shipped. So, um, there’s there’s a lot more and I encourage you all to check out the full keynote on YouTube or X if you haven’t already. So, let’s let’s move to wallet share. Uh, a couple of things that I’d like to highlight here. Trump accounts achieved a really important milestone in Q3 autoenrollment. So, um, as we’ve said before, we’ve got nearly 70 million children in the US under the age of 18 that are eligible for the Trump account. And now the US Treasury has opened accounts for all of them, for all these children. And because of the generous gift from uh Michael and Susan Dell through their foundation, 25 million of those children already had $250 invested for them uh by by the Dell Foundation. So we’re excited about this initiative. Um it’s one of those things where, you know, it’s it’s just been snowballing and we’re we’re doing more. So there’s just uh a ton of roadmap ahead. One of the things I’m particularly excited about is um I think it can become the default vehicle for philanthropic giving in this country, right? And and we’re already seeing the beginnings of that with with uh with the Dells, but also the other donors and uh we don’t really have a great default option. I think Trump accounts can become that. So, we’re going to be doing more there in partnership with BNY and uh and the US government. We’re also continuing to make progress with Robin Hood Gold, which today is one of the largest paid membership programs in uh consumer finance in the US. So, a couple of years ago, we set out to actually completely revamp our gold product. And what we wanted to do is put something in gold for our mass market customer. So, so that you didn’t have to be an active trader to benefit from gold. And I think we’ve we’ve been able to achieve that. Um, so in this quarter, uh, Robin Hood Gold reached 5 million subscribers. Okay, we see it really paying off. We see it paying off. We’ve got 5 million gold subscribers, and that’s up over 30% year-over-year. And it’s a 4x increase from when we began the journey to revamp the gold program uh just about 4 years ago. So that gets us to uh about an 18% overall gold adoption rate when you look at our customer base. uh but 40% if you look at in quarter so of the customers that joined Robin Hood in quarter uh much higher adoption and and that’s really great to see because then we see a path as we continue to grow gold will just uh continue to increase and I think there’s actually much more room to grow. our big bets for for growing the gold value proposition are banking and credit. Um and and those are still despite getting to large scale not generally available yet. So there’s still limited release. Um and and we’ve been really investing in more integration points. So things like easy sign up for banking and gold card if you’re signing up for Robin Hood. um contextual upsells so that we, you know, detect when banking and credit is going to be appropriate for you uh when you’re using the Robin Hood app and kind of putting it there. Um so we we think we’ve got plenty of room to run. These can become even more meaningful drivers of of higher gold adoption. Finally, let me get to global financial ecosystem. So uh on July 1st, just a few months ago, we launched the Robin Hood chain mainet. And in its first quarter, it’s already a top five chain by volume and revenue. So far, we’ve seen over a 100red billion in DEX volume. So it’s 100 billion in decentralized exchange trading volume and over 50 million in chain fees. Defi perpetuals, it’s a interesting innovative product have seen uh solid growth on the chain as well. So in recent weeks we’ve been seeing DeFi perpetuals volume of over a billion dollars per day uh on the chain. So it’s clear customers have demand for these tokenized assets on chain and you know we we think we not only believe we we’re building Robin Hood chain to be the best place to own and trade uh all of these tokenized assets of course starting with uh stock tokens and and perpetuals but expanding much much broader from that. We’re also expanding our brokerage infrastructure globally and we’re excited with that to announce that we received authorization from the Dubai Financial Services Authority to launch Robin Hood in the region. This will broaden our international footprint even further. The product velocity that you’ve been seeing uh and the focus on the customer experience have led to really strong business results. Market share continues to grow up double digits year-over-year for each of the main assets, equities, options, crypto, and margin as well. Revenues grew 12% year-over-year to a record 1.4 billion. Adjusted Ebida, that’s up 9% record of over 800 million. And then net deposits 16 billion in quarter and uh with a strong start to Q4 which sh will talk more about we have already exceeded our annual goal of 20% net deposit growth and that’s with 2 months left to go. So we’re pleased with the strong results for our customers and for our business. We’re pushing hard to make Robin Hood your financial super app. So with that I’ll ask Shiv to come up. How are you doing sir? doing all right. All right.

So, thank you Vlad. Uh before we get into the results, I just wanted to share three big takeaways from Q3. Uh first, as Vlad said, the core business is firing on all cylinders. This led to our highest quarter ever for both revenue and adjusted IBIDA. And really great to see platform assets were nearly 400 billion. And on top of that, we set new records for equities, options, event contracts, and margin. So going well all around. Uh second, our product is driving a more diversified business. We’re now up to 14 cylinders that have reached 100 million or more of annualized revenue as Rthera, our prediction markets exchange, hit this number in just its full four full first full quarter of operations. So really nice to see Rthera scaring well. And then finally uh we drove another quarter of strong growth, profitability and scale. So we’re a rule of 80 company but at our scale of over five and a half billion of annualized revenue. So we remain disciplined on expenses even while investing for growth which is which is fantastic to see. So let’s get to our Q3 results and uh all of these will be compared to a year ago. So revenues were up 12% to a record 1.4 billion and this was driven by strong growth in both new products and existing products as well. uh transaction revenues were a record as trading volumes were new highs across equities, options, and margin. Each of these was up around 50% year-over-year, and this was on market share gains. And the event contracts continued to scale really nicely. This was up 7x year-over-year. Additionally, the Robin Hood chain in its first quarter of adoption saw really strong uh usage as Vlad mentioned before. So that was another driver of transaction revenue in the quarter. And then on NIM or net interest revenues, really strong growth in margin, credit card book and Robin Hood banking and these grew to new record balances and our total interest earning assets on the platform also hit new highs. So really nice to see both transaction revenue and the interest earning assets do well. And then finally in other revenues as Vlad shared before, gold subscribers reached a new all-time high of over 4 million subs, which is which is great to see. And then additionally as we continue to build and expand the Trump accounts uh for customers uh that generated some additional revenue as well. And so while revenues grew to a quarterly record uh we also see discipline on cost. And so adjusted OPEX and SBC was managed to 664 million. Uh this was managed within our our prior outlook range. And again, as we’re investing for growth, we’re still being being really really disciplined on our uh on our expenses and our productivity also continues to do really well. So in this quarter, we hit revenue per employee of nearly 2 million, which would be a new record. So we’re shipping for customers, but we’re also doing it in our lean and discipline way. And then finally, as we look ahead to Q4, while we plan to continue making growth investments, in particular on the Trump accounts, we’re also controlling our expenses and have driven more efficiencies across our business. So, as we do that, uh, we’re going to lower the top end of our prior outlook range by 25 million. And we now expect fullear adjusted OPEX and SPC to be between 2.675 and 2.75 billion. And this is 13 million lower at the midpoint versus our prior outlook. So you put them together, really strong topline growth, expense discipline, and this led to a strong quarter of of profitability. So adjusted Ebida up a was a record 88 million. This is up 9% year-over-year, and adjusted EBA margin continues to be strong uh at 57% in Q3. EPS for the quarter was 51 cents. Now, this includes a minus 7 cents of marktomarket impact on investments that we hold. And so as we talk about EPS, we’re continuing to expand our business into investments. One of them is is such as Robin Hood Ventures. And as we launch more and more of these products, we’re now seeing some non-operating movements on on these investments. So we’re introducing adjusted EPS. And this is to just better reflect our core operating profitability before any gains or losses on investments or some of these other nonoperating items. But at the same time, we’re going to remain accountable for all of our regular ongoing costs. So, we’re still including normal course SPC uh in our adjusted EPS. As I’ve said before many times, uh share count and the denominator matters. And so, you put it all together in Q3 adjusted EPS was 60 cents. And so, moving forward, we hope that investors find this a useful measure of our core profitability in the business. Another area I wanted to touch upon is prediction markets. Uh we believe it’s really early innings for the asset class and we’re investing to be a leader in the space. We’re constantly improving the inapp experience. We now have a vertically integrated exchange or thera and as I mentioned before it’s off to a great start. Additionally, we also announced a recent partnership with Crypto.com and OG.com. Now, this is really exciting for both our customers, but also for our business and shareholders. It’s really important for us that customers have a best-in-class selection with consistent pricing across exchanges and with these partnerships that announce allows us to do that. But additionally, with no cash outlay, we received an initial 1% equity ownership stake in Crypto.com and OG.com. And we have the ability to earn up to 10% ownership depending on how much we partner together in the years to come. So before we move to Q&A, I just wanted to give a little bit about how Q4 looks to start following a record Q3. October net deposits are over 13 billion the month. Great to see. And that includes six billion of the Dell family gift to Trump accounts as Vlad mentioned earlier. And this brings our total year-to- date net deposits to over 68 billion. This is already a new annual record and north of our 20% growth target with just a few months with still a few months to go left in the year. And then compared to Q3, average daily volumes for equities, options, and cryptos are off to a good start and are about 5% lighter relative to the really strong Q3. And then event contract ADVs are already up about 10% to start the quarter. So stepping back, it was great to see another strong quarter in Q3 and we’re really excited about a momentum entry in Q4. And as we’ve shared before, our financial northstar remains the same. Maximize earnings per share and free cash flow per share for shareholders over time. All right, Chris Vlad, should we take some questions? All right, thank you, Chef. Let’s do it. For the Q&A session, we’ll start by answering shareholder questions from SE technologies and after the say questions, we’ll turn to live questions from our audience and then go to the uh dial in Q. So, I’ll kick it off with our first question from from say which comes from Bo Shen.

Bo Shen, how you doing?

Okay, I think we’ve lost Bo. Um, so, uh, Bo asked, “How is the expansion into banking going and when will features such as the zel replacement arrive?” It’s a great question. So, I thought, uh, rather than talking about it, I’ll actually just show you. Um, I try not to launch new products during earnings, but I thought since we have a crowd here, I might as well give you give you a little bit more. Um, by the way, before I get into it, uh, I do want to say one thing about banking as it pertains to our super app vision. So, one of the things we’ve been tracking for a really long time is what the top bank withdrawal destinations for our brokerage business have been. So, this is, you know, the top institutions that people actually move money from brokerage into banking. And uh for the longest time it’s been kind of the expected big banks. Not not a huge surprise there. But as we’ve started to roll out Robin Hood banking, we’ve actually seen Robin Hood banking uh climbing up the list. And this quarter for the first time uh uh Robin Hood banking became the number one withdrawal destination for Robin Hood brokerage customers. This is actually even before it’s generally available. So it is the number one bank that uh that customers withdraw money to by dollars. Um which I think is quite amazing and obviously uh we love this because that money is not leaving the Robin Hood ecosystem. It just stays stays uh in people’s accounts. And I think it’s it’s one major proof point that customers are choosing Robin Hood for their totality of their financial needs. They’re coming in, they’re direct depositing, their paycheck. Um, you know, they they have their checking and savings account. Of course, they move money to invest and trade. They do their spending with gold and and now platinum. So, in increasingly, you don’t really have to leave Robin Hood because we offer best-in-class services kind of across the board. Now, one thing that people have been asking about is peer-to-peer payments. Um, and of course, we we didn’t want to just uh do like a regular add-on bolt-on peer-to-peer payments feature. We wanted to make it really really nice. So, if if you guys are ready, I can share my screen. Um, so this is Robin Hood Banking. So, I’ve blurted out my my balances. Um, this is the new design, by the way. We’ve we’ve updated it to have the liquid glass UI. So, there’s this button on the bottom right, which is kind of your overall transaction action button. And if you if you open that, you see there’s this new uh send money feature. So, uh Matt, can I send you would you accept a few dollars from me? Sure. Yeah. And I’ll know how much you uh you like me based on how much you send. Okay, good. You’ll know. Uh I like you a moderate amount. Um awesome. So, it’s it’s just as simple as that. I’ll send Matt uh who’s been doing a great job from our investor relations team, $5 from my joint checking account. Okay? And you can put a little message here. Of course, this is my favorite one. And um so, check this out. So, I’m going to send it via text. One of the really annoying things about peer-to-peer payments, I don’t know if you guys have experienced this, but you know, you want to use an app and the person you send money to doesn’t have it, which creates this like moment of friction. I don’t want them to have to install anything. Um, and uh, you know, then they’ll ask you, can you send it this way? Can you do it with with one of one of the competitors? And then you have to install it. Anyway, we’ve gotten rid of all of that. Matt, if you uh did you get it? I got the text. Okay, if you want to show. Um, so there it is. He just taps on it and you can accept money with Apple Pay or Google Pay without even having a Robin Hood banking account, which is pretty awesome if you think about it. Of course, it gives us an opportunity to upsell Robin Hood banking, which is just a really clean experience for those of you that have tried it. But you don’t have to have it. You can just get it right into your Apple Pay. So you don’t have to worry about that friction of the recipient of the funds. Um so right now still in limited release, you know, if if Matt sends money to someone, they’ll get it. But um yeah, you should you should expect to see us rolling this out much more broadly in the coming weeks. And just another reason why, you know, everything we think can be better uh on Robin Hood if you do more and more of your if you run more of your financial life through us. Who needs cell, right? Yeah. I mean, uh, legacy technology. I think we can do better if we build everything in an integrated fashion. All right. Great demo. Um, all right. So, the next question is from Mark and Marcus M, who asks, “How is global expansion going and what countries are next?” Yeah. So, I’ll I’ll uh field that one. So um you know when when Shib and I were kind of coming up with uh our plan and and we thought what can Robin Hood be uh in 10 years um we we called our third arc global financial ecosystem and you know we our vision and I think this is backed up by how big these markets are and also sort of like wealth accumulation people outside the US keep getting wealthier. Our vision is that you know over the long run more than half of our business should be outside the US and cut another way more than half um should be institutional and um what we didn’t anticipate is products like Robin Hood chain right and we we said Robin Hood chain already in quarter got out of the gate really quick with 100 billion in DEX volume and 50 million u of chain fees right and you you you think about how much and and we’re we’re actually continuing to invest. Frankly, the the growth of of the chain and associated ecosystem and the wallet surprised uh and and sort of like uh uh was higher than our expectations. And so now we’re spending a lot of time, you know, investing in how to make that even bigger, how to support the community. We know we’ve been hearing from a lot of builders that, you know, we could be doing more to support the community. And I think you should expect to see us really ramp that up because you know we want to make it the best developer ecosystem as well as the best sort of global uh onchain community. So um yeah, you should expect to see us ramping the investment because you just don’t see growth of a new ecosystem like this. It’s it’s an uncommon thing. I mean a lot of chains have launched uh over the past few months that have just had not nearly like a incomparably small uh level of traction compared to this. So, so we’re doubling down on that. And of course, as I mentioned earlier, uh we’re expanding into uh uh into MENA with uh our Dubai license. And we did get in principal approval from MAS to expand into Singapore. And that’ll be our um our our Southeast Asia um APAC hub, which which we’re very excited about. And and by the way, we’re we’re continuing to get deeper in our more established markets of EU and UK. UK now has um uh crypto and brokerage in the same offering. So, it’s getting to to parody and you’ve seen us actually increasing our download share and and getting more traction there. So, so it’s um I would say shiv, I don’t know if you would disagree. Um, I think like for a while our international business was sort of like a future uh ve very like far off into the future when we expected to see meaningful contributions, but we’re starting to see that accelerate and you know, I’m seeing uh the most traction I have. So, I feel probably the best that I’ve ever felt and we’re kind of accelerating so much in in momentum there. No, I agree. We built a 10-year plan. It’s nice to see the seeds coming. Um, and also Canada. You forgot to mention that as well. We’re now we’re now Canada crypto business through the Wonderfy acquisition there for sure. So, pretty soon we’ll have Robin Hood all over the world. All right. Um, our next question comes from a special guest. You may have seen him driving the Robin Hood neon car during the last two NASCAR semeies

race winner and driver of the number 23 Toyota for 2311 racing. Bubba Wallace. Are there any new major product plans for 2027 that could increase Robin Hood’s uh revenue? No easy questions. Bubba, you know, he’s just getting right into it. Um yeah, and by the way, it was fun uh fun watching Bubba compete at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway a couple weeks ago. Um hot, but I don’t know how he does that for so long. Um so I I would say one of the things that I think people find uh attractive about Robin Hood as a business is that it’s a financial compounder right even if you look at the core business of equities options crypto uh margin you know we’re continuing to to gain in market share uh we get more customers those customers get wealthier as they get older the market appreciation adds to that so you know all of this is leading to total platform assets this quarter of about 400 billion and I I don’t think it’ll be long before we’re talking you know over half a trillion and and you know knock on wood into the trillions right um so that just the core brokerage business and the crypto business has been remarkably strong um but we’re not just uh we’re not just like being complacent and seeing we have a a strong core business um we’re moving at incredible pace, not just adding all the products and features that our competitors have, but also um I think just leading the industry across a couple of major domains. You know, uh I mentioned agentic trading uh earlier. I think agentic trading um I don’t think there’s really another game in town in terms of financial companies that are really investing in in Agentic Trading and making that a first class experience. So I think uh we’re at the very beginning there and we’re just continuing to invest in in making the product experience really really good. We’ve talked a lot about prediction markets. I’ll also throw in perpetual futures. I mean we’re super early to that, right? A lot of a lot of a lot of companies announce plans to offer these new assets, but we we announce and then we ship and we roll out. We’re seeing we’re seeing strong traction. That’s another asset class where we expect to to be to be the leader and gain market share. Um on the wallet share front, you’ve heard me talk about Trump accounts. Uh Robin Hood Ventures is is another one where it’s just um other companies aren’t really doing doing this where they’re trying to uh we’re going they’re going after the vision of democratizing private markets for for retail investors. So we have RVI uh RV2 shipped and you should expect uh e even more. I mean we are just uh we’re really investing because we think it’s important and it’s a a big business opportunity a new category that that I think we can own and then of course uh long-term in in the global financial ecosystem tokenization and Robin Hood chain and Robin Hood wallet or unique products where it just really feels like we’ve got the tiger by the tail. So those are kind of several areas, not just one, where um we think we can surprise to the to the upside with uh with the product bets that we’re making. All right. Thank you, Vlad. That concludes our say technology questions. Now I’d like to go to questions from our live audience. So if you’d like to ask a question, please raise your hand to later stages of the pipeline and then answer reflected the mic over to Hayden. looks like um over here. Uh hi. Hey there. Um I know you’ve got active trading and you’ve got the strategy side of things. What are you doing to focus on the middle ground of customers who just kind of want to deposit and forget about it? Yeah, that’s a great question. Actually, that’s one thing I forgot to mention. Um I think Robin Hood uh strategies which is our uh passive digital advice product. Um so over two billion in assets it it’s been growing really quickly year-over-year. I think it’s a bit of a dark horse um just because you know we launch so many things and I think the uh active trading products tend to get a lot more attention and mind share but we have all these amazing passive products you know uh strategies being one of them that provides a best-in-class experience. So we we’ve been continuing to uh add things to the product suite. We have a uh we have this this tool smart income which is part of Robin Hood strategies where you basically just like can just really easily with a slider just slide your your time horizon and risk tolerance and it’ll tell you what uh what the sort of like uh expected return for for your for your investments would be. And then the idea is you just put money into there. You drop money into that account and it’s a complete set it and forget it product. Um, and then I I think we’ve got some things like like that team has ambitious plans. Uh, there’s a bunch of things that we’re working on to make that even better. So, uh, suffice it to say, strategies isn’t staying still. I think that’s it’s it’s a darkhorse product. I think it’s one that could surprise people in the coming year. All right. Thank you, Vlad. Uh, next I think Hayden, did you have your hand up? Yeah. Can we get a mic to Hayden? Great.

Hey guys, thanks for doing this. We’ve been really impressed by the product velocity and traction at Robin Hood, the 14 cylinders over 100 million. Can you speak to how many products your power users engage with versus your average user? and what would it mean for your business if you were able to convert the majority of your customers into power users? Yeah, I mean that’s that’s a great question. We look at this internally um quite a bit and uh we sort of see that basically the more products that someone uses and once you get up to three or four products in the Robin Hood ecosystem, the uh the average revenue per user and the engagement uh just continues to increase with three or four products being really kind of the sweet spot. It also we can cut it by asset classes. You know, a lot of people come to us to trade equities or crypto first. But then if you look at the customers that trade equities, crypto, options, futures, and prediction markets, uh the the revenue and the engagement with the platform really increases. Um and uh we’ve been making a lot of investments. Maybe those of you that use Robin Hood have been seeing our our work there and just making the app more coherent and more discoverable. This was something I mentioned in the last earnings call. You know, we we have more work to do because, you know, we have all these products. How can we make sure that the app is coherent and that you kind of understand what we’re about? Well, I I think you’re starting to see some of that progress because our shared surfaces, including social, search, home. Um, I think we’re doing a a much better job in kind of surfacing relevant content uh to you. I think the focus has been on making sure prediction markets works really well because we’re kind of doing a unique thing like combining this new uh asset class with you know other tools that are that are sort of like personal finance centered. Um, but I think you’ll see us continue to invest in in personalization, in making it easy to discover things, in, you know, subject to, um, all the rules and regulations, being able to surface relevant content to to customers. And I think that’s another area where, you know, we’re we’re bestin-class and continuing to get better. If if you want to look in terms of how big it could be, I think gold is the best way to see it. So gold, we don’t view it as a subscription product. We view it as a loyalty product. And what you see is a customer comes for something. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an equity, an option, a crypto, an event contract. They discover gold. They then use more products. They then deposit more. They engage more. They trade more. And so for how big it could be, we’re it’s great. We have 5 million customers. It’s only an 18% attach rate. And you know about 40% plus adopt it when they first come in, but there’s still a large runway ahead of that.

All right. Thank you. Next question. What is what is Robin Hood’s strategy for educating customers about active active trading products like perpetual futures or agendic trading? Yeah, I think that um uh what we really try to do is make the products themselves understandable and clear um within the app. you know the and I think you know with with our various learning modules and tools we’ve done a really good job at taking advantage of the limited real estate uh of the app and giving people the information they need at the time that they onboard without just like the too much of the fluff and filler. Now, as we expand into the Agentic products and actually one of the one of the reasons I’m excited about Agentic Trading and and our investments there is that um a lot of our customers are using that as uh an education tool because these AI agents are really good. If you just ask them, hey, explain this to me. You know, what is a wheel strategy? What is a you know, uh what is an options? Like what are the typical options trades? you can say, “Hey, I have this like plan, this point of view. Can you break down, give me like the top three ways to capitalize on that?” So, I I think there’s strong potential. We’re actually seeing a lot of customers doing this of just explaining things and not even just placing the trade uh fully trading autonomously, although we’re we’re pushing ahead in that direction, too, but just taking some of this complexity and kind of breaking it down for the customer. So yeah, the the plan is is really each interface has somewhat different affordances. On mobile, it’s really about how do you like clearly articulate um what what the what the functionality is, what it’s for. How do you make it so that you know with as few taps as possible, you can actually do what you want to do as a customer. Web, I think you have a little bit more of like real estate to to browse. And I think a Gentic, you know, lends itself to like a back and forth um which is difficult with with all of the interfaces. But yeah, I mean we’re we’re making a ton of progress on on all of these simultaneously. And I think the other thing we recognize is um we do uh I mean we do produce some firstparty educational content, video and so forth, but um we also want to make it easier, you know, for you to discover all the great content that’s out there. So I mean there’s just so many uh content creators and influencers that are making YouTube videos and they’re they’re quite entertaining. So one one of the things we’ve been trying to do is can we make it easier for you to get some of those things you know in the right way through the experience too. You also have Robin Hood social as well where you can learn from the community each other. So just another surface for uh for customers to talk to each other. Yeah and that’s that’s a great point. I think I’m much more bullish on our ability to surface thirdparty user generated content to you because we just have many more passionate people that can make it. Um, so some of the content on Robin Hood social that we’re seeing is actually like, you know, very deep investment analysis and we’ve been working hard giving people more tools to like share charts, share, you know, different uh different data sources and uh and and yeah, I think we like what we’re seeing there. So, we’re going to we’re going to do even more. All right. Any other questions from the audience? Sure. Right. Uh does Robin plan to get into like exchange funds like cash and Titan? There’s a lot of money that’s locked in into other brokerages which you don’t want to sell. So having the ability to trade without selling can be a very big upside for Robin Hood. Yeah. And you know, I I talked a little bit about um uh Robin Hood strategies and I I think certainly um helping customers with concentrated positions to diversify and you know, handle that in a taxefficient way is something that we’ve been we’ve been looking very carefully into. You know the other thing is a lot of these products that are offered by the incumbents have um really high minimum requirements. So um of course whenever we see that we we ask ourselves is there an opportunity to create a really really nice product and uh make it available to lots of people.

All right. Any other questions from the audience? Okay. Uh with that, let’s let’s move to the uh the Zoom Q&A. Um so I think the first question we have today is from Devin Ryan from Citizens.

Hey Vlad. Hey Shiff. How are you? Good to see you guys. Doing well. Good to see you Devin. Um question on Robin Hood chain. Obviously great to see uh early traction there. uh also appreciate uh it benefited um from some congestion uh in late August and September which helped uh gas fees. So so maybe seeing some normalization in fees there but volumes have been still pretty resilient. So my question is really just how should we be thinking about the financial opportunity over time and really you know what we should be looking for to drive maybe that next real inflection in activity. I know uh you mentioned perpetuals gaining traction so maybe that’s one example but um you know is it just more products being developed you mentioned Robin Hood can do things to support the chain so love to hear about that and then just bigger picture too can monetization um improve um over time without making the chain less competitive thanks yeah I mean I’ll I’ll start maybe maybe you can hit uh your thoughts on monetization so uh another thing we look at for the chain that gets us so excited is um developer activity. So uh I think last time I checked we were number one in onchain developer activity. Um and so developers are actually coming to Robin Hood chain because they see the traction that we’ve had and they’re making a bet that this is kind of the the ecosystem that they want to invest in for for their activities. Um and and I think at the end of the day uh the ecosystem is actually going to be driven by the developer activity. people haven’t had very much time to build sophisticated you know onchain applications yet. So that’s why I think in the first instance the applications that you’ve seen are you know relatively simple you know launchpads and um you know linked pools and things of that nature and you know people are working on um really interesting things now that are more complex that connect stock tokens with with crypto assets and and technology. And just sort of imagine, you know, if you take a stock token and make it fully programmable just like software, um what can you do? Uh I mean, can you have tokenized options contracts for example? Can you have you know um uh products that we haven’t seen before? So that’s why we want to invest in the developer ecosystem. Um when you know uh I think it’s interesting the whole fees and and congestion and revenue um when when Johan who’s our crypto GM and I talk about this um basically we we both agree that the most important thing to prioritize is uh a great experience for our users. So so I don’t really want to be in the business of like uh charging high fees for onchain usage. What I’d rather do is um gain the market share, make the developers choose us as the best chain, uh give them more products, and I think we have a pretty clear roadmap for what first party products we need. Um yeah, the the idea is anything that you can trade on Robin Hood in the US uh wherever possible should be made available in onchain versions for our international customers. So it’s more stock tokens but then expanding to other asset classes and and making sure that um you know these things become like Lego building blocks that developers can incorporate into their onchain applications and since we offer the primitives uh you know one of the reasons stock tokens have been have been so successful is people know that you know Robin Hood stands behind them and that you know makes it much more likely that they trust them in their applications than uh just some some third party. So, we’re going to we’re going to continue to uh execute on that. And I think the the way we’re tracking long-term sustainability is we obviously like to see DeFi TVL go up, but we’re specifically looking at um we’re we’re specifically looking at stock token TVL, making sure that’s on a healthy trajectory and we have a path there because I think our differentiator with with the chain and what’s been working well for us is real world assets. So we should expect to see real world assets adoption just continue to increase. Yeah. On on monetization only piece I’ll add is it was about 50 million gross revenue the quarter. You know we shared the schedule before we share some with arbitrum was about 50%. So even on a net basis about 25 million or 100 million annualized. We didn’t call it a cylinder just yet. We want to give it more time to bake. Um you should expect in a normalized environment it’s probably a couple basis points on notional value is what we monetize. But as Vlad said the team is not gold on revenue at this point. It’s growing TVL, making developers happy, growing stock tokens. If we do that, a couple basis points can add up to a really large number over time. Yeah. And I know for the developers out there, they they uh we have a lot of passionate Robin Hood chain developers that are working on projects. Just uh be confident that, you know, we’re talking about what we can do for the community. And uh I think I think you’ll see since it caught us by surprise, we’ve had to like staff up a team here. Um, I think you’ll see a lot more uh for us supporting builders in the in the near future. Great. Thank you, Vlad and Shiv. Um, our next question is from Steven Chewacc at Wolf and Le. Hi, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. Once again, Stephen, so wanted to just ask on the um the net deposit growth, which I know seasonally 3Q tends to be a touch lighter. Now I’m really evaluating this KPI on a core basis. Um but as the denominator has grown larger um you’ve been getting running a little bit below that 20% target and just wanted to get a better sense as to as we unpack some of the building blocks. How much of that 20% um is expected to come from you know new account growth um or new store growth versus same store growth? and specifically wanted to get a better sense as you continue to expand internationally how those efforts could potentially help close the gap. Yeah, I’m I’m happy to start on on this. Yeah. Yeah, go for it. Um, so as we said before, we target 20% annualized and I we gave some October color on the call. We have already surpassed that. So we’re just through October. We’ve already done over the 68 billion last year and uh and surpassed our our growth target. Now uh as you mentioned, it will not be linear. There was some higher growth in Q2 and then it came down a little bit in Q3. But we’ve said over and over again um I don’t overindex in any one month, any one week, any one quarter, but on an annualized basis, we are still seeing the business compound. The best driver of net deposits is just new products. And so as we keep shipping new product velocity, customers come, they adopt us more and they uh they continue to deposit more. Uh in terms of new store sales versus existing customers, uh it is both. Uh more recently it’s been a little bit more of the existing customers. We got a lot of customers very very fast in the prior years and now as we ship new products we’re gaining sheriff of wallet and they’re starting to trust us more. As we’ve said before though we are starting to to turn the dial to try to accelerate net funded accounts again. Um and so Q3 was similar to Q1. Uh Q2 we saw a nice bump up because of some market backdrop and there was a couple IPOs in there as well. Uh but big picture, our existing customers are still using us for more and we think we have some great products next year that should also drive the top of funnel. Yeah, and I I’d also add to that, you know, we’ve been pushing pretty hard on Trump accounts, making that a great product. You know, you’ll see this this isn’t just an app. You know, it’s uh it’s going to be increasingly an ecosystem. So, we’re plugging in employers. And now, you know, employers will be able to fund Trump accounts uh on behalf of their employees. And then we’re going to be plugging in donors. You know, donors are kind of done on a one-off basis now, but you can imagine, you know, if you’re a corporate donor or a wealthy philanthropic individual will make it really easy and delightful to go into the Trump accounts. Um, we’re already seeing seeing meaningful uh net deposit impact on that. And, you know, I think that it can be much much bigger. everyone. A lot of people are aligned in in uh having that be uh a bigger number. And you know, we think that we have an opportunity of course if we continue to serve these customers very well as we expect to for those to be compounding assets. Uh uh what was the number? SE 70 million 25 million funded uh by by uh Michael and Susan Dell uh alone. I mean if we serve these customers well over time I think uh you know a large portion should be Robin Hood customers. All right thank you for the for that uh Vlad and Shiv. Um so the next question is from Michael Cypress at Morgan Stanley. Great. Thanks for taking the question. I I just wanted to ask about peer-to-peer payments um that you just um just launched here um on the call here. I was hoping you could expand on your vision for this new offering. how you see this contributing in the coming years including uh perhaps a funnel for new client acquisition maybe even revenue monetization. So if you could talk about your expectations there and how you see this ramping. Thank you. Yeah, I mean where um where we started was really just um you know we had a lot of customers saying that they want to send money to their friends uh via you know the question asker asked about zel but zel or or other things. Can we make that a little bit easier? And then we thought, well, um, what’s the most simple, seamless thing we could do where you don’t even have to enter anything? You could just send money via via text. I think, um, and and I think we’ve delivered that experience. It’s just if you want to just tech, literally sending money from Robin Hood is as easy as texting someone. So, the first thing we’re looking for as we roll this out is are our existing customers using it? Is it solving their problem? And uh I think I think once we’ve got that by its very nature um the product should be viral right as they continue to send money to their friends if they use it then you know we have to make a compelling case for that recipient if they don’t already have Robin Hood to to enter that ecosystem. But that gives us another opportunity another potential touch point to to get them as customers. All right, thank you Vlad. Uh, the next question is from Alex Margraph at Keybank.

No, Alex. All right, we may have lost Alex.

Uh the next question is from Ben Buddhes at Barclays.

Hey uh good evening and uh thank you for taking my question. Um hey Ben one for Hey, um one for Shiv on on the expenses. So the number for the quarter came in I think a bit lower than a lot were expecting. Your fullear guide was lower just a little bit. Curious if you could talk about the moving parts. I know there’s some timing of Trump expenses that are expected to come in in the back half. Um and and curious what you can share on the run rate into 27. Um I know you’re not giving guidance there yet. Obviously the Trump expenses may be non-recurring. Um and you’ve kind of talked before about sort of like a lower singledigit growth rate for existing businesses, but on top of that there are new initiatives. So uh curious if you could talk a bit about the near-term moving pieces and how we should think about the run rate uh going into next year. Thank you. Yeah, great question. So uh what I’m really excited about is even with all the new products we’re shipping, we’re still staying lean and disciplined. As you mentioned, we lowered our outlook by by 25 million at the top end. Um, in Q4 specifically, uh, there’s a couple things that we’re rolling out that uh, we’re investing in. Uh, first, we’re doing even more for the Trump account, so you should expect some some more expenses there. Uh, second is the credit card. We’re continuing to scale the credit card, both gold and platinum, so there’ll be some uh, investments there. And then lastly, we’re in the middle of annual planning right now, but there’s a couple items we got really excited for, and so we pulled those four and we started to make a couple investments there. uh for Trump account specifically that you asked about uh for the full year. I shared earlier that we expect it to be about a $und00 million investment. It’s still roughly going to be in that range for the full year. And so there was some timing things throughout the quarter, but but that’s what I would expect. Uh for next year, it is early and we’re going to finish our planning process and we’ll come back in January and February and share the full plan. Um so nothing to share on that yet, but as Vlad said, um it is going really well. They’re asking us to do more and so I would expect that we’ll be continuing to invest there. And then in terms of our overall philosophy, very similar to prior years. Uh as we go through planning, we’re asking each of the teams to be more efficient in those core business. We take those efficiencies and then we reinvest it. Uh we have so much more to do as you’ve seen and so it’ll be very very similar to uh to prior years. All right. Thank you, Shiv. Uh the next question is from Patrick Moly at Piper Sandler. Yeah, thanks guys. Thanks for taking the question. I have one on crypto.com and og.com. You now own equity in two uh prediction market venues while running your own exchange with Suscoana. How do you reconcile the routing decisions between the different venues and what is the strategic logic of holding stakes and competitors to Rothera? Thanks. Yeah, maybe maybe I can uh um start. Um we want to give our customers the best uh prediction markets experience and um we want we want them to have choices too. I don’t think we can send all of our flow to one venue. Uh so we think that you know the combination of Rothera and uh Crypto.com is just uh positions us well to actually serve our customers well, have great execution quality and have um broad coverage of all of the assets that our customers want to trade. Um uh maybe you can take the financials. Yeah. Um you know on as Vlad mentioned it is good to have a resilient and a second exchange. What you should expect is um rather will be our primary exchange and crypto.com/ogg.com will now be our main second exchange and we’ll be getting off most of our competitors. Uh by the end of the year into early next year, you should expect the vast majority of our flow goes through both of those. Uh from the financial standpoint, what we’re doing now is in addition to sending them flow, we’re also becoming owners. And so before we were sending our flow to other exchanges and we weren’t getting any financial incentives because of that. Uh there is no conflicts to be clear. A product is listed on a particular exchange. It’s depending on where you can get a product experience. So there’s no routing like equities or options. They’re not interloable. You have to list it on either or either crypto.com. But now in addition to getting a great customer experience, we can also provide a little bit monetization for shareholders. So that’s why we’re super excited to both build and get a great product experience for customers but now also having some financial upside for shareholders as well. All right, thank you. Uh the next question is from Brian Bedell at Deutsch Bank.

Good to see me. Hey guys, hope hope is well. Thanks for taking the question. Um if I can ask a two-parter um one just the timing of company KPIs um for launching those now that uh SIBO has uh final approval for that. Uh and then secondly, uh Shiv, if you could just talk about a little bit more color or give more a little bit more color on the October volumes to date. Um if you said down 5% on equities options in crypto, if you could just sort of maybe bifurcate between those um those areas and any comments on take rate in in uh crypto, I know that tends to move around a lot. You want to do the KPIs and I’ll do the Let me take them all. This is Sure. Uh so so on the KPIs, we were actually just talking with uh with the GMs this morning, uh Steve Quirk and and Johan. Um they’re both coming very soon and so the teams are hard at work on them. We’re getting the final approvals. We announced them at HoodSummit. So you should expect them in the near term. We’re just waiting for kind of all the uh the approvals to come through, but we’re uh we’re ready to go and excited for customers. Um in terms of the October color, uh and so as a reminder, Q3 was a record quarter. So everything was our highest quarter ever for equities, options, and margin. And so great to see in October for equities and options and crypto, they’re within plus or minus 5%. And so I kind of group them all together, but they’re all trending to similar levels. And early in the quarter, call it, you know, within within 5% of the uh the high water mark in Q3. And then I called out event contract specifically because that was a little bit different and up about seven times year-over-year. And so starting to see some some more increase there. uh on take rate. What we’re seeing to start the quarter um is that spreads are a little bit tighter and so we’ll see where the full quarter shakes out, but but early indications are spreads are a little bit tighter and we’ll see how it plays out for the uh the next two months.

Great. All right, the next uh the next question is from Gav Blasburg from Wolf Financial. Gav, hey, how’s it going Vlad and Shv? Great to see you guys. I’m going to go into a uh area that I don’t think has been discussed too much yet and that is Robin Hood social. Um talked with you about this Vlad. I’ve been power using the platform. Love it. Spending probably an hour plus a day on there and I’m talking to more and more people and people are like well what are the plans for this? What’s the goals? How does this create revenue? How does this drive things for the platform and create shareholder value? And I would just love to hear also how it’s being prioritized and balanced with so many other things going on. Building out a social media is no small undertaking. And so I wanted to hear some of the vision for this and how this is ultimately going to lead to revenue generation and increasing shareholder value. How have you been liking it? Have you uh any any any critical feedback? Anything we could be doing better? Oh, I’ve been uh I’ve been chatting with Anna uh Torque and some others on the team and and given a ton of pieces of feedback and also trying to talk to the other Power users um and connect with them and get pieces of feedback. I think it’s you know continuing to progress really nicely. There’s certainly listen, if you want a feedback session at some point, I’ll give it to you, but I don’t know if that’s the best use of your time right now. Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, you don’t want to do that too much at earnings. Um, no, he’s a he’s a tough customer. Um yeah, look, I think that the reason we get excited about Robin Hood social is because um yeah, I mean, frankly, I believe that it’s the best way to learn, you know, rather than uh which which way am I most bullish on Robin Hood producing all the content that, you know, uh teaches people how to invest and and and gives them all the tools. um or am I uh more bullish on you know 28 million customers and you know those customers uh using our product and you know bringing the best ideas that they find from um everywhere in the world to us. So, uh, definitely the latter and yeah, I I think if done well, we can just surface really good content for for our customers that they can use to learn new things. And um, we’re already seeing kind of a community form around this. So, um I mean we we’ve got a lot to do just uh we’ve made it so that you know people can share things outside of the platform and um we’ve continued to also increase the type of content that you can share on social you know it started out with uh just trades but now you can trade now you can share P&L you can share charts um you can do your portfolio we have the creator offering uh also creators a lot have been asking about creator monetization. So, um that’s something we we’ll obviously want to look into and I think at that point um yeah, it becomes, you know, a business line for us. But as of now, I think we’re we’re thinking about it in the context of the broad Robin Hood experience. And we we think that if we do a really really good job, it just gives people one more reason to not just do the execution of the trade on Robin Hood, but just stay in Robin Hood for for getting the idea uh and and the context behind the trade. All right, thank you Vlad. Uh the next question is from James Yaro at Goldman Sachs. Thanks for taking the question. Um, I was hoping you might be able to just update us on your Robin Hooded strategy, your rough era strategy at this point. Um, how do you plan to to generate market share gains? Um, and uh, maybe you could speak to the pricing strategy at this point and then maybe finally uh, maybe just an update on how you’re thinking about adding other FCMs to the platform beyond just the Hood brokerage. Yeah. Uh that’s a great question and again um we don’t uh we’re we’re a significant equity holder in Rother, you know, uh us in SIG, but uh we don’t actually we’re not actually operating uh Rthera uh ourselves. I mean, of course, um hopefully they like to uh hope Tom and team uh do listen to us occasionally on retail, but it’s like a independent uh independent business. Um yeah and so I don’t want to speak too much about their strategy for getting FCMs though I know they’re they’re highly motivated and um you know I think Rother could become the default uh neutral gateway for uh FCMs because a lot of the other prediction markets venues um they have their first party offerings where they are uh trying to acquire customers while they’re offering a a service to others and I think when we talk to uh a lot of other FCMs they don’t like the idea and the potential conflict of uh of of their provider also operating a first party business. So I think the great thing about rather for any FCMs that want to connect to it is that um it’s purely uh it’s it’s purely working with FCMS. So you don’t have to worry about your provider also competing with you in the marketplace. Um, and at least from our standpoint, we have been investing a lot in the non-sports contracts. You saw us announce, you know, KPI prediction markets. We’ve been seeing a lot of growth in the crypto contracts and commodities. And I think that over time we see an opportunity in integrating these financial I think I think we can own the financial category um because that’s like a unique advantage we have and Rother can support just uh more sophisticated financial contracts and and be a leader there because I I think we’re less excited about doing what everyone else is doing which is just all sports all the time because I I think that’s rapidly going to get commoditized um and is just frankly a little bit less uh differentiated from my standpoint. Yeah. And the two things I’ll add there. Um on the non-sports side, if you look in the quarter, it was actually about 30% was non-sports and that was up from 15% the quarter before. So, as Vlad said, we’re starting to see adoption across some of these other asset classes, which was uh which was great to see. On the pricing side, um we’re really excited that our pricing is now is now official, but we lowered pricing for customers when we bought Rthera. And what we did is we made a dynamic pricing model. And so what we heard from customers was if you were trading something in the wing relative to the center, you actually paid a higher take rate. And so uh instead of just increasing monetization, what we decided to do is redo the pricing model. We made it dynamic. We listened to customers, but we didn’t impact our take rate because we were able to share some with them and take some of that back. And then on top of that, we made it even better with gold. We talked a lot about gold, but now if you’re a Robin Hood customer and you’re and you’re a gold member, you also get even better pricing as well. So, a couple different things all going on there at the same time. Yeah. And if you look at the experience, those of you that trade prediction markets on Robin, you can see we’ve really done a nice job just refining the experience, having like specific modules for different types of prediction markets. The midterms hub in particular, I think just looks amazing. So, it’s it’s not just, you know, if you want to trade them, but just as a way to explore and find what’s likely to happen through the midterms. I I think we’ve done a a really really nice job and the 15-minute up and down markets um on crypto have been looking good. So, yeah, I think you you can see um you know, the chiseling that’s happening on the product to make it even more usable. All right, thank you. Uh the next question comes from somebody right off a plane. Uh, Dan Dolv from Missouo. Dan Dov. Hey, Vlad. Hey, ship. How are you? Are you in the airport? I’m in Munich. Oh, nice. I just just got back from uh Israel on route to New York. Um, vote for today. Um, great results as always. You know, we’ve done some work. I’m very interested in uh perpetual futures. Um, sounds like you guys are headed to something really big there. And I think we, you know, we’re get we’re getting a lot of questions on it. I just want to know like how big do you think this one could be cuz it sounds like it’s a huge opportunity here. So we’d love to get some more color on that. Thank you. Yeah, I mean I think that if you if you look at the um sort of like leaders in perpetual futures, the perpetual futures is a huge market by volume with daily volumes in the billions. In fact, some of some of the some of the platforms, you know, globally have tens of billions in in daily pers volume. Um, and then we saw even on Robin Hood chain, which again is just a couple months old, we’re seeing over a billion in uh US dollar notional in onchain per. So, I I see no reason why uh our offering can’t get to uh a similar if not greater scale than the DeFi offering as as time goes on.

All right. Uh, the next question is from David Smith at Truist. Hey, good afternoon. Hello. Hey, David. Uh, could you flesh out a little bit more about what you’re seeing in terms of the drivers on on take rates as 3Q came in lighter than a what a lot of us were expecting and it sounded like that declines continued to start the fourth quarter. Sure, it differs across asset class, but is this a mixed issue on the user front or on the subasset class uh front, trade sizes, volumes, other dynamics? Um, what would you point to there? Yeah, I’m I’m happy to take this one. Um, so on on equities, it’s usually a mix shift between single names and ETFs and it also depends on what the spreads are. Um, options is also similar. It depends on on what the VA is and also the spreads. And then is it are they trading more index options? Are they trading more single names? uh is it more indices? Uh that tends to be a bigger driver there. Uh on crypto, the main driver was our Robin Hood earn our stable coin product. So that product is doing great. It now has over 500 million of of assets there, but because it’s stable coin, we monetize it uh less than the the normal platform. And so that’s what drove it down. If you take out the stable coin, it was basically similar to the quarter before in the same zip code. So that was the main driver there. And then ECS, as I mentioned, we updated our pricing. And so it’ll depend on what the customer is trading. are they trading the money line? Are they trading at the wings? Are they using Robin Hood gold? And so that’s why we saw it moving a little bit. So I would say each of them is a little bit different. Um and that what we’re seeing in October is, you know, as the start they’re they’re similar to what we saw and maybe a touch lighter spreads are a little bit tighter, but again it’s about 3 weeks into the quarter and so we’ll see what the full quarter shakes out. Great. Uh thank you. Uh the next question is from uh Dr. Crossroads.

Hey guys, thanks for taking my call. Uh just uh wanted to ask uh given that you’ve given us uh last year some information regarding the impact of rate hikes and we’re in a very different or rate cuts and we’re in a very different situation with rate hikes. I’m wondering if it’s going to be a similar impact on the ecosystem. I believe you guided for a negative 50 million impact for each rate cut on net interest income. Uh especially now that banking is a part of your ecosystem and also credit cards are a meaningful part as well. You remember uh by the way a couple was it like a year ago everyone was like what what’s your business going to do? You’ve done so well in a high rate environment with all this interest income. How will you survive in a low rate environment? And now it’s funny every couple years it’s like the question reverses. Oh, you’ve been doing so well with these, you know, declining rates. How are you now rates are going to go up again? But uh I’m happy to take it. It is great. I mean first good to see you by the way. Hope you’re doing well. Uh the the first thing we like as Vlad said is uh the business is diversified. So some products do well in a low rate environment such as the the trading products and others do better in a in a high interest rate environment such as the NIM products. Um the actual math is uh for every 25 basis point uh hike or decline it’s about a 1 and a.5% change to uh to revenue. So all else being equal, if uh if the Fed hikes another 25 basis points, that should be a lift. The really simple math is we have about 80 billion of interest earning assets. about half of that 40 billion is interestsensitive assets because the sweep program and a few other things aren’t insensitive. So uh the DV1 25 million 25 basis points and 40 billion is about 100 million of of uh a change and then 100 million on about a 5.5 to6 billion run rate gets you to about that one and a half percent. So big picture though we like being diversified and uh and a rate hike is a tailwind. Um but regardless if the of the rate environment we’ve got we’ve bought a business that does well in both of them. Thank you Chev. Uh the next question is from Adam Fresh from Evercore. Hey guys, good afternoon and thanks for taking my uh my question. I wanted to follow up a little bit on net deposit growth and and actually monthly activives as a percentage of fully funded. Both were a little weaker this quarter. So would appreciate some color on what drove that in the quarter if we should be aware of any new or incremental initiatives you’re thinking about or acting already to reverse that or if it’s just a 90-day period that isn’t necessarily indicative of the overall trends and what you’re seeing so far in 4Q. Thank you. Uh yeah, I would say it’s more the latter. U we don’t overindex on any one month or quarter and and the best way to see it is October. As we mentioned, October was was already a record of over 13 billion of net deposits. And uh in ADVs, we’re very similar or just a touch lighter than what we saw in a record Q3. And so, uh things are going to move around. There’s timing of when we launch new products. Uh there’s timing of when promos happen. There is some seasonality. There’s macro events. There’s the IPO market. So, all of those come together. But if you look at it on an annualized basis or if you just look at October alone, uh already seeing really healthy engagement across trading at net deposits. All right. Thank you, Shiv. Uh, the next question is from Ramsey LSL at Caner. Hi, thanks so much for taking my question tonight. I wanted to ask if you could elaborate a little bit, Vlad, on on the rationale for the Ripple partnership. How’s that going to benefit you guys? I know there’s a few different dimensions there, internal treasury operations, also external facing benefits for Bitstamp, etc. Where do you see the nearest term opportunity, the greatest near-term opportunity, and just sort of if you could expound a little bit on the on the overall strategic rationale? next. Yeah, I mean, um, yeah, I think, uh, I I like Brad and the team at Ripple and, um, I think that we were excited to to to do more business together. Um I think that there’s uh yeah a lot of ways in which we offer complimentary things and you know we’re never we’re never afraid to get you know more integration into uh I think I think more integration more um uh products more selection for uh the Robin Hood ecosystem both in the app and in chain is just uh strictly better and I I think um we kind of bring complimentary three things uh to the table, you know, with with their uh institutional business and our more retailoriented business. Um and in fact, you know, uh today’s another example of this uh Ono integrating into uh Robin Hood chain. Now, Ono also has uh tokenized products, but our thought is well, you know, and we want our chain to be the best home of tokenized products. They don’t need to be our own. And and in fact, you know, it it’s uh it’s it’s important for us to just make sure everyone has an equal opportunity to list uh on on our chain and on our properties for for our customers because that just leads to to the best product. So, of course, if we we we would like our own firstparty products to always be used, but uh if if uh they also have to be better than uh than the competition.

All right, thank you Vlad. Uh the next question is from Ed Angle at Compass Point. Um hey, thanks for taking my question. I guess how are you thinking about bringing stock tokens on short the US after the SEC’s innovation exemption? And then is there anything regulatory wise on your radar that might unlock private stock tokens that you announced last year? Yeah, that’s a great question. Something we’ve been very passionate about. You know, for for private companies, we basically have two bets. one being Robin Hood Ventures which is um in the form of fund products in the US and then stock tokens um over overseas where you know we we have the ability to tokenize individual companies and in in a sense through our um uh well we benefit from you know the these two things help each other because you know with Robin Hood Ventures we have relationships with with companies we’ve been investing in a lot of companies, we have like an active pipeline. Um, and you know, a lot of those companies actually inquire about what tokenization is and and you know, can they can they join and you know, we we’ve been we have the relationships and we’ve we’ve been uh a leader in this space. So, I would say uh we have a path to doing it overseas. We know how to do it. We’ve demonstrated the technology and the capability. So it’s just a question of getting all the regulatory stuff in place. But uh we we do intend to launch uh uh these products overseas. Uh now when it comes to in the US for private stocks um specifically there’s uh another layer to it which is the accreditation requirements. Um and so we we are we are working hard to find a path that satisfies the current accreditation requirements and also leads to uh a great customer experience. I think I think Robin Hood Ventures is uh uh you know an example of this in the construct of funds but of course a lot of customers want exposure to individual names as well and so we’re working hard to to do that within the constraints. Um as far as the innovation exemption goes you know I I think it’s a really positive step. Um we’re supportive of it. uh we think that obviously the US uh needs to be a leader in this new technology. I I do think more needs to be done um to give people a little bit of of certainty uh because if as we talk to customers I think um you know the the uncertainty of what happens in 5 years um is is likely to be an impediment to like putting serious assets uh on onto this technology. So I still think some uh rulemaking or legislation uh is going to be is going to be necessary even though of course it’s a it’s a positive step and you know uh we we’ll hope to have more to share on our own US tokenization plans in the near future. All right, thank you Vlad. Uh the next question is from John Tadaro at Needm. Hey guys, good to see you and thanks for taking my question. Um I I was hoping we could just get some commentary on maybe the health of the the retail trader within equities. Uh in particular, AI stocks have come down quite a bit in the last several weeks and many of those were were trafficked in quite a bit by retail. So just wondering if we can get any commentary there uh on engagement post the selloff. Yeah, I’m happy to take this one. Um engagement continues to be really strong. I mean the best way to see that is through the ADVs and through net deposits and both of those were incredibly strong in the start of October. And so, as we said before, our customers, they tend to be younger. They tend to be techno optimists. They tend to be technology forward. They use sell-offs as a buying opportunity. And so, when you saw a sell-off, you know, in AI stocks or in chip makers or in semis, uh, our customers leaned in and continued to buy more. On down days, we tend to see some of our strongest net buying. And so, uh, but the best metrics I would look at are just net deposits and ADVs. And both of those were really strong to start October.

All right. Thank you, Shiv. Uh the next question is from Andrew Hardy from BTIG. Hey, thanks for taking my question. Uh SH, you talked about turning up the dial a bit on top of funnel. Just wondering if you can uh share some details on the strategy there and any traction you’ve seen. And then a bit of a followup on the MAU question. Uh you know, I realize it’s kind of just one period, but in the past year, we’ve been in that 13 to 14 million or 13 to 14 million user range on MAUs. Just curious anything you can do there to try to drive that number higher as well. Thanks. Yeah. Um could you repeat what was the first part of the question? Apologies. Before the miu anything on top of funnel that you’re doing and then similar question but how to increase the MAU number as well. Yeah. Um on the uh on the top of funnel there’s there’s two things. First is product and the second is uh marketing. What we’ve been focusing on this year is primarily product. We’ve been testing a tiny bit on marketing but we haven’t we haven’t done it yet. Um, but if you look at a lot of the things that that Vlad shared, whether it was it was P2P or banking or other products, um, we think those can be pretty meaningful drivers. So, we’re making some investments and we pulled some of that forward to to make them and develop them this year and you’ll see them launch in 2027. But the big drivers are generally just products and a little bit of marketing. Um, on MAUs, the honest answers, we don’t go on it. The teams are gold on our customers are engaged. Are they using the platform? Are they trusting us? Are they depositing? All of those are incredibly healthy. mouse is an output metric. It’s going to move around a little bit with the market. As I mentioned before, it could be seasonal. It could be the macro. It’s what they’re doing. Everything we’re seeing as customers are incredibly healthy. And if they’re depositing more and they’re engaging more, they’re using more of our products, we call that a win. And then MS are just going to move around. Yeah. And I I think, you know, uh longer term, we have some bets that we’re working on. I think um obviously you know having the opportunity to uh to to serve you know upwards of 70 million children with the the Trump accounts and serving as uh uh the broker and and trust the initial trustee of the program with with BNY. Um I think it’s a big opportunity for us to just be in front of the next generation there. Um we’ve also been uh thinking about how to invest. I mean, we have custodial accounts, um, which which have been a nice, uh, addition to the platform, but how can we actually invest in getting customers as they’re even younger and build an an even better experience because we’re starting to to see some smoke there. Um, so yeah, I I think that, you know, in in the next year, we’re going to be making several bets that uh yeah, I believe we’ll just not just increase um uh top offunnel net funded account growth um but also MAU growth. I mean, the the two are sort of like uh high level interconnected. So, so you should see those move and that’s uh outside of outside of marketing and outside of I think the long-term opportunity of serving as the trustee of the Trump accounts initiative. Oh, you’re muted. Oh, can you hear me now? You’re back. Yeah. I told you last quarter my son was about to be born and I signed him up and I can confirm it was a very easy uh onboarding process for his Trump account. So, well done there. Oh, thank you. That’s uh that that warms my heart. Uh hopefully you’ll have many more. Also, you can see if your employer will match you now and get a little bit more for your uh for your son in there as well. Yeah, good good call. All right. Uh the next question is from Alex Markcraft at Key Bank.

Hey guys. Um thanks for taking my question. Um sounds like things are going quite well in banking. I certainly appreciate the withdrawal destination data point that you shared. What should we be looking for to determine when the products in a state that warrants more sort of intentional marketing efforts or you know when you’re ready to to pour fuel on the fire so to say? Thanks. Yeah, that’s that’s a good question. Uh that’s going to be tied uh with the general availability of the product. So, so right now you kind of have to be a Robin Hood brokerage customer to be eligible for banking. Um, which essentially means there’s no like independent onboarding. Sorry, my hair makes these tough. Uh, no independent onboarding yet in the in the banking app. Um, of course, we do intend to to roll that out. And um if once we have independent onboarding then that unlocks the possibility of performance marketing which will be a new capability of ours because now we’re marketing multiple things. So, we’re we’re still early, but um I think we’re we’ve got a great team uh on the marketing side and and we’re going to be investing more in the capability, but we do believe that um banking will actually give growth to brokerage and not just the the other way around. So, this is just uh uh yeah, just a green field opportunity for us which will also impact uh net funded account growth and and MAUs. Yeah. and and banking is a little different than the credit card. So credit card, we’re rolling out more delivery because you have to get the unit economics right. You have to get the credit risk right. Banking is just like any of the other products that we launch. You make sure that customers like it, you fix their pain points once you find product market fit. So it’ll be much more akin to a regular software product relative to the credit card which took a little bit longer to roll out. Yeah. And and I’d also add that, you know, it’s it’s a little bit more of a predictable compounder, you know, because the the trading products, you know, it’s uh there is a dependence on the market and seasonality, but banking, people just receive their paychecks, they spend, you know, they’re in the ecosystem uh week in week out. It’s uh which which, you know, counterbalances the the trading business quite nicely. All right. Uh, and finishing strong here, our next question is from Ken Worthington at JP Morgan. All right. Hi. Uh, good afternoon. Thanks for the last licks here. Um, keeping it sort of high picture, Arpoo doubled over the last two years to about million dollar road map of new products and new cross-selling. How do you see RPO evolving from here? And if I pick an RPU RPO figure like $300, $300, do you see this as feasible? And given all that you’ve got going on, what does Robin Hood need to get right to get to a figure like that? Yeah, I think that’s an interesting question. I mean, um, the reason I’m reluctant to just give you our our arpoo goal is I think we also, uh, think there’s a lot of opportunity to grow customers and grow down market. I mean, if we get more younger customers, um, you could see for for example, you know, our food decreasing, but the total size of the customer base increasing dramatically. I mean, particularly depending on how you count Robin Hood chain users and international customers as we continue to to to put our foot on the gas of the international expansion, which I think we’re still, you know, the relative early days. I mean, we crossed a million international customers, but you know, not hard to imagine that itself growing exponentially on the way to, you know, the majority of our of our customers being international over the long run. So it’s a it’s a complicated optimization of you know our existing customers continuing to get val more valuable get wealthier and their ARPO should be continuing to increase but there’s going to be you know a counterbalancing effect of us just getting uh plenty of more customers from international markets and who are who are younger. Yeah couple things I’ll add there. Um ARPO is an output metric so we actually don’t go the teams on that. We grow them on market share and then ROI. And what we’ve said before is we believe Robin Hood can 10x from here. And so you can take any metric you want, whether that’s revenue, net deposits, etc. Um the highest predictor and correlation to revenue is just net deposits. So if we keep gaining net deposits, if customers keep trusting us, whether that’s new funded customers, whether that’s an existing customer trusting us with more, that’s how you grow the business and that’s how you grow revenue. Arpoo is going to grow wherever it’s going to go. But again, that’s not what we go on. we just grow on market share and and giving a great customer experience. All right. Well, that concludes the Q&A portion of the call. Vlad, would you like to make any closing comments? Yeah, I just wanted to tell you guys again, thank you for being uh here for those of you in person and and also those of you watching remotely. Um we’re uh building a community here not just of customers but also uh shareholders uh investors retail and institutional had some content creators on the call and you should know that we are uh we are far from done and we are not complacent and the road map just continues to be incredibly full. So, uh, rolling out all the things from HoodSummit and a bunch of other things in the hopper, um, to make this your financial super app and to deliver the power of ownership to people worldwide. So, thank you for being with us on the journey and, uh, thank you for listening, bearing the heat. Jeez,

and thank you, Sh.

Please welcome to the stage Robin Hood chairman and CEO Vlad Tenev and chief brokerage officer Steve Quirk.

What’s up everyone? How’s everyone doing? Well, thank you for rising early with us. I know it’s a little bit uh Has the coffee kicked in yet? Yeah, there we go. Good. Who was up all night conversation out there? Isn’t there Q? Uh, how are you doing? I’m doing well. Yeah, I mean it was really fun um you know with the presentation yesterday, but it was very fun talking to everybody afterwards just hearing it’s always fun to hear what what’s resonating and how you’re going to use it. And so a lot of people were talking to me about, you know, what what they’re going to use and what they’re excited about. So that was really fun. What did you what did you hear? What were what was you know, I heard a lot about the hours. Like a lot of people are excited about having the ability to to be able to you know to trade when things are happening. Um because so much is happening when you know when they I don’t know if you guys saw this about five years ago they did this study about um the market’s performance if I just traded in the day and bought and if I bought after the market closed and it was like the market significantly outperformed if I traded in that period and invested in that period. So all the gains and the big moves happen overnight. Yeah. So it was kind of cool. It’s just you know something that’s really interesting. I’ll tell you my least favorite part of HoodSummit so far because I, you know, it’s been generally good, but there’s been one part that’s left me very, very unhappy, which is because we have so many people, it’s over, 1500, our biggest yet. I wasn’t able to get through the entire selfie line. So, I apologize in advance if if you see me shuffling around to places. They’ve told me that uh if I had to take a selfie with everyone and their significant other, it would take me 72 hours, which is amazing. So, it’s a I remember when this was like a little intimate thing and what the first Hood Summit in Miami was a couple hundred people. But, you know what’s really cool? Uh I probably met 50 people who have been at every one of them. Yeah. Yesterday, which is really cool. It’s really fun. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that um uh I had a conversation at the Saturn 5 rocket last night with a few of the customers and uh uh by the way the Saturn 5 rocket. Did you guys see that last night? That was just a unbelievable piece of engineering. It made me very proud to be an American, you know. Um and also realizing that that was built in the 60s. I know it’s crazy. kind of like we we’ve got a lot of work to do to to catch up to to that. But anyway, um uh this customer came up to me and they were like, you know, I hear you talk about ownership, but really um what I love is agency. So, uh the thing that I appreciate most about traders is uh we all believe that um you should be able to do whatever you want with your money. So, nobody should be telling you uh don’t do this with your money. And our job as creators of this platform is to make sure you have the best tools and capabilities possible. So, uh some of my favorites every time we launch a new asset class that you can’t trade anywhere else like the first true per uh that have come in the US uh the first predictions uh for earnings. So now Robin will be the first place where you can trade regulated KPIs for earnings which open up a new class of strategies and then you have 24/7 which again uh you’ll be the first people in the US to trade stocks on Saturdays and that’s that’s another big thing. Not to mention the the Robin Hood agents which will allow you to uh trade while you’re sleeping. So, I think that I’m most excited about seeing what people can do with all these new tools and all the new opportunities that you’re going to uncover. you know the and then the the the one thing that you didn’t mention which actually connects all of them is social because I mean part of what makes this such a great event is not only you listening to us and by the way we are you I mean I’ve been a I’ve been a trader for I don’t want to say how many years but it’s a lot like I was on a trading floor during the 1987 crash so it’s been a while um so I think like you think I that’s what I that’s what I strive to too is make sure that you get access to everything that you know professional traders have had for years. But I also think it’s equally as important that you learn from each other and the best way to do that is by giving you tools like social so that you can you know you can collaborate with each other and if there’s best practices this isn’t a zero sum game you can all be winning you know in this scary market you know loses. Um, so, so I think that social is going to be really powerful for people, particularly if if I’m newer to the market because it, you know, there’s a learning curve. So, you you need to catch up and and figure out how to navigate markets, particularly volatile ones. And I think uh, social is going to be really powerful there. You know, it reminds me I had a couple of people come up to me and say, you know, this this is a great event. It felt like you invited a bunch of your friends over and we’re all your friends. Um, and were some of those friends um out late in your living room? I think they were I think they were up late trading um or you know enjoying that giant rocket which uh I was happy that I I got to spend time seeing that. But um yeah, I think that the best value at this event which I encourage people to keep trying to capture is making introductions with each other. I know a lot of people are still in WhatsApp groups and and signal groups from prior years. We we’re we’re trying to make it easy and conducive to uh create real relationships cuz this isn’t a typical business networking conference. You’re all here because you want to be here. Um so this is a great opportunity to find others that care about trading and markets and learning just as much as yourselves. Yeah. But I think um you you know there’s all kinds of sessions and Obie is going to come out in a minute and talk to you know walk you through everything that’s going to happen you know over the course of the day. But before we do that I think we want to we want to thank some of our sponsors and of course thank you for all being here. Um a lot of you have made trips from that’s first question I always ask when you know when I when I meet everybody is where where did you come in from? And man it’s all over the place. It’s it’s kind of cool. Um, but the sponsors we want to thank, as you can see up here, uh, the SIBO, CME, NASDAQ, State Street, AWS, Eyesshares, Direction, Sage, Tip Ranks, Van, and Roundill are all out there, and they all have uh boosts. Some of them were I couldn’t believe how how long the lines were to get to to uh some of those u sponsors yesterday. It was kind of exciting. I didn’t know what they were giving away, but I I wanted to get in line. No, these guys are um they they’ve been really amazing and we partner with them on uh all kinds of products. I mean, a lot of the products we announced yesterday were really made possible with partnership by by these sponsors. So, a lot of what we’re doing here is we’re we’re not just bringing people together, but we’re building infrastructure for what trading looks like in the future. And um I think that involves companies big and small. And I think increasingly Robin Hood is is a part of global trading infrastructure in a way that we weren’t maybe five years nexus. We’re the nexus. Yes. And and one other thing I would say what I love is when people say I love all these things you’re doing. This is so helpful. What I would like to see because we get a lot of great ideas from you. You’re the people that are the ones that are oftentimes telling us, hey, you know, if I had the ability to do XYZ in addition to this, it would be really powerful. Those are great things for us to hear. And you could tell any one of us. Abashek’s right over there. I’ll give you a cell phone. Call him 24/7. I’ve been pointing people to you. Oh, I had someone come up with very explicit future trading feedback and uh Okay. I was like, you know who you should talk to? And they said, uh, I know you’re going to point me to Q. Yeah. Yeah. He’s right there. I like it, by the way. I love it. So, please, I want to hear I want to hear from you. We all do. Creating futures backstage. I was That’s where we get all our you get our good uh that’s where we get a lot of our good ideas. So, with that, I think uh we’re going to bring out Obie, who is our MC for the day. I think we’re going to bring out Obie.

Hey, thank you guys. Welcome to day two. Enjoy it. See you. Thank you. By the way, he’s a big White Sox fan, so he’s kind of excited. It’s a good day yesterday. It’s a good day. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Vlad. Thanks, Q. Good morning, everyone. How we doing? That’s We can do better than that. How we doing? There we go. I know you guys had some fun last night. I’m Michael Obacina, better known as Obie. I’m the head of education here at Robin Hood and I will be your MC and master of ceremonies here on the main stage today. You’ll see me throughout the day keeping things moving, making sure you know what’s happening across Summit. And trust me, there is a lot happening. So, make sure you know that schedule. For those watching online at the the main stage live stream, we’ll stay up during breaks. So, if you need to step away, grab some coffee, come back, set an alarm, we’ll keep that live stream link running all day on YouTube, popping in out uh as you’re able to. All right, let’s walk through the day starting right here on Main Stage. We’re going to kick things off here in a moment with a live edition of the Risk Reversal Podcast. They’ll be discussing the state of the markets, everything from the AI trade in the midterms to other forces shaping markets into year end. These guys are my favorite. They’re fantastic. Uh then we’re going to get hands-on with those new a agents that we saw last night uh in the keynote. Uh Robin Hood’s VP of product Abashek who was sitting about right here last night. Uh we’re going to work with uh professional trader Chris Abdul Msia and two of our app store partners spot gamma and Quiver Quantitative. They’re going to be going through some examples of building some options trades using agents. It’s going to be really cool. And then we take a short break at 9:45. Uh, and at 10:00 a.m. that’s when all the other stages open, podcast and the trading lab, which I know a lot of you experienced yesterday. Uh, and then when we return, Guyadami is going to sit down with State Street’s Matt Bardellini for an ETF State of the Union. And then Q will make his way back on the stage with the CEO of Bruce Markets to take us behind the scenes of the 247 trading infrastructure that was also announced last night. And then last but not least, before lunch, uh our friend Kevin Avery from Chatwood Traders, a very popular trading podcast, uh is going to sit down with uh Geneva Trading CEO Rob Kramer, CME Group’s Craig Buick, and I’ll be on that panel as well. And we’re going to follow a futures trade from your screen to the exchange to the market maker on the other side. It’s going to be a really fun conversation. Then we break for lunch, but please don’t even think about leaving early because we’ve stacked some of our best sessions in the afternoon. Starting uh on the other side of lunch at 1:00, we’re going to do a session on the midterms using the prediction markets hub and we’ll be joined by a former presidential campaign manager, a leading pollster, and our friend Danny Moses to build a trading plan for the 2026 midterms. And then Robin Hood Ventures, if you guys have heard of that, uh we’re gonna have a panel with uh does anyone know Kathy Wood? That’s right. Kathy’s gonna be here joined by our very own CFO uh Shiv Verma and head of Robin Hood Ventures, Sarah Pinto. And that’ll be moderated by our good friend Dan Nathan, who you’re about to see on stage. And then, and this might be one of my favorite sessions of the day, we turn inward to the mental game of trading. Jared Tendler, who is a mental game coach, is going to go inside the mistakes that our brains somehow convince us to make when we’re in the middle of a trade and like, “Oh, this is a good idea.” And we’re going to have a little session on how to improve our mental approach to trading. So, please stick around for that. I’ve seen the rehearsals. I’ve worked with Jared on this. It’s going to be a lot of fun. And then we wrap the day and summit with my favorite tradition for Hood Summit. And this is lessons from a legend. We’ve done this every year. This year, uh, SIBO’s JJ Kahan sits down with a true professional and legend of the retail trading world, Tom Sausnoff. Has anyone heard of Tom? Yeah. Uh, he’s he’s well known in the industry. I’ve actually started my career working for Tom. So, we’re happy to have him here. And then to close things out, we’re going to bring Vlad and Q back on at the end of the day, wrap it up, and send you guys to happy hour. So, that’s it for the main stage. Fully packed day. Um, but as you guys experienced yesterday, we’ve got the trading lab all the way in the other side of the convention center. Uh, it’s smaller, more intimate, built around more hands-on live trading workshops. We’re going to have sessions on options, technical analysis. We’re going to explore futures trading, and then you may want to sneak early for this one. The guys that are coming on stage here, the the famous big short traders, they’re going to do a master class on how to trade from the short side. And then uh of course uh schedule-wise the trading lab starts every hour on the hour uh starting at 10:00 a.m. and finishing at 2. Seats are limited. So if there’s a session you want to be uh there and and and be involved with, get there early, get a good seat. And then don’t forget the podcast stage. All day long we’ve got live conversations with traders, industry leaders, uh across markets, AI, options, futures, crypto, technology. So there’s a lot going on. And if you’re torn between what you want to see, don’t worry. Everything’s getting recorded. So if there’s something that h you know what, I can’t decide. Pick the one that you want to be involved in because we built Q&A into every one of these sessions. So you’ll see Mike’s here. You’ll see Mike’s over in the other stages. Get involved, ask questions. uh don’t be afraid to get up uh because we want you guys to learn from these experts and there’s no better way than asking them uh right in front of them. And then uh of course besides the stages, you guys have already experienced this yesterday, but we’ve got Brain Date. We’ve got the Robin Hood NASCAR out there. Take a picture. Uh and then uh you know, rest your feet, get some coffee, hang out in our sponsored lounges. Don’t forget lunch is at noon. Happy hour starts at 4:30. So, my wish and and my hope is that you guys get out there, ask questions, meet somebody new, make the most of your day, cuz this is jam-packed with trading, education, community, uh, and of course, we like to have a little fun. So, once again, are we ready to go? All right. Fantastic. There’s really only one way to start a day like this, and we got to talk markets. Uh so please welcome to the stage Robin Hood’s chief investment officer Steph Gild fame big short investors and founders of Seawolf Capital Vincent Daniel and Porter Collins and your friends in mine co-founders of Risk Reversal Media and co-hosts of CNBC’s Fast Money Dan Nathan and Guyadami. This is Risk Reversal Live at HoodSummit. Let’s give them a hand.

Morning people. Hey Obie, don’t leave yet. Just wait one second. A round of applause for Michael Ouchi. I mean, unbelievable. Put this together. You’re going to see a lot of Obie. Obie is a man. We love him. And thanks for having us here, folks. We’re excited, clearly. Uh I’m energized. I was here last night. I did not get a seat. I sat in the back. It was full. And that’s a tribute to all of you. There was a saying at Goldman Sachs uh when we tried to put on trades, take a partner. And that basically meant, you know, if you have an idea about something, bounce it off somebody else and let them sort of look at it and see it through a lens that maybe you didn’t look at it through. And that really helps. And if you think about the community you’ve built here at Robin Hood, you can do that in a material way. And given what I saw last night, it’s going to make it a lot easier. So without further ado, I have an amazing panel here. You will notice Danny Moses is not here. He didn’t want to sit next to Vinnie. He said it’s too much. You’ll see Danny later, but the Porter and the Vinnie are here along with my dear friend Stephanie Gild and obviously Dan Nathan. So Steph, I’m going to start with you. Obviously the topics are energy, the topics are interest rates, and the topics are AI. That’s what’s dominating, but there are other things going on. So if you’re looking across the spectrum, and you do amazing work, by the way, you’re really fortunate to have Steph guild here at Robin Hood. You know, what sort of stands out to you over the last few weeks? Um, I think obviously the things you said and the things that worry me about it is just like the the trickle effect from the higher costs. Um, and what that does to the consumer, what that does to the cost for businesses to run themselves. Um, but I also think that um, you’re kind of seeing it play out in the markets where there used to be much more breath and now the breath has come in where it’s concentrated in the LA, you know, the kind of largest names. Um, and that that’s also that’s probably how it’s playing in to uh, you know, the largest names are not being as impacted by it more recently. And and actually, there’s something I was thinking about with it, which is it used to be that like if you’re worried about growth, you could just go buy the largest tech companies and kind of hide out in there. And I’m not sure that’s actually where you should hide out anymore. But I think that instinct or reflex is still exists in the market. And that’s maybe why you’re seeing um the mag seven catch up and there being much less breath right now. We play this. Any fast money fans out there, don’t lie if you’re not, but if we make it to January 20 years, anybody ever seen this show? Somebody please say you can yell and scream. By the way, um we have Mike. So, at the end of this uh session, to the extent you have questions, we’re going to ask people to sort of go down either aisle. We’ll leave some time for Q&A, but we play this game on fast money. If I had told you six months ago the following would be happening and stuff I’m going to go back to you. Six months ago I said to you oil is going to be either side of $95 10ear yields going to be approaching 5 and a4%. A war is going to be lasting for five or 6 months in the Middle East. And then I said okay given those things I said where’s the S&P? And I will tell you what I would have said 6500 if not lower. Yet here we are couple% from an all-time high. Does that surprise you in any way? Can we can we add in the Fed’s been hiking rates, too. I’m going to add in, by the way, the Fed’s been hiking rates. Thank you, Porter, for that. Um, I I would have actually I my target was around the 6,500 with a give or take 100 points around that. Um, so I am actually really surprised that we’ve been able to bear through a war that hasn’t ended, oil prices that are not going down, and rates that continue to go higher. Although the rates thing I’m not at all surprised about because I feel like I’ve been saying that they should be higher for a while. Um, and I think as a I’m one thing I think is like that’s helping offset that is that we do actually have growth. It may be um fueled by capital spending that could be at risk, but it is there and that’s the only thing I think that’s been offsetting the higher rates. Vinnie, nothing surprises you. I’ve been around you long enough. You’re very measured. But again, all the things we talk about it is to me it is surprising the resilience of the market. Now maybe it’s against the backdrop of earnings growth which is supporting but the earnings growth is seemingly coming in a very specific area. So thoughts on that? Few things. Uh the market breath right now is terrible as as we’ve discussed. Uh let’s also keep in mind we’re running 5% fiscal deficits. So that creates revenue growth for somebody out there somewhere and like you said it’s very concentrated but how much longer I always ask can this last where we have such a bifurcated so the market breath is horrific and it can resolve itself one of two ways uh it’s either going to resolve itself where the cap weighted names are going to come down or the names that have gotten crushed I mean take a gander as any hopefully no one has been trading this and if you’re short it great But take a look at the stock McDonald’s. Just look at the chart. It’s horrible. Right? So I look at what’s causing some of this market breath. And I always go back to market structure, right? So think about everyone who works. You get your W2, right? You’re usually saving money from that W2. It’s going to target date funds, which are cap weighted funds. So, there’s a flow of money going into the market that just goes to 10 or 20 names. And the rest of the names in the S&P, while they’re getting some drips and drabs of money, they’re not getting anywhere near the amount of money Apple’s getting. Just you put a dollar in the market. What is it? 8 to 10% is going to Apple, 8 to 10%’s going in Nvidia. And this is just money you’re getting every Friday from your salary straight to the market. It doesn’t have a brain. Doesn’t know what it’s buying. It’s just structured to go there. So, I think the structure is holding up this market for the time being. So, I’m gonna I’m gonna put a pin in that, which is a phrase that I’m reticent to use, but I will this morning. I’m going to go to Porter real quick. You guys, when I say you guys, you and Vinnie and Danny Mosers, who is floating around, get labeled um perma bears, which is not true. You’ve both all three of you have found opportunities in a lot of different things, extraordinary ones. Energy has been a place that you guys were early and in arts in world you were early and right typically it’s early and wrong. Still opportunities and energy here regardless of what you think about the underlying commodity in crude oil. Well, you know, I think this war has forever changed the structure and dynamic of the energy market, right? I I think that um buyers of of natural gas and and crude and LNG are going to be very reticent to to go to the you know rely on the Middle East just because there’s so much turmoil, right? That’s just been the the history of it. And I think, you know, the structure of those markets are going to be changed for a long time. And you know, hopefully the the price of oil does come back down. You know, I think the the the asymmetry in the energy trade was much better uh when everyone, you know, hated it and oil prices were very low. But I would point out that, you know, there hasn’t really been much of any multiple expansion of the energy names. It’s just been pure profit. Um, you know, profits are up and and people are discounting obviously the the the curve on the the oil. So, I don’t think there’s a lot of expectations built in. You know, the average investor still probably doesn’t own oil stocks. uh you know the index sure doesn’t it’s I think it’s two or 3% of the index as well. So I think that a lot of these big energy names are great places to you know own for uh dividends and and uh cash flows. So yeah, I think it’s it’s it’s a nice piece of people’s portfolios. Moves have been extraordinary. Some of the refining stocks are trading like biotech names. And you know, people look at this and say that’s unsustainable. But if you think about the backdrop and the earnings growth and and it all goes to the bottom line, seemingly despite the moves, there’s still room in these things. Well, this is this is kind of the one of the reasons we were so bullish on energy is that if you look at what happened to ESG, they were retiring all these refineries for a long time. Here we’re in the we’re in the the energy capital world here in Houston and you know the the world hated energy still does right and so that they’ve been retiring refineries and now in Russia we’re blowing up uh refineries and um you know there’s been lots of uh fires you know whether there’s vandalism or whatever in a lot of different refiners and so just the the the supply demand there’s a lot of demand still and there’s and the supply is shrinking just you know that that’s that’s why you know Marathon stock goes up every day right probably one of the best performing stocks in the market you know it’s amazing the three best things that happened to energy in my opinion over the last it’s called five or six years the prior administration this is not political they were very clear about their want to sort of put the energy business into the ground when front month crude oil traded down to minus $40 a barrel that sort of was a wakeup call and what you just said ESG and all those things force these companies to sort of take a hard look at their businesses and sort of operate better. Steph, I know you do some work in the energy space. Is Is there an accuracy to that? No, I I think it’s right. And if you also think about like you said back in 2014 when oil prices dropped a ton, like it was another wakeup call for energy companies. I think if you always kind of take a bigger step back, I like investing in in sectors that have been through it already and had to like realize how to be efficient in a not great environment for them. And that’s why I think like energy can do well going forward because the demand is still there and they know how to run businesses without very much help um or or resources. I’ve not forgotten about Dan Nathan. We started a company about six years ago. Any risk reversal media fans out there? You can raise your hand if there’s got to be somebody. By the way, you right there, Junior Amanda is doing great. By the way, if you see her, it’s her birthday. So, please wish her a happy birthday. But Dan Nathan, I’ve gotten to sit next to on Fast Money for the last 17 or 18 years. Um, and he’s obviously not the voice of skepticism, but he’s somebody that brings up things that a lot of the people out there don’t really bring up. And I will tell you, Dan brought up early and correctly what was going on in sort of these private equity names. and they although they bounced they’re sort of back on a trajectory lower and this has been a concern of yours now for a while. So obviously not financials in the historical sense but financials the importance of what’s going on in the world. Yeah and I think um you know Vinnie Porter Danny have been all over this. You guys have drawn correlations between the thing that everybody is talking about and what are some of the second derivative trades about that and I I got I’ve learned that gut from you guys. You know when you think about how this infrastructure build has been financed over the course of three or four years I think it’s very instructive to see who are some of the beneficiaries right out of the gate right and then essentially who are being dragged along and we can do the industrial stuff at at another point but the financing of this is the most important point and you go back to 20 I don’t know 19 2021 when Microsoft one of the best credits in the world it has a better credit than the US government invested $13 billion into a startup, OpenAI. They own 27% of that company. Just think about that for that sort of investment. Now, they could raise as much debt as they need to to build out whatever they want to do, right? Some of the other companies that they were investing in were having a harder problem or harder time doing that, but they were leveraging off their investors and ability to do that. So then you take it a step further and you say, “All right, Microsoft can use their cash flow. They use their balance sheet. they can use their ability to raise debt. But then where did some of the other folks have had to get a bit more creative, right? They had to go into the private equity, private credit really space. Those guys get funded, right, by a lot of the banks, insurance companies. I mean, the list goes on and on. So here we are 3, four years into this Microsofts, the major hyperscalers. They’ve used a lot of their cash flow. They’ve leveraged their balance sheets, that sort of thing. So where do they go? They go from the guys who make fees, right? Lending into this sort of stuff. And so that’s where you get to these private equity credit, what whatever you want to call them, alternative lenders. They have traded really poorly in many ways. I think they have been sort of the canary in the coal mine for how this trade might go. And these are great companies and I know you guys know this. Apollo and KKR and Blackstone and the list goes on and on. The stocks trade like dog [ __ ] okay? They just don’t trade particularly well. And so I don’t know how you can look at the performance of those, look at all the exposure that they have, look down the chain of where they get their capital, how they get their returns, and say to yourself, “This is all going to go well in a straight line.” So last thing I’ll just say, a KKR strategist, it was in the FT, I literally just read it 15 minutes ago. He’s talking about concentration risk. He’s talking about how basically the concentration in investment grade debt in the US for AI related stuff is 6.3%. That is double the 30-year average of any one sector. And that company which has lots of I guess toes in the water all around this trade are basically saying are one part of that organization be careful of concentration because if things go sideway we’re going to have some problems. So Vinnie, how important are interest rates in this whole thing? reporter correctly told me that the Fed is on this rate height cycle it appears and whether you think it’s a good thing or a bad thing. That is what’s going on right now. Bond market is telling a story that the equity market either chooses not to listen to or just doesn’t think it’s a big deal right now. Well, when I think about why rates are rising and there’s a lot of reasons, I just go with D. All of the above. All the above. All of the above. Right. whether it’s higher than expected inflation, a crowding out element that while the the treasury needs to refinance a ton of paper, AI has a lot of debt requirements and requirements of debt issuance. Uh you also have an interesting dynamic associated with who’s buying treasuries, how levered they are, and as volatility increases, they need to degrow. So that is happening as well. Um I every single reason you give me it really doesn’t matter. Higher rates really hurts markets at the end of the day. And so we keep saying and of course oh I forgot one of the biggest ones which causes a lot of the inflation which is this war right this this war and the lack of supply of energy and oil and diesel which finally f funnels itself into the economy with higher costs which requires higher inflation. So I say, well, in order for markets to really resolve itself, getting back to this market breath and all the other stocks that were not the the non20 AI related names that are going down, how in the world do they go up? You have to get rates down. But how do you do that, right? Well, the first thing you need to do is to end the war and that would decline. Again, this is nonpartisan. I’m just using market related uh stuff. So, I think we’re probably done with rates being at zero or 1% like that’s we were talking about it in the back. That’s kind of the anomaly. But if rates were to rally 50 basis points for the right reasons, you can see some interesting things that happen in the market. But you need a catalyst. I don’t think it’s just going to happen just because it happens. What is the catalyst though? as you said, I mean, it’s it’s a war ending potentially or or it’s a stock market that sort of rolls over in a meaningful way and then maybe you do see a flight to quality in the form of the bond market, which is historically something that happens. It’s two ways, right? You end the war and then we could have a disinflationary kind of mini boom. I don’t think it’ll last super long, but it’ll last long enough to be a tradeable uh event. Or you have the other way, right? And the other way is what you said, which is rates eventually start biting into everything. Perhaps this AI capex boom by next year, the rate of change turns negative. And then all of a sudden, we’re going to have a more recessionary environment that’s pervasive in the economy. And if that is the case, then you’ll probably get rates lower because inflation will turn into disinflation and potentially deflation. Cord, you guys obviously do a lot of work in a lot of different areas. is Latin America is something that we talked about over the last couple days. There’s an election in Brazil on Sunday. Um the Brazil ETF, the EWZ had a great move earlier in the year. It’s backed off a little bit. Opportunities in Latin America if you’re trading, if you’re playing our home game here. Well, you know, Vide and I are worry about everything and and if I look around the US, there’s not a ton of bright spots, you know, like I I you know, I’m trying to look for idiosyncratic stories that go up, but like you know, if I if I look at a from a macro perspective, I go to Latin America, you’ve had a big uh shift in terms of regimes, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, um that all moved more conservative And what that basically means is liberalizing the economies, opening them up, allowing them to to to grow faster. And you know, they they’re called emerging markets. And usually emerging markets are people worry about them because they have more debt. Well, they actually have less debt to GDP than the United States does. And that basically all these uh developed economies do. And so you have better growth. you know, the the the earnings multiples are at least half of what you see in in these markets. No one’s really looking at them. Um, and you know, they’re very well-run companies and and we were talking earlier about companies or or countries that have been through periods of long hard times. Well, this is a this is, you know, this is case number one in, you know, Brazil or whatever that they’ve it’s interest rates are 14%. I imagine if the interest rates the Fed raised rates to 14% I think times would be a little harder here and so that’s why I look at opportunity there’s you know the election is this Sunday if if you see you know a move more conservative in Bolsson winning I think that’s really an opportunity to to say hey like growth is going to be a lot better inflation can come down and rates can come down and you can have a a good cycle right we don’t the you know I think that we worry about rates going up here in in Brazil I don’t know rates can work and rates go 14 to 11 that’s a pretty big bull cycle that’s going to occur there so that’s that’s the stuff that we look for sort of asymmetry and that that’s so you know I think I would u look at Monday or Sunday night’s election and say you know is this a tradable event that’s what I would look for Vinnie you’re a master at finding names that nobody’s ever really talked about or heard of until everybody’s talking about and hearing about them. Are there any of those names out there now? It’s, you know, if you want to go to Latin America because there are a lot I mean you think about Brazil resources, banks, minerals, I mean the whole mining stocks, I mean it runs sort of the gamut there. I’ll give one name. You you guys are very familiar with CME, right? In terms of a name in a company. Uh what if you can own the CME of Brazil, right? Uh it’s B3. They’re the Brazilian exchange. they they they kind of have a monopoly in in many respects. Uh Ebidot margins are 60 70%. And stock trades at a fraction of the multiples that typical exchanges trade. So if if this election goes stock has done reasonably well, uh if the election goes well, we believe it’ll it’ll really uh pick up. So a name like B3, a name like XP that we recently bought, which is kind of like the Brazilian Charles Schwab, right? So, a lot of the things that people Not as buying Robin Hood. What? Not as good as Robin Hood. Of course. Correct. The Brazilian. It’s the Brazilian Robin Hood. It’s not as good as Robin Hood. Indeed, it doesn’t have the technology. So, um, so to me, we’re sort of buying the Brazilian equivalents of things in the United States that trade at much higher multiples. Just out of curiosity, process for the people here, all traders, is it just rigor that gets you to these names? Is it just doing the work? a natural curiosity because I’m sure a lot of people are saying I say it and I’m supposed to have been done this for the last 40 years like how do people like Vinnie and Porter find these things. Yeah. Well, first off, forgive me guy. Me and you have a lot of gray hair, right? So, we’ve been doing this for a while. So, that that helps to a certain extent. We we’ve kind of seen a lot of things. Uh Porter and I like to start with a thematic of where we think the world is going and then from there we find things from the bottom up. And then after that, it’s just I mean, I stupidly like to sit in balance sheets and and look at these things and study them and and be challenged by it. Even even with names when you’re wrong, it was like, “Wow, this stock sucks and we own it, but that was a fun analysis I just did.” Uh, and I know that’s weird, but it’s it’s just the way I’m built. Uh, well, you might say weird. I I love it, too. I love being a nerd. Yeah. Well, that’s what I was going to ask you, Steph. It’s about the process and obviously you have an extraordinary process. So walk us through, you know, how you sit down during the day and sort of come up with the thesis you come up with. It’s not too different. I would say we we actually start in Robin Hood strategies with a quantitative process first because I kind of know that sometimes like my own opinion can get in the way of good, you know, fundamentals or data or finding something interesting. So we have uh proprietary factors that we build that kind of give us like what are the value stocks, what are the growth stocks, what are the quality stocks. Um and that’s where we fish. But then I’ll also have kind of a a thematic and I I read a lot like I I read articles and listen to podcasts, some finance, some not finance. obviously listen to risk reversal, but um but I also like listening to things that are not financial, but like people will bring up things that they’re doing, things that they’re talking about. I also have kids that will tell me like what people are doing. Um my daughter asked me for a JBL speaker the other day and I was like should I look into who makes those and like um and she loves Starbucks but um there like I kind of start forming a view of the world taking all of that in and looking for things that like not everyone’s talking about yet and try to pair that with the quantitative kind of bottom up process. Dan goes down the rabbit hole every day of you know the information all the different things you read and to your credit we talk about sort of cyclicality and I want to come back to that but valuations matter and obviously some stocks trade at ridiculous valuations but then you look at a name like Nvidia which last I look is trading at about 19 times next year’s numbers 100% earnings growth 100% revenue growth broader market probably trades at 22 times to the extent that they even have peers probably half of the valuation. I ask out loud, why is that? Why do you think is it an opportunity or is it a warning flag? Well, I mean, let’s go back 26 years, right? And um I I did a podcast on Friday, risk reversal podcast. I’m just going to kind of give it a little push here. You guys have to go listen to Jim Chenos, who is the guy who found the Enron fraud. Like to us, he’s like that guy. Okay. Um we love him. He’s a friend of ours. and then another guy named Gary Marcus who is a very um prolific AI skeptic but an academic and we had the two of them together and you know Gary brought up Nvidia but Jim really kind of nailed it. If you are Nvidia and you were at the center of this entire ecosystem and they kept on using the you know if you’re selling shovels in a gold rust that is Nvidia they’ve been able to have margins that like we’ve never seen a semiconductor company ever have. They have these moes they have this crazy market share they have everything. All right. So Jim’s point was if you believe everything that we’ve just talked about in this whole conversation, okay, about the technical aspects of it, the mark market aspects of it, the all the opportunities and your Nvidia, why would anybody who is dependent on your chips and your allocation and your I mean the list goes on and on. Why should that trade at a higher multiple than the company? And I and I’ll put it to maybe Porter and Vinnie like like think about that. You could be skeptical of the circular financing. You could be skeptical of the um competition that’s coming. You could be skeptical of just, you know, them being this Cisco. This is the thing going back to 1999 of this whole sort of trade. And when it kind of goes pear-shaped, they’re going to be ground zero for it. But in the meantime, the stock has gone sideways for 6 months. It’s back towards those highs. They seem to have to pull up every rabbit out of a hat. Now, this new $150 billion um buyback that they’re actually instituting. It’s not like, hey, we have this dry powder if the stock comes back in. So, they’re making a judgment about the valuation of their stock. And I’m just curious how you guys think about that because Jim’s point is a great one. You can take all of these qualitative inputs from someone like Gary Marcus, but Jim’s actually not thinking about that. He’s thinking about the quantitative aspects of this. Vin, good point. And my perspective is they’re right. And I look at names if if if I thought that the AI narrative trade capex cycle whatever we want to call it is is going to have a negative rate of change. I’m not thinking about Nvidia as the first thing to short. I’m not I’m thinking more of the very heavily indebted uh names some of the data centers where the business models are questionable to begin with. Right? I would look towards that to short more. So, I’m in complete agreement with with with Jim on how the direction I would trade this if I felt like the AI trade was on its last legs. Yeah. But, by the way, they’re the ones that have the pricing power, too, right? So, they’re invest in a NeoCloud. They turn around and buy their chips at a 77 gross margin for Nvidia, you know, understanding that this is for them. They got to get it while the getting’s good, right? Like, and it’s been good, Porter. So like help us think about that because that is the most like you’re not going for Nvidia. If anything, Nvidia might be a great pair stray. It might be that hedge against shorting this stuff that are their customers that have the questional unit economics. So we’ve gone we’ve gone bearish, you know, on Nvidia on on the AI trade. We’re talking, you know, the risks. We’re talking about risks. You know, I will say that I probably underestimated how powerful AI would be in my life and and and the the quick adoption everywhere. You know, you you’re seeing, you know, we saw the presentation last night. It’s being incorporated into everything. And I think that, you know, in one way it’s it’s scary, right? You know, are we able to sustain, you know, the job growth? We talked about on our uh Substack. It’s called what are we doing? I talked about um accounting jobs, you know, are they going to replace accounting jobs with AI? And the answer is probably yes, right? And so I I worry about that and I think that AI is probably going to be more powerful than most of us think. So um that’s at odds with the business model and the financing of of all this stuff cuz you know two companies Open AI and Anthropic have $2.5 trillion in debt. It’s a lot of debt for companies that don’t make any money, that really don’t have any prospects for making money. So, I I think something needs to change, right? We’re going to all going to need to pay a lot more for compute for these companies to be profitable. Um, you know, I I use Gemini. I pay 20 bucks a month. I’m not a power user of this stuff and I think it’s amazing, right? But I’m not paying you know when companies start replacing a lot of humans uh with you know $100,000 of compute power um that’s when you know I think the profitability of these companies will really take off but that’s obviously scary right and so I think we’re at a very interesting point of the world and the markets are seeing the trepidation the markets are um very uneven right now and I think that’s the way I see it too. I you know so Steph when historically when cyclical stocks are their cheapest that’s the time to avoid them and conversely when they get expensive is cyclicality even a thing anymore because if you listen if you watch daytime business television you’ll hear a lot of people say it’s different this time famous last words um the I do think it’s a little bit different this time I I I think it used to be much easier to analyze the market and the economy and they were a little closer together. And I think now we’re on and I talked about this yesterday on another podcast here, but like I think we’re on two timelines. And I think we’re on a AI timeline that is tech enabled and the life that we might all be living. But then there’s another timeline. I think about my parents like they were like, “Yeah, we used chatbt once.” It’s like there there’s a whole lot of people out there that AI has not entered their world. Like the progressive commercial. Yeah. Yeah. Like your parents. Um so I I just think there’s like there’s still a lot more growth coming because there is a lot of people in the world. There’s a it’s what is it like 2% of the population that are actually participating in this and it is really hard to change behavior. Like it takes a while to change behavior. It change oh takes a while to change behavior inside organizations to use this AI. So that’s why I think we’re kind of on two timelines. So the timeline that used to be the timeline um and this is like where you said I used to use timelines use the word bifurcated. Yep. That’s that’s not doing well. Consumer names are not doing well. 20% of the largest 1000 stocks are down more than 15% and it’s all some software companies like in it. So accounting is over and then you know in Adobe and then it’s like consumer names and some of them have stock specific stories but some of them are just because consumer sentiment is down like people don’t think not a lot of people in the bigger world think things are great but then I feel like a lot of us here think things are better because we are in that other timeline of seeing that growth. So I I think that’s almost what the market is struggling with right now too under the hood even though the VIX is like not high um because it’s it’s coming together. The one other thing I wanted to say about Nvidia is that I wrote a piece about Nvidia becoming a bank and if a bank takes deposits and lends them out and then lends their name and then often concentrates in sectors Nvidia is doing all of that. Um, even though they say they don’t have financing, like you said, they they lend money out and that’s on the or order of like, you know, it’s not that big compared to their revenue. It’s like $500 billion from what I could find deep in the disclosures. Um, but it’s I think it’s probably more than that. And they’re the most incentivized to keep things like that going. And that’s why I think this can go in a circular motion for longer than we think should. Yeah. Um, just by the way, um, if you guys got questions, there’s three mics here. Um, I wanted to make one point. Guy, you asked about process and you know, last year we were at the hood summit and they rolled out Cortex and we got to see the blue guy with uh, Vlad’s voice last night which was pretty cool, but they updated a lot of these products and you know, when you talk about what are some of these second derivative things? So last week when Muse came out or two weeks ago, did you guys see all the companies that have subscriptions? They all got killed, right? like like literally so all of a sudden you could use an agent to go into all your crap and find the stuff that you’re not using anymore subscriptions and kind of log out of them or unsubscribe from them those tools I think are the things that give you the ability to find those other trades and I think that digging into those all right guy you played host we didn’t get any guy opinions here and I will say this because you guys know guy well he doesn’t love to kind of take any recognition for anything that he’s done well in his life you have had uniquely. You and I have had the benefit. Steph’s been on with us in the podcast a lot. You guys have been. We’ve had amazing strategists, investors, analysts. Um, you’ve been steadfast in rates going higher. We don’t have to dig into that much. But here we are. We’re at this level. It’s broken out to a 5year, multi-year high. Forget trading yields right now. If we were to see a pullback, and there’s a whole host of things that you just laid out, Vinnie, and we could have these kind of What would you trade? What would you do away from yields in the stock market that you think is a great way to reflect you know yields coming back below 5 yields come in from let’s say 5 and a/4ish where we are now let’s say call it 4 and 3/4 so we can do that math you have to say okay what is the backdrop for that to happen but then I say to myself okay what has higher yields created a headwind for that is still a structural trade and it comes back to gold Vinnie I think you probably agree with me on this one gold’s obviously had really difficult couple of months had a bounce I don’t know let’s call it mid August or so but it’s pulling back now I think solely on the back of yields being higher I’m of the belief you know if the bond market continues to erode there will be a point in time where that becomes bullish but under that scenario I think that’s when gold is going to really flourish so I I think the gold story is intact Vinnie the fact that the Netherlands a few weeks ago or a month or so ago announced that they were repatriating their gold I think it was 80 tons of gold. I know that’s a wonky story. I think that’s a big story that came on the heels of France doing it earlier this year and I think it was 14 or so years ago. The Germans did it as well. That’s a that is a telling sign. So in what Dan just laid out, Vinnie, I say the gold the gold market’s going to work in a material way. Thought Oh, go ahead, Porter. Well, you know, we’re a little bit older than than the uh Robin Hood crowd, but you know, I think they see the same thing we do with Bitcoin. And you know, Bitcoin has been in a bare market for quite some time. It’s sort of peeking its head out of the out of the closet here and trying to, you know, do a little better. And so I think it’s sort of similar. It’s the debasement trade, right? We’re not going to be able to pay this debt back with, you know, uh, what the government’s doing. We’re running 5% fiscal deficits. As far as I can see, we’re going to have to print the money. that’s the only way that we’re going to be able to pay for social security and and everything else going on. And so I think this debasement trade, whether you choose Bitcoin or choose gold or choose the gold miners, you know, I think that’s a trade that will be here for a long time. Ben, yes. Um, it’s also a question of what is causing the rates to go down 40 50 basis points. Is that somewhat sustainable? Does is inflation coming down with it? And I’m talking real inflation, not fagazy CPI prints. I’m saying we actually get a reduction. Like if oil went from a 100 bucks to 75 bucks, keep coming back to this war. That would cause a chain chain effect on inflation. And as a result, I think there would be even more things. Yes, gold. Yes, Bitcoin. I agree with that. But there would probably be even more things to buy over a 6 to9month period. I’m looking down in the crowd again. If you have questions, the microphones are there, but Steph, we have a few minutes left. We haven’t talked politics, nor do I want to talk politics, but there is an election coming up in the next 35 or so days. Historically, elections are market moving. Have you done any work around that? And I’m going to come to you, sir, but go ahead Steph. Um, I not very much other than to know that usually markets will rally post an election because knowledge is calming. Um, but I for this one I just I feel like we end up being in this like uncomfortable middle maybe because less will get done in Congress and um so much getting done right now. Well, I think they were try I think they were trying to get stuff done. Um and and now I’m I’m just afraid that the attention will turn toward like going after your enemies and I don’t want that. like I would rather it be like just focus on getting stuff done and instead it will be more of like ridiculousness. So um and but there will be more support for uh I think data center pullback like spending on that and putting in regulations on that kind of thing. So um I’m a little worried about like the AI infrastructure not all of AI but because of that. Um but otherwise I I do think knowledge ends up usually creating a rally in the short term. Sir um uh really what what you say Steph about timelines. I think uh I see it every day with my family. You know I was having this conversation with my sister where she’s like AI is going to be doom. You know it’s everybody’s going to be unemployed and things like that. But then you see Jensen in the all in uh podcast talking about um how people is saying things like in 6 months all entry jobs will disappear and then it doesn’t happen and then zero accountability on those kind of things, right? Um you see big tech companies hiring again. So, how do you have conversations with those people who feel like AI is going to um kind of like destroy everything, but you see that reality doesn’t match that and how you face that conversation. And I will say it um for I think like movies like Terminator haven’t um helped because I think like you know if if AI becomes physical then like I saw this meme the other day and I said this to my friend. I’m like I’m I always say please and thank you to my agent um because if they do become physical they’ll be nice to me um in the end of it. But I think uh I mean just sharing the data points that you just shared to me I think is is actually the right way to hit it head on. Like I understand why it’s scary because it feels like a person that can come in and just do whatever you were doing before, but I I personally have not seen it that way like you. I feel like it’s made us do more with less in that I do I I can do other things while things are happening. Like we run reporting now using AI and we’ve uncovered stuff that we probably wouldn’t have uncovered with just humans alone. that makes us a better, stronger company and it makes us be able to go and do more strategic things. So, it doesn’t actually get rid of us to me. It just it makes us do cooler things than the more annoying things. We have Rip from Yellowstone here. It’s good to have you. That hat’s awesome. This is Colin. He’s one of my friends.

Thank you guys for being up there. I appreciate all your guys uh commentary over the years. I love your guys podcast. Thank you so much for sharing everything with us. But uh my question is pretty straightforward. Uh so I do some agentic trading with Robin Hood of course. Now I had to go and bolt on Claude. So I’m glad now it’s going to be all in one app. But I wanted to see your guys perspective. If you think this could be the thing that makes jobs obsolete. I my perspective is in order for AI to work. I think about it from an enterprise perspective. In order for AI to work, there has to be a reduction in employment. I I I don’t see any other way. Now, perhaps we get a productivity miracle after the fact that new industries spawn up. Uh but if you actually look at the statistics over the last 15 years, the majority of those jobs have come from healthcare, which come from government money, which comes from deficits, which makes it work. Uh so I actually think that there is going to be job destruction. That’s that’s my base case. It’ll be slower than people think but it will be there. And then we have to figure out as a society what do we do with that. Uh and that’s that’s a very difficult question. Sir when you think about systemic risks in the market um how do you think about AI just enabling faster and cheaper cyber attacks? I mean if that’s if that’s going to blow open the market where would that be and how do you just think about that risk? I’ll take a quick stab at that and I think maybe you have time for one or two more but if you look at the cyber security names Palo Alto Zcaler which is lagged but bouncing now Crowd Strike there’s a reason why those names trade at the valuation that they do and the fact that they’re name like PaloAlto is making an all-time high speaks to I think the concerns that you have and Jensen spoke about it the other day. I mean there is a real need to get your arms around that and if you’re looking just for a strict trade which I know is not sort of the intent of your question but you know I still continue to go back to those names and and you have to be somewhat um valuation agnostic because they are very expensive. Last question right here sir. So I I feel like I see all of you guys in my television every day. So is that a good thing or bad thing? No it’s good. It’s good. So, one thing I’ve noticed in in my line of work is that AI is really impacting treatment for strange difficult diseases. Companies like Tempest and Amjen and Lily are just this is the way that it things are going to change. Where do you guys see that? Because AI is really impacting medical care. I I think it’s I think the answer is yes. I think a lot I think you know it’s it’s a supercomput like it’s going to be able to you know I use it for you know some strange question that I don’t have the answer to or recently I got blood work done I put all my blood work into into you know Gemini what does this mean cuz my doctor sure’s not going to call me right and so I think tools like this are super helpful right and and so it can be helpful and scary at the same time which is okay we We all have two thoughts, you know, opposing thoughts in our brains at all time, right? And so, you know, I try to embrace what I can and I think, you know, it will be a super impactful technology on almost every industry. Can I just add briefly to that? I think one of the reasons why I’m so bullish on health care with AI is because one of the things I hate about going to the doctor is that like there’s I don’t have curious doctors. My the doctors I see are like they’re all specialists. So if you have this problem with this, you go see that specialist and they’re not thinking about the seven other things that it could be and vice versa. But AI, I think, can put together the research that comes within the specialties and connect them and actually come up with new things. It’s you’ve seen it in mathematics, too, where there’s math specialists and it connects things and unlocks solutions that haven’t been solved. And I I actually think that um or solutions to problems that haven’t been solved. So, I think that’s actually why it’s so powerful. I just eat a shitload of Cheerios. We’re out of time here, folks. Thanks so much. Enjoy the rest of your day. I’m sure you’ll see some of us floating around. Thanks, everybody.

helping us make sense of a market that is not really easy one to figure out. Uh, one more round of applause for the risk reversal crew. You know, interesting note for those guys. Uh, other than hoodies and sponsors, I believe they’re the only group to have joined us for all three hood summits. So true veterans, we love working with them. And don’t forget, you can follow them at riskreversal media on YouTube. And then for Porter, Vinnie, and Danny Moses, they have a Substack called What Are We Doing? Fantastic read. Um, so definitely check those out. And then you’ll be seeing them throughout the day. Market Call goes live at 9:45 on the pod stage. And then we’ll see Porter and Vinnie at I think noonish in the trading lab talking about trading from the short side. Now we’re going to shift to what’s happening in the markets to what you guys were just talking about AI. So how do we use the tools that we talked about last night to understand and and understand how our trading process might be changing? So as you saw in the keynote, we announced our our Robin Hood agents and agent apps. And this morning, we’re going to put them to work. Uh, and we’re going to put these tools in the hands of some experienced market professionals and the builders behind the companies that you saw as part of those app store partners. Uh, and we’re going to do some live trading workflows. So, please welcome to the stage Robin Hood’s VP of product, Abashek Fatura. He’s going to moderate a conversation with the founder of Moon Tower. Yes, Moon Tower from Days and Confused. That’s where he got the name of his company. Uh, professional options trader Chris Abdul Msia. He’ll be joined as well by Brent Kuba, the founder of Spot Gamma, and James Kardatski, the CEO of Quiver Quantitative. So, let’s go from prompt to portfolio. And let’s put our agents to work.

How are you guys doing? How’s how’s everyone doing today? Um, well, good morning and uh thanks for being up so early. Um, so who’s excited about Robin Hood agents?

How many of you uh open an account already? Okay. Uh a few less of you. Uh but uh so last night you as you guys saw we introduced Robin Hood agents and agent apps opening up Robin Hood to specialized tools and data to become part of our experience. Uh this morning we wanted to make it a little bit more real. We demoed like one thing last night, but we thought it would be cool to show it off a little bit more uh with some of the people that have made this possible. So, the goal of the session is pretty simple. We’re going to take some real market ideas. We’re going to use some real data and then we’re going to work through a couple of workflows uh that these guys have actually cooked up uh live. So in each case, we’re going to see what happens when traders start with a very simple question. Then they call on their agent with specialized tools and then they follow the information wherever it leads. And ultimately they can then decide how they want to express that view uh in the markets. So I’ve got three people here. Uh Obie already introduced them, but Chris is the founder of Moon Tower and a professional options trader. He’s also our resident trader today. Um he’s going to bring the market questions uh and challenges what the tools give him. Brent is the founder of Spot Gamma, which is one of our agent apps which specializes in options positioning, volatility, and market structure. I highly encourage you guys to check it out. I’ve been using it. It’s pretty fun. Uh Brent is going to help us understand what the options market may be telling us underneath the surface. And this is uh James, CEO of Quiver Quantitative, uh which brings together alternative data sets. I think this one’s my favorite actually. It’s the most fun. Uh from congressional and insider activity to you can see who’s lobbying, you can see who’s getting government contracts, um and a lot more. So, James is going to show us how you can use some of this information uh to look at research when you’re thinking about investing and we’ll have time to take some questions. In fact, when the agent thinks, we’ll just like open it up to questions. So, uh feel free to walk up to the mics and I’ll call on you. Uh but before we get into it, uh maybe I’ll let these three introduce themselves. Do you want to get it started, Chris? Sure. Uh my name is Chris Ablamsia. Uh I’ve been a options trader for over 20 years. I started at Susuana and worked there for almost a decade and then I ran a volatility trading strategy at a hedge fund for about a decade. Uh today I uh run an options analytics company and I talk about uh and I try to teach people about uh options trading and how to use it in uh their for whatever their investing goals are.

My name is Brent Kachuba. I’m founder of Spotgama. I started Spock Gamma in 2020. Before that, I have about 20 years of institutional trading experience at a couple of banks, uh, an options market maker, and then I was at the family office before starting Spock Gamma. And our goal is to tell you how the options flows may be moving the stocks that you and I are trading every day. James, go ahead. Uh, my name is James Kardski. I’m the CEO of Quiver Quantitative. Uh we started Quiver back in 2020 with the goal of bridging the information gap between retail investors and Wall Street. So really our purpose has always been to just find really high quality data, find ways to scrape it and then present it to retail investors in a way where they can use it to make smarter trading decisions. So yeah, really excited to bring some of our government data sets here to Robin Hood. uh looking at a lot of things like there’s kind of countless ways that government and public companies intersect whether it’s like public companies trying to influence legislation through lobbying or receiving revenue from the government through government contracts um or even members of Congress buying stock themselves with their own funds. So um we brought a lot of those data sets into Robin Hood and super excited to see what you guys are able to do with it. Cool. So Chris uh before we touch a tool, where does a trade idea actually come from? Yeah. So uh the way I think about the origin of trade ideas is um from two two two sources. So one of them is what I would just call is your senses. So you have the things that you read. You’re reading whether you’re reading a book, whether you’re reading uh Substack, whether you’re reading Twitter, uh whether you’re reading uh Robin Hood social. Um these this is uh it could be something that you’ve heard conversations that you’ve had with people. So there’s a number of ideas that are just stirring in the original LLM up here, right? The your your your gray matter and white matter. So that’s the way you move through the world is going to create inspiration and ideas. That’s one set of uh of again what I call your senses. The other place you get ideas is from the dashboards and the instrument panels that you have created that look at market data, right? And what’s happening here, I think the beauty of what they’re of what what Robin Hood’s building with these uh partners is they have created they they’ve not only shortened the bridge between these two parts of information, but they’ve widened the bridge. you are now able to have more like throughput is the way I think of it. Two-way traffic between I’ve got an idea. Let me look at the data. How do I take the ideas that I get and formulate them into a research question? How do I turn this into something that I can actually make a financial statement about in the form of a trade?

So, um today we’re going to start with two different disturbances. uh one from Washington and then one from the options market. Uh so the first example we’re going to use is we’re going to start with uh Quiver quantitative. So uh James, why don’t we ask Quiver what’s a stock where Congress is doing something unusual right now? Yeah. So one company we’ve seen recently a lot in our data is Bloom Energy. Both from Congress and from within the White House, there’s been trading within that stock. Um, so actually I’d love to, you know, show a quick demo here of like how you can actually use the Robin Hood app to find that information and then kind of walk through queries data. Um, oh yeah, perfect. Got a phone. So we have a little demo device here. We’re going to get back to Neptune from last night. So cool. So yeah, directly within Neptune here, you can just ask directly as if you were, you know, talking directly to another human, you can say, um, using quiver

which politicians have been trading Bloom recently

and then that’ll get to work starting to query the the agent, starting to query queries data to pull that from our data set. So, as part of this partnership, we’ve brought in our entire Congress trading data feed. So, basically, every single Congress trade that’s ever been reported since Congress was first required to start disclosing that back in 2014. Um, and then alongside that, we’ve also been tracking the uh presidential trading disclosures as well. So, whenever uh Trump releases new trades, we have that included within the data feed as well. So, you’ll see here that Bloom Energy, the the big headliner for the last year was uh Nancy Pelosi purchased um back in early 2026. Um, so you see here like looked through all the trades and found that Pelosi and you know gives you the trade date, gives you the amount. So in this case that’s a big position. Yeah. Yeah. One to5 million especially for Congress trading like I feel like you know you have very rich members of Congress but it’s not on like hedge fund scale typically. Um so yeah like like with this you know you can put in any stock you can do queries like what stocks have been most purchased by members of Congress recently if you want to see across everyone in Congress what’s been being bought the most. Um, but just sticking with Bloom here, like within that same theme, let’s look a little bit more into how Bloom might in turn be attempting to influence Congress. So, one thing you can do is say, um, see what issues has Bloom been lobbying on recently. And by the way, is if you guys want to follow along in your own phones, you can, uh, you can do that if you want. So our lobbying data set is also pulling from all the disclosures that have been uh reported over the last few years. So basically anytime a public company does lobbying of specific government offices, they’re required to disclose that and list off which issues and which bills they might be doing that lobbying on. So what we find is that it’s like a really really interesting data set to look at if you’re trying to figure out how companies might be affected by the government and also what their team internally is really thinking about going forward. A lot of times like in advance of new um like R&D initiatives or like in advance of like new product lines, companies might start doing some lobbying to kind of like figure out how they can shape the the legislative path to kind of be more beneficial towards them. Have you ever used uh lobbying data when you’ve traded before, Chris? Uh I didn’t because I mostly traded commodity options. Okay. Wasn’t super relevant to what I did. Yeah. So So here you can kind of see it gives a listing of like some of the recent areas where Bloom has been lobbying. They’ve been doing lobbying on energy tax credits, uh, electricity supply for data centers. Um, as you can imagine, this is a company that’s going to be really heavily affected by everything going on within the data data center space going forward. Um, and then we have another data set that lets you really dig even deeper into this this uh same vein. Um, because one of the things we track is like what legislation is actually being proposed within Congress. So every time there’s a new bill that’s being proposed at all within Congress, we scrape the details of that bill, kind of scrape a summary of it and have that included in this agent as well. So like if you even wanted to ask like what recently proposed legislation could impact Bloom.

It’ll look at all the recent bills that have been proposed on Capitol Hill and kind of, you know, parse through them to see which of them could impact a specific stock. So again, this is a really good way of like being aware about what’s going on within the political landscape, making sure if there are any risk factors you aren’t aware of in terms of like new legislation that could impact your portfolio. Um, this is a great way of staying on top of that and making sure that you’re not blindsided by anything. Um, I think this one’s really cool because when like new tax bills come out, it can like completely change uh the P&L of various companies. Yeah. Yeah. So like here for example, you can see like HR 9340, Raid Payer Protection Act, uh was placed on the Senate calendar on September 17th. Each of the bills, it’ll list off the name of the bill, list off the current status of them. So you can see like whether they’re uh currently in committee or whether they’re just proposed or whether they’re being brought to a vote. Uh it tells you a little summary of like what the the bill is proposing. So here, for example, large data centers would pay the incremental cost of a new generation and grid upgrade grids needed to serve them. And then it can also tell you why this matters to the company in question. So again, if you didn’t have this tool available, you would have to spend probably hours and hours pouring over these bills. Like they’re not easy to read. They’re like legal ease. They’re often like very long and very complicated. Uh this just gives you a really quick distillation of like why it’s important and what you can do with it. So um yeah, we think this is a great new way just like for everyday people to stay on top of this data. And also um you know in the past I think this is the sort of thing that only hedge funds would have really had the time and resource to to pour into this data whereas now it’s kind of available to anybody. I think we have a question why don’t we take a question in between but uh thank you for wonderful um presentation. So um I opened the MCP account a while ago and uh connected my own agent but um you know it’s not really giving me option to do what you guys are doing right now. Um when will that be resolved? So this is the new Robin Hood agents that we should have rolled out to all of you last night here. So if you find me afterwards I can help you get set up. H because this is not available in whatever agent you’re using probably. Yeah. So I just connected and I was trying to find a way to get to where you are and I would love to you know follow along on all this uh wonderful journey and uh you know I’m kind of finding myself at odds. Yeah. Yeah. Why don’t you find me afterwards and we’ll get you set up. Um, so Chris, yeah, just because a politician bought it, does that mean uh we should buy it? Well, so first of all, it it’s uh when it comes to data, what one of the things we’re looking for are what we kind of call disturbances. What’s an anomaly? Buying is always a bit more interesting than selling when you’re looking at insider transactions. The reason, of course, is because uh insiders sell stock all the time. On a 10 uh 105D1, they’re on a regular uh selling schedule. They’re just raising liquidity. So, the chance that selling has any signal in it is a lot harder to know because it is such a regular event. But buying is a lot more of an interesting signal because you’re thinking about you have an executive who is already it could be well in this case it’s Pelosi but if you have an executive that’s buying they’re already long that uh asset right so they’re really adding quite a lot of concentration to what they’re doing so you want to pay attention to that a bit more but I would like to see uh a little bit more uh information to think about bloom energy in this

turn to Brent here. So, uh, Brent, we have Bloom on our radar now. Now, so why don’t we figure out what the options market says about it? Yeah. And I think as I, uh, have the opportunity to walk you through how you can actually add our app to the agent here. Hopefully, I do this right. Uh, we notice here we go into the marketplace and we scroll down to the options edge, which is our, uh, our offering here. And any of you that do this now, you get this free for a month. So you can add on and try this out for free. And the nice thing about this as we load it up is that the options market and prices in the options market or the volatility surface as someone like Chris might say gives us a lot of interesting information about the expectation of the price distribution of stock. So are people still bullish on Bloom? Will you see that reflected in call prices uh or put prices? And so that gives us an extra opportunity to see, hey, Nancy Pelosi bought it. what does everyone else think about this thing? And so in this case, what we can do is we can say using spot gamma. I should spell spot gamma correctly. It would help. Uh it’s your company.

So I can ask about the IV rank and skew rank. Now the IV rank is going to tell us how expensive options are on a relative basis. This is for one month options. And what skew rank tells us is what is the price of calls versus puts. And Chris can kind of tie in why this might be interesting for us. Now, uh, but I think about the prices that we’re going to get returned here is important because as an retail options trader myself, uh, I’m looking for disturbances as well as a primary signal for what I want for what I want to trade. So, are options cheap? Are they rich? Um, and what kind of structures can I set up around this? And I found that this app has been incredible to help me use that kind of top offunnel idea for what highle prices are and then drill down into the trades that I want to make. And so Chris, as you can see here, the IV rank is an eight. Uh this is based on a one year of data. So this is telling me that the options prices now are cheaper than they’ve been basically than 90% of the last year. And the skew rank is 93. So that tells me that calls for one-month options are more expensive than puts, more expensive than been 90% over the last year essentially. And so a lot of people like the Pelosi position here of leaning long into this stock. Yeah. So this is this data is interesting because um if you have a bullish view let’s say you want to take the view of the insiders that are buying you have a bullish view. Now one thing is part of this view is likely baked into the stock price already. Bloom energyy’s tripled this year. So it’s not exactly new information that that there was this insider buying. But now we look at the option surface and we can consider well if I have a bullish posture if I have a momentum sort of view on this stock then what I can do here is I can structure what I can I like to look at the option surface to say let me take what it gives me. What the market here is giving me is it’s saying option premiums are relatively low right now. The IV rank is under 10%. So where less than 10% of the time balls get this cheap. The other thing that’s happening is the call skew is very elevated. With this the combination of these two forces, what it will do is it will reduce straddle prices relatively, but it will raise call prices relative to the straddle price. What is that doing? It is creating a very cheap vertical spread. Like if you buy an at the money option like a 50 delta option and you sell a 25 delta call, you are sort of exploiting the way the curve looks in the options market. So you’re buying the thing that’s relatively cheap and selling the thing that’s relatively expensive and you’re doing it in a directional to sort of um take the posture of of momentum. Now an interesting thing about Bloom is and when I uh had looked this up, it’s also a very expensive stock. So, uh, being a very expensive stock, it’s I think it says a three, uh, like a PE of like over three 300, um, and we know that there’s been buying. So, there’s another there’s other questions here is like, um, that you’re going to be able to research. For example, when insiders buy, how long do they typically hold for? Because when I think of Bloom, I’m sort of torn between is this a short-term trade that I want to go into or what do I think about this long term? I always think back to I I I I teach investing class to some kids and I use uh Zoom stock as a case study. Zoom stock was 300 PE kind of like Bloom is today five uh five six years ago like during COVID. And what happened with Zoom was that the price the anticipation of great earnings like we have in Bloom was correct. Zoom stock has multiplied um you know 4x 5x its profits in the last 5 years but you’ve lost 70% of the value of your investment in the last 5 years because of course the wrong price will ruin any investment. So what’s happening here is you have these questions that you can ask. How long do these people tend to hold their positions? So maybe I want to be bullish because uh there’s maybe if I find out I do research with with a quiver and say, “Oh, they typically hold their positions for 3 years or longer.” Uh then maybe we’re still early. But if they tend to trade their position a bit more, then maybe I actually want to have a bearish posture. So uh and the options market will tell you what you can do to execute the trade. And here what it’s saying is balls are cheap, calls are expensive. Maybe I can uh I’ll buy I can buy I can buy the at the monies sell the 25 delta to be long or if I’m long already I can buy uh protection because my puts are relatively cheap. I can buy 10% out of the money put relatively cheap and I can coller it by selling a call.

That’s right. And we can do some other queries here to pull up key levels and things like that around Bloom as well to see where the biggest positions are in terms of the biggest call strikes, uh, where the most gamma is and different queries like that. And so this tool does a great job of letting you filter down through finding the key names on something like Quiver Quant and then dialing in and getting more granular on that type of data. Now, one of the other data sets we want to show uh were the biggest options position changes. And and to me, this is one of the best aspects of our data set because a lot of times you hear on CNBC or on Twitter, hey, somebody just bought 50,000 of these calls. And the truth is you don’t know who somebody is. That could be a market maker to a market maker. It could be less uh offering less information than you think. And so what we do here is we can say, “Show me where the biggest position changes are.” And we’re showing you what we believe the buy side is doing. The buy side is hedge funds and or large retail traders. And that to me can offer more information in terms of prices. So I can say uh show me the biggest options position changes for Intel. We had to prepare for this uh so we’re using some data from Monday uh cuz these were very interesting options position. I believe that was the 28th 26th. Um, and so what we’re going to get here, we should get here is a list of the biggest buy side options position changes. What options did they buy and sell? Because as we all know, not all calls are purchased long and not all calls are uh or puts are bought long, right? Or you can buy and sell options. And so what’s going to come up here is a list of the biggest options trades for Intel um on the 28th. Now, you can ask for today as well if you’d like. And you can also do a bunch of interesting things like show me the biggest options positions in the semiconductor space or in the energy space. uh or say, “Hey, what are the congressmen trading? What options positions do they happen to open?” And so, we highlighted this because it’s a really fascinating uh discussion topic here. The two biggest trades from the 28th are just these monster positions, $14 million of premium each. And what this trader appears to do is they sold the April 2027 105 puts, and they use those funds to purchase the October 16th 130 calls. So we would call this a diagonal uh something like a combo diagonal Chris I guess you call that. Um and so this gives us a really interesting position because as Intel stock was coming off somebody stepped up selling longerdated puts to buy shorterd dated calls clearly they’re looking for some type of a rally in this situation. So you were saying that once you use this is like interesting because in the previous example we looked at the government data first and then we started looking at the options data. In this example, we’re starting with the options data first and then you were saying we can then track it down to the politicians data. Do you think it would be cool then to bridge this with what is like what are politicians doing with with uh semiconductors? Yeah. Uh that’s one of the things that I found to be most fascinating about the app is that it understands the prices and say so one of the things I was able to do for example is show me options pos uh show me options that have a high IV rank and are near the 52- week high because the agent understands what a 52- week high is and then it can pull for example the stocks that also have a high IV rank. So a stock up ballup situation oftentimes can create rich premium for example. Um so we could do something like that. uh here. Now, Chris, back to the uh Intel example. Um when you see a large buyside trade like that, does that generally queue you off to I mean, there’s 13,000 hedge funds in the world and they often times have unlimited resources, right? So, their large trades I think often times can create the distribution or disturbances we were referencing. Yeah, absolutely. So this one was uh kind of looked at Intel because I had seen something online talking about large call buying uh in Intel and that was what uh made me want to think hey let’s let’s look let’s look this up in uh spot gamma and then we saw those um those calls. Now the interesting thing is uh if you look back those yeah they’re ox 16. So the interesting thing is this is a big bet on Ox 16 calls and they were opening. Now Ox 16th is before Intel’s earnings. Intel’s earnings are on October 23rd. So somebody is buying these calls but it’s ahead of earnings. It’s a little I thought that was a little bit strange like why would you you’re placing this big bet but it’s before earnings. But what’s happening tonight? We have micron earnings today. So is somebody doing the sympathy trade in Intel and buying the calls there capturing micron earnings? So you can be a little maybe the seller of those calls is a little offguard because they’re like whatever these are these are not capturing earnings. They don’t deserve at the premium but Micron um but Micron is today. So it’s to me this potentially somebody making that kind of bet. Now I would like to know are micron earnings expected to be important? So Brent can can we look up what micron earnings are going to be like? Yeah, absolutely. I’m going to punch that up. Uh the query I brought here combines the quiver quant data and stock gamma data here in this case and I searched for stocks that have an IV rank above 50 and has recent congressional buying and turns out that Apple I guess they’re very excited about the flip phone with the Robin Hood app. And so here you go. We got uh Apple Ivy Rank and looks like Ed Casease here uh bought some of that stock and so you’re seeing again the combination of the options data and uh the quiver quant data set which is just uh really I mean Chris what would you do as a next step to this? So you know that IV rank on Apple is high and there’s been some recent congressional activity like how would you think about that? This sorry this isn’t this is an Apple. Oh, this this happens to be an Apple this example because it combines the quiver quant data with the options data. So, if we take the Intel example, well, I would like to can we can we look at what what’s going on in Micron because it’s kind of my my thinking is related to to the to the Micron just because I think that expiration choice is a bit strange for Intel. Like it’s a pretty shortdated bet. It’s a lot of premium.

So, we’ll look at the Intel first.

It doesn’t like the word Ivy. It’s my nervous fingers here. I don’t know. I think uh Ivy just keeps getting uh autocorrected to uh in Why don’t we take another question while uh while you type? There we go. Do you want to take a question? Yeah. Thank you. um particularly on agentic trading for legend. Is this going to be available in terms of the data feeds you’re talking about? And I got a followup to that if uh we can get a direct answer to the first one. Um I think long-term yes not not immediately. No. Um love the MCP availability. Can we get an API? Because for the majority of people that are doing anything algorithmic or with locally hosted AI or anything that’s a stack of agents, I want an API. And anybody on Interactive or on Trade Station or on any of the competitors, they will move to Robin Hood if you give them an API. And I’ I’ve been scratching my head on how to do that with the MCP, but you’re wrapping something that’s not designed to do the same thing. Yeah, we’ve been looking into it. So, okay. Thank you.

Are you ready or it’s still going? It’s still going. It’s getting All right, let’s take one more. Hey, thanks for like arranging this session. I just had a question about like uh congressional buying because mostly like the disclosures come like weeks or months after the actual trade has taken place. So, how do you think like AI can help us like bridge this gap? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, within our data set, we publish both when the trade was made and then when it was published. Uh, you’re spot on that there’s often like a gap of several weeks between when politicians make the trade and when they actually report it. Uh, in some cases more than several weeks, some of them wait years before they report old trades. Um, but uh, yeah, so we we have that data all included within this data set. So, you can see when it was made, when it was reported. Uh, one of the things we find is that often, you know, these politicians, while they may have access to inside information, they might not necessarily be day traders. So even if they make a trade like several weeks ago, it might be based on more of like a long-term thesis that they have about how different things within, you know, the the government or within the geopolitical space is going to be impacting company. So a lot of times like in the research we’ve done, we see there’s still a lot of uh you know important insights that can be gained from tracking it even though there’s this gap between when a trade is made and when it’s disclosed. I think unfortunately we’re probably going to need a law change to bring that time down.

You guys ready? Yeah. So, as you can see here, back to that Intel trade we were just discussing. Um, you can see here that the IV rank is a 46 and the skew rank is a 63. So, that upside called distribution or that call skew is a lot less than in bloom, but the overall implied V is quite a bit higher as the stock has been moving quite a bit. It’s been mentioned by Trump and a lot of the other politicians quite a bit uh recently as well. So that that volatility is much higher or that implied volatility is much higher which tells me that the options are more expensive. So as an options trader, I want to think about spread trading or ways to potentially offset some of that richer IV. Uh which again is part of your idea funnel uh and trade idea generation. This helps me to put this thing into context. Yeah, this is going back to the possibility that it’s a a micron sympathy trade. If uh if micron earnings are priced relatively low, meaning that the straddle, meaning that it’s not expected to move very much, this actually sets up an interesting possibility that the person that’s betting on uh on Intel here, maybe you actually want to be a seller of these calls or a seller of the volatility because if Micron’s own earnings straddle doesn’t expect Micron to move very much, then the sympathy trade loses a lot of its appeal. So if we know that the options here are elevated, the call skew is a little bit elevated and the thesis for the trade is kind of broken, if micron’s not supposed to move very much, then there’s this opportunity to possibly sell either sell straddles in Intel or sell covered call. If you’re a long if you’re an Intel holder, you could sell a call against it. But one thing I want to also um just remind you is that um if somebody comes in and they buy like the let’s say Intel’s 120 and somebody buys the 130 call it affects the whole V surface. It causes the vault in that um in those in that expiry to to rise which means that you don’t have to go and sell the 130 call. You can sell elevated vault on a different strike. So if you sell the straddle, you are still sort of taking the other side is how I think of it of this buyer. You’re just not doing it in the same strike. But all the all the strikes are deeply related when they’re fairly close to each other. So if you see buying in the 130 call, you don’t have to anchor too much to I need to be out there selling the 130 call to take the other side of this. I can just sell the straddle or I can pick the structure that suits what you want your portfolio to look like. Cool. I mean, James, uh, should we ask Quiver about what it’s been learning about Intel and what Washington has to say about Intel? Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So, I guess we’ve already kind of given some examples here of uh, congressional purchases in Intel’s an interesting one because there has been a lot of congressional trading in the stock. So, one of the things that we can do here is like uh, instead of listing trade by trade, actually do some aggregations. So you can ask um has Congress been doing more purchasing or more selling? Your typing is much more impressive than mine by the way. Get the texting hands here, I guess. Um in 20 while uh this thing cooks. You want to go ahead? Oh, I’m so sorry. Oh my gosh. So my name is Colin. Thank you guys so much. Um so I love you guys. Agentic Trading. I opened an agentic account as soon as you guys rolled it out. But my question is, it looks like there’s only one agent. Um, I built probably about a half dozen on Claude and I have a Grockbot scanner that goes overnight. Will it be able to feed this agent and then have this agent execute trades? Um, so our our plan is to have a couple of different things. We’re going to leave the external accounts and MCP open. so that if you want to continue to use that, you can continue to use that with this. This is all going to be inside the Robin Hood ecosystem. And the plan is for you to be able to have multiple of these as well inside of the Robin Hood app. So, you should be at first you’ll just be able to have uh one per account, but over time we want to be able to do more. Thank you. I was just getting like like scared that I was going to have to try to have 12 agents shoved into one dude in the app and he was just going to take a thousand years to make an actual trade. I don’t know. And you can keep doing what you’re doing, too. That’s awesome. That’s what I was afraid of cuz I mean it took me a long time to get it working and then co-work felt like not doing it anymore. So, I had to like learn how to code. I’m a hair stylist. I don’t know how to do any of this. So, I use my microphone. I’ve never used a keyboard because obviously I talk well, but I can’t type to save my life. So, as long as I can keep using that, I’m really excited for this. Thank you for bringing it forward. Cool. So, yeah, turning back to uh Intel here, you can see that the agents successfully pulled the trades that have happened so far in 2026. Uh I did a quick summary here showing that there’s been nine separate purchases for $4 million and 10 sales for an estimated $250,000. Um, so yeah, queries like this are very easy for the agent. Um, I really liked some of the queries you guys were showing earlier that kind of combined in data from multiple agents or multiple different data sources. I think that that’s definitely like one of the coolest things I found in my own testing of this is just how easy it is to bring in a lot of very diverse data sets and come up with like really interesting unique investment thesises based off of that. Um, I think in general, like, you know, anytime you combine uh unique sources of information, it often gives you insights that maybe other people aren’t clued in on yet, which I think often gives you, uh, you know, very investable insights. So, um, yeah, I definitely would highly recommend trying to use some of these data sets in combination with one another to try to find a unique angle that other people may not have really considered yet. Um, so we only have four minutes left. I guess before we open it up to the rest of the questions, I wanted to ask each of you guys. So this thing lets you combine all these external data sources that might have signal. What would be the dream data source that you want in this thing to be able to to analyze the dream data source? Um well stock trading is relatively new to me compared to commodity trading. So, on the stock trading side, I would really just want to dig into uh I’ve had a lot of questions for James because the congressional stuff and the insider trading stuff is all interesting. And what I would want to know, for example, we just pulled up the Intel data set and I would like to know, well, what is considered uh significant? Because I see these buys and I see these sells, but I don’t really have a frame of reference or or sense of proportion around what is a large quantity. what is a disturbance in buying and selling? What’s abnormal? So for me, I would probably just for now be diving into what quiver has to offer because uh I think the combination of that plus uh like some options data like spot gamma and my knowledge of options, the combination together is what would be compelling to me. How about you? I I’m excited not necessarily for having more data, but it’s the synthes synthesis of the data that is being offered here that really to me is helpful because I have the workflows that I like and I spend a lot of time filtering through the data myself, you know, looking at the options chains myself, trying to find IB ranks and and just something to trigger a trade idea like a congressional trade, right? And so it’s the ability to kind of combine all this and very just quickly give me the answer that I want. Uh that is really exciting for me. So, so that that sort of again synthesize that data and just give me what I want is uh is is something that’s very exciting here. How about you? Yeah, I mean I definitely say like just within the world of alternative data, there’s like so many unique things that you can touch on that you wouldn’t necessarily think have like a impact on the stock market, but if you really dig deep into it, you can find ways that you can kind of figure out what might be happening in the future with a company based on the data. though. Um, if I’m playing fair here and not like saying something that we’re already bringing or that CR already has, I feel like, uh, data on like satellite imagery is like one of the examples I always look at where it’s like there’s really really cool things that you can do with that data to see like how things are happening in the commodity space. Uh, you know, even like looking at like parking lots to see like how many cars are going in and out of different like companies like retail locations. So, um, yeah, we don’t provide that ourselves, but that’s, you know, the sort of thing that I think is really cool that retail investors might one day have access to. We actually do have a satellite data provider in the agent apps that are going to be there. Uh it’s called Skyfi and I’ve been talking to those guys about giving each of you guys the ability to deploy your own satellite uh wherever you want. So maybe one day. Um all right, we’ll wrap it up with a few more questions. Do you want to go ahead? Yeah, thank you. Um, I’m just curious after seeing like real usage on the platform, what are users doing that’s surprising to you or um made you rethink the product in some way? Yeah. Uh, I mean, you know, it’s been a little bit hard so far because when people are using MCPs and connecting outside agents, we actually don’t see what you’re doing aside from your trades. So, it’s actually difficult. we don’t see like what you’re talking a claude about so or codeex about. So we’ve only heard stories. I I think the coolest ones I I’ve I’ve seen personally and are sort of the origin story for some of what we’ve built is some people we saw were getting these like Mac minis. They were running agent longunning agents on their Mac minis. Then they were like buying a bunch of data sources, providing credentials, connecting their Robin Hood account, then connecting like Telegram to it. And they were basically just talking to their Robin Hood account and bridging together like five different data sources. And then we like asked ourselves, what if we could do that in like six clicks in the app? And that’s basically how we got to Robin Hood agents. So um yeah, thank you.

Cool. We’ll take one more and then we’ll wrap it. Hey Bishek, my name is Samir. Thank you for giving power to the retail investors by building the tools that give access uh to do so many things on Robin Hood app. Uh the demo that we got to see today is cool but I wanted to to know what is our strategy to take it to the next level wherein finding information is good but automating it to place trades automatically like copy trading when it is coming to Robin Hood. I mean you can do that like each of these examples we showed here you could set it up so I mean we haven’t rolled out loops yet so that once we have loops so we showed that last night but I think the example where he showed uh like look for stocks with an IV rank of over 50 and uh recent congressional activity you’ll be able to set up a loop which just says like run this every day and if it’s true do these things and it’ll just it can just trade for you. Um, so we just didn’t show that right now, but uh it should let you do that. Yeah, you could you could take it directly from the chat and say, “Let’s go trade this.” And it it’s a very smooth transition. That’d be great. Wonderful. Thank you. Yeah, of course. Cool. Well, thank you guys. Hopefully you enjoy the product. Please give lots of feedback. Um, and if you can’t uh figure out how to access it, go to that like dome looking thing in the middle of the booth and they’ll help you out. Cool. Thanks so much. All right.

the new Asian apps. With that, everyone, we’ve earned our first break of the day. Go grab some coffee. If someone wants to get me one, that’d be great. Check out the booth. We’ll see you back here at 10:00 a.m. sharp for ETF State of the Union with Guyadami and State Streets Matt Bartellini. And everyone watching on YouTube, don’t go far. Live stream stays live. We’ll see you in 10 minutes.

All right, welcome back. That was quick, but we are back. Before we get started, quick check on the markets. Looks like markets are green today. S&P’s up 40 points, NASDAQ up 232, Dow up 7 points, small caps up about a third of a percent. Uh, VIX hanging out around 15. So, not like we’re really missing too much today. Uh nothing like hosting a conference where half the audience could be looking at their phones and that’s technically being engaged. So um all right well we are shifting gears now and we are talking ETFs. How many people out here trade ETFs use ETFs? I’m sure everyone right we all do. Uh well this market has evolved tremendously from what it started as the sort of traditional index funds uh from many decades ago and and our next conversation really focuses on that where the ETF market is today where the innovation is happening how these products are creating new ways to think about income exposure portfolio construction. So to help us understand that, we’re going to bring back a guy we just saw, uh, Guy Adami, and he’ll be joined by the managing director and global head of research strategist at State Street Investment Management, Matthew Bartellini. This is the ETF State of the Union, sponsored by State Street.

Not too difficult to get people smarter than I am, but clearly I have one in Matt. Matt, welcome aboard. How are you? Good. How are you? We’re going to talk ETFs and you know, Fast Money, we spent a lot of time obviously talking about ETFs, so we’ll break this down into sort of three segments and the pro proliferation. Number one, by the way, again, questions. We have mics set up. So, you know, in about 20 minutes or so, if you want to make your way to the mics if you have questions, but let’s talk about ETFs. And we’re here sort of on a historic day. I think globally the 14,000 ETFs now, 5,000 in the United States. I mean, just think about the magnitude of that. But talk about inflows and we were talking about it earlier before we came on. Something pretty significant is taking place right now. Yeah. So, it’s oddly enough today while we’re talking about the ETF State of the Union is the fact that as of today in 2026, ETFs in the US have now taken in 1.53 trillion for the year. And that actually breaks the fullear record from last year of 1.52 trillion. And we’re only 9 months into the year. And we’ve been putting out projections all year that we would hit 2.3 trillion here just in the US. And we think that we’re going to be definitely in that realm because we are on that trajectory where we’re at 1.53 trillion just through 9 months and only, you know, in the fourth quarter we typically do see a seasonal bump. It’s a staggering number. So the the obvious question is 14,000 ETFs globally, 5,000 United States. How do you rise above? Like how do you become the go-to ETFs? Like h how do you differentiate yourself? Yeah. I mean from our lineup, we always try to build different strategies with specific solutions in mind and specific outcomes in mind. And I think for this audience, when you’re trying to screen through all those 14,000 globally, 5,000 in the US, I would think about it from that lens, too. Like, what outcome am I trying to solve for? Because ETFs have definitely shifted from just pure access vehicles and are now definitive outcome vehicles. If you want to target a specific outcome in your portfolio for income or risk management or even again on the access side targeting some sort of thematic sector and you need to screen through 5,000 different ETFs, start with that outcome first. You know, if you’re looking for, you know, the Federal Reserve is raising rates and you want to manage your duration profile and you want to have something that can mitigate the impact on rising rates and sit maybe on the shorter end of the curve. Well, you could you’re really looking for a broad macro beta exposure. So looking in that term structure and then maybe prioritizing on fees because there’s not a lot of differentiation between one to threeyear government bonds from one issuer from another to another. You’re getting that macro exposure. But then maybe if you’re looking at income, you want to maybe sort on yield first on that outcome and then look on the sustainability. So there’s different criteria for different different areas and different outcomes. So for us when we’re trying to build solutions we’re building for different outcomes and I think for investors try to dissect the ETF industry by your outcome driven nature first. Talk about pro you know we in my prior conversation we talked about process and I think I’m always sort of drawn to that because I’m fascinated is how do people get to certain places again with 14,000 ETFs globally. You’d say to yourself we’ve we’ve attacked every possible angle but clearly that’s not the case. So the process of and you brought some sort of slides to illustrate this. Yeah. So from a process perspective, it all it does start with what are we trying to achieve? What solution are we trying to deliver? And we always try to deliver specific solutions to an end investor’s client concerns. Now one of the interesting things that has happened over the last few years, you’ve seen regulation unlock a good period of innovation in terms of different SEC rules. Whether it’s these are the 6C11 and 18F4. It’s basically the allowance of of of creating more active funds and more active funds or even index ones with derivatives. So the chart here showcases this. We’ve seen significantly more active funds and active funds utilizing derivatives. So now we have more tools at our disposal to create differentiated strategies. So one that we’ve done in the last two years is is bringing a hedge fund strategy into an ETF structure. And it really allowed us to do this because of those regul regulation changes where we can now use bits of leverage of uncorrelated assets. Previously you only had a 2x leverage cap. Now you have a VAR test that actually allows you to create more leverage within an underlying portfolio utilizing prudent measures of capital efficiency combining equities bonds and commodities together and harnessing the sort of coariance matrix and correlation and getting something about 180 200% gross notional leverage. So our process really starts of what are we trying to achieve? What are our tools at our disposal that can achieve that? And with this regulation changes, we’d have more tools at our disposal, but it does increase a lot of the complexity in the overall ETF industry. How do you determine success? Is it as simple as inflows and usage? Because again, I don’t know the numbers you do, but it would appear to me that there are BETFs that are going to fail for a var, you know, myriad of different reasons. So, success. Yeah. So, last year in 2025, there was a thousand ETFs launched. We’re already at a thousand now in 2026 and we’re likely to outpace that. And what success looks like, I mean, from an issuers’s perspective, you would obviously say a successful ETF is a large one that generates a lot of revenue. And commercially, that is 100% correct. But another level of success is does it appeal to a lot a lot of broad swath of investors? Are there more organic investors utilizing it? Can it appeal to an individual investor, a wealth adviser, institutional investor? And for me that is a greater measure of success when you look at a 13F profile and you see more clients in it because that means that one fund is hitting on a outcome or a need and we’ve been able to deliver a successful solution that has more durability and consistency but applicability beyond just say one or two key clients. although two key clients that’s great that it works for them but having something that is really democratized across a lot of different investors to meet their needs I think is extremely successful from my lens what is the correlation between complexity and usage if that makes sense so I there’s a low correlation I think in some sense there’s a a high correlation between complexity and launches more launches recently have anchored into the more complex utilizing derivatives and utilizing different forms of leverage and more esoteric type of strategies where you have derivatives on top of derivatives. I think the correlation between complexity and success though is low because still we see a lot of usage in your core essential building block exposures. So lowcost core exposures general active exposures as well. I will say though when you combine complexity with a specific portfolio outcome. So derivative income ETFs are been driving growth in the active landscape and I talked about this yesterday on a podcast. They are complex. You’re utilizing options to create a specific income stream. It’s much different than just buying high dividend yielding equities. And so there is a level of complexity because there’s also different tax rules associated with it. in there that is a high correlation between actually delivering on a key portfolio outcome and having success. The other one would be within defined outcome ETFs. Those are quite complex. are utilizing different tranches of equity options, but you’ve actually created a more novel risk management tool. And I think it’s really eaten the lunch of your traditional low volatility equity exposures or your minimum volatility factor exposures as well because those proved to not be that helpful during uh systematic draw downs like we had during COVID and during 2022 where they had still embody that native risk of equities and they drew down significantly. Well, defined outcome ETFs are offering a complex vehicle utilizing options. And sometimes in the wealth space, you have to take a suitability test to actually utilize them. And so there is some level of complexity, but they’ve been massively successful. And I think the runway for those is is pretty pretty far. As I mentioned, if we make it to January, fast money is 20 years old, which is remarkable. And for a long period of time, fixed income was not something we talked about. There was really no reason to talk about it. the last year obviously that’s changed there seems to be this proliferation of fixed income ETFs so can you speak about sort of the growth there yeah so it’s really interesting fixed income ETFs if you look at it from a a markets perspective and you see you know in the ETF space you do see a lot of return chasing and trend following which is is valid and and a and a great use of ETFs to sort of position where you think the market is going if you look at bonds bonds as an asset class they’re kind of in a lost decade right Now bonds are in a lost decade where you’ve had significantly negative returns or returns below the rate of cash and you should as a asset be returning above cash because you’re departing with that liquidity of cash. So even though the bond market has been challenged from a return space, fixed income ETFs continue to just break records every single year. They’ve already broken fullear records so far this year with over 450 billion of inflows. And if you look at from a market share perspective, they’re taking more market share of what their uh AUM would indicate from a flow perspective. So they’re gaining market share relative to equities. And you continuously see greater adoption and usage. It’s not just these lowcost vehicles. You see actively managed fixed income exposures growing in the number of launches, in the number that are actually producing strong results in terms of excess return or excess yield, but also in terms of flows. So fixed income ETFs are a growth engine for ETF usage and assets for the next 10, 15, 20 years. And you’re seeing it in light of outflows within the mutual fund space. So ETFs are becoming the deacto default option to put into portfolios whether it’s in equities, fixed income or alternatives as well. And I think you’ll continue to see more flows into the fixed income ETF market which speaks to innovation and complexity trends. We have a chart here but speak to that because innovation like any in any other industry innovation is critical and and you continue to innovate. Yeah. So one of the charts here this is something I’ we’ve been talking a lot about. There’s a QR code here that links to the research that we have done as well around the need for income and it’s it’s a it’s a pure essential portfolio outcome. It there’s three of them. It’s capital appreciation, income and risk management. And the income potential from traditional assets is at all-time lows. So the ETF that we launched in 1993 is a good example of this. It’s S&P 500. Its dividend yield went below 1% for the first time this past year because the index itself went to about 1.05% in an all-time low. And so how do you actually get income in this type of market environment? In one way is through innovation. Those derivative income exposures utilizing options because of the way regulation has allowed for a greater use of derivatives has unlocked this potential to create a differentiated return stream that can actually seek higher levels of income and you can do it in many different ways. You can do it on broad markets. You can do it on sectors as you can see out out there at our booth. You can do it across single stocks as well. And you have all these things at your disposal now to create really differentiated return streams and income streams because as I walked through yesterday on that podcast, their reaction function to market environments is very different than the reaction function of high dividend yielding equities because if the market draws down, well, those companies will if their profits go down, they’ll probably cut their dividend. And now you have less of an income stream in fixed income. If yields rise, you’re not actually getting that yield right away. it’s just a yield out on offer. You have to continuously reinvest it and the income stream will have a longer latency to catch up to it. With a derivative income, if the if the market falls and volatility rises, you have a quicker reaction to harness that volatility premium because you’re consistently selling it. So, I think innovation has helped unlock new use cases for ETFs that were probably just within more separately managed accounts or or towards institutional investors. alternative invest there conferences that I go to about alternative investments which 10 years ago was not something we were probably talking about but obviously again on that curve of growth you have to be on top of what’s going on in the alt space so speak to that I think it’s essential so portfolio diversification is is really being challenged by those the historical norms that bonds are your only true diversifier to equities I think it would probably be you know fascinated everyone in the audience here that in 13 of the last equity draw downs, bonds actually fell in nine of them, too. They’re not really a reliable source or only the reliable source of diversification. And this is something we continuously talk about from a markets perspective. In my seat, we talk about this new macro environment of more fragmentation where inflation has become a more durable risk driver. And if we look at the reaction function of equities and fixed income together, equities, they don’t really like rising inflation. bonds, nominal bonds don’t really like rising inflation. And so if you have a period where inflation is a more durable risk driver or something that we have had not to deal with for really a long time in the era of the 2010s, basically inflation was about 1.2%. Now we’re at more durably around 3% and that’s something new. So having these discussion about alternatives, you don’t have to get too crazy, you know, in the alt space to pick up some form of diversification. You don’t have to buy equity long, short, market neutral, relative value arbitrage, more complex sophisticated strategies. Add in some commodities, real assets, gold, inflation linked bonds, other things that will have a different macro relationship. And I think from a flow perspective, we have seen that because we can see these flows on a daily basis in these more tactical thematic spaces. And we do see inflation link bonds, they’ve had inflows in 199 last 20 months. Broad-based commodity ETFs are at records. Gold flows were records last year and they’ve rebounded this year. And we see all of these flows going into something to build more reliable, durable diversification. And from a category perspective, those more, I would say, true alternatives, the esoteric alternatives, the ones that do fit in that fit in that melting pot, they are at record inflows as well because investors are realizing that bonds are not the only diversifier to your equity book. And it’s because of the way they have different re macro relationships that really haven’t been tested, you know, up until now. In 2008 and09, leverage became sort of this four-letter word. Maybe for good reasons. I’m not going to sort of debate that, but levered ETFs are obviously a thing. So, let’s drill down a little bit there because I’m sure there’s some mixed feelings about that. So, there are. I mean, one of the interesting things is I read an article from a while ago that said leverage is one of the true last market arbitragees. And it’s not the leverage in the sense of going 2x a single stock every day and then having to deal with the the volatility drag of that. I think there’s some concerns there that you’re not getting 2x the return of something over a one-year time horizon. It’s on a single day and there can be volatility drag and you’re actually be actually underperform as a result of that. but prudent use of leverage, capital efficiency, the ability to have to take a part of your portfolio and stack different macro factors upon each other. That’s what that 18F4 rule from the SEC helped unlock. That is one of the I think the true last arbitragees out in the marketplace. the ability to combine prudently uncorrelated return streams so your portfolio is not so directionally associated with what goes on in the S&P 500 or what happens from an interest rate perspective. I think that in the prudent use of it of capital efficiency of blending two assets together with low correlations to each other to create more durable and resilient portfolios. I think that is something where ETFs are going to continue to grow into and we’ve made inroads in the last say 18 months of thinking through and trying to solve that problem of what assets where do you use leverage how do you use it and the big one that no one really ever understands or not understands but ever talks about is what’s the outcome in the taxable investor space because if you utilize all this leverage and use swaps futures options contracts get all this leverage but at the end of the day you saddle the end investor with a large capital gain That is a poor investor experience. So we think very diligently of when we’re carefully constructing portfolios and utilizing derivatives and leverage, what is the worst possible outcome that could happen for that taxable investor. How do you view lever ETFs as trading vehicles? Like how should somebody like me think about it and how should the people in audience think about them? It’s just sort of an arrow in their quiver. Yeah. So I mean within our suite we don’t really have any pure levered ETFs that take you know the 2x 3x uh mechanism but what I’ll say is they should be used as intended as trading vehicles to take a directional market view to give you an extra oomph or extra volatility for that directional bet. And I would say leverage ETFs they were making headlines because the headlines said that AUM hit an all-time high. And while that was true, it was really wasn’t driven by a massive amount of inflows. They actually levered ETFs that had basically middling amount of inflows. It was because of the directionality of the leverage. It was on semiconductors on single single stock semis. It was on the AI related ecosystem and that exploded as we all know. And so in that case, if you had that directional view that you think that AI was going to just have this sort of J curve boom to it and you are looking at the range of solutions out there to invest in it, you have different levels of volatility in which you could do it. You could do it in sort of a traditional semiconductor ETF or if you’re willing to sort of take on that levered bet, do it that way. It’s not for a long-term investment, I think, is the big punchline of of my answer though. Tactical trends. I mean obviously again that that goes speaks to innovation but you have to sort of see where the world is going and I think you do an extraordinary job of that. We have a chart but speak to some of the what are you seeing the tactical trends. So one of the things that happened this year was the awakening of sector investing. So if we look at uh sector flows here on the chart they kind of have been middling around for a little bit have been in outflows for some years but this year you’re at records and there’s some things driving them. One is the AI ecosystem. So everyone started to gravitate towards anything tangential to AI and the ecosystem supporting it whether it’s the capital expenditures, semiconductors, cloud computing. So technology related ETFs have about I think 50 billion of inflows. That’s an all-time record because investors started to position for this productivity miracle that’s out on the horizon. But you also saw as a result of the macro landscape with the war in Iran, the the impact on supply chains, the impact on energy infrastructure around Venezuela as well, we saw a massive amount of sector dispersion that hadn’t been there because it had been such a tech heliocentric market where it was just basically tech or bust. But now you have the energy sector up 40% this year. You have the industrial sector led by aerospace and defense companies up quite significantly as well. You have materials companies as a result of the impacts on the comp commodity complex doing well. So we start to see more cyclical exposures doing well as well. So if you look at industrials, they have 10 billion. Materials have about 11 billion. And then one thing that’s come up of late as the AI trade has extended beyond the sort of first order magnitude of semis and cloud into the ecosystem that could benefit from it in terms of healthcare stocks and biotech. So healthcare and biotech stocks are areas that have had really strong flows over the last three months and more so in that biotech industry where they’ve are at record inflows and are finally after years of being impacted because of high interest rates maybe some weak profitability where if you started from 2023 there are net outflows they’ve actually on that cumulative basis have just turned into inflows. So we are seeing more usage of sectors to position tactically because it is a more dispersed return environment where you have both macro factors impacting it but also the AI trade really creating a expansive opportunity set to position because the range of outcomes in terms of AI issuingly wide and so you’re seeing investors position based on their thesis. And again, if anybody has any questions, I’ll ask you to go to the mics in the final few minutes. But it I always look at the world sort of it’s somewhat binary in terms of there only so many investment dollars to go around and obviously you know we talk about it semis AI dominates the landscape sometimes to the detriment of other sectors. You just brought up biotech but is it that binary or do you see things around the edges that are starting to emerge sort of outside biotech and those types of things? Well, within sectors, you do see a lot a good deal of rotation. So, you’ll see, you know, buying in one and selling the other. There’s a lot of sector rotation strategies out there. We definitely have seen areas where there’s out of favor. So, not everything in the ETF has an arrow pointing up. You see outflows in consumer stocks, consumer discretionary, consumer staples. Those those areas of the marketplace have been hit hard as a result of rising consumer prices. Even though consumption is quite strong, we do see margin compression in those spaces. and the underlying stock performance has been quite low. We’ve seen a limited amount of investment. I think on the same on the same token when looking at it even within the fixed income space given how tight credit spreads are even though there’s a thirst and a demand for yield, we’ve seen outflows into high yield and a lot of that just has to do with there’s not much spread compression left and we’ve seen more rotations into ultrashort government bond funds because you can get roughly about a 4% yield without taking on as much volatility. So it isn’t just you know ETFs are hitting records and everything is arrow pointing up. There are some areas that are witnessing outflows and a lot of it has to do with some of the tactical positioning based on market trends. Artificial intelligence again topic we talk about. How is it impacting your life your job stage all those different things that the industry? Yeah I mean there’s there’s a lot to that and I know we only have five and a half minutes left to go through it. I think one thing for me is I I do fear that the ETF due diligence will be offloaded to AI where you just ask a prompt of tell me the best ETF for uh clean energy and the AI model and I don’t know how every one of them’s trained but we’ll go and look through marketing material and larger firms now I’m a larger firm so maybe I shouldn’t be saying this but larger firms have more marketing material so you might not actually get what would be the best and it still requires a lot of work. So we might become just too reliant on AI to service up our best investment offering because it’s being trained on you know marketing material and other language and news articles and you actually might miss the signal through a lot of that noise. So that’s one thing I I do fear of that a of AI and the use of it. we just become too, you know, used to just typing in our prompt and getting our answer back and taking it as gospel. I mean, I I I’m susceptible to that as well. I think from an investment management perspective, we’re using AI within our walls to manage some of the portfolios in terms of understanding trade ration, understanding what is the inventory out on offer for some of our bond portfolios. So, it has helped from a capacity perspective. No doubt you have to be excited about what you do, otherwise you shouldn’t be doing it. And you know, we had a conversation prior to this. We’ve had a couple calls. You’re clearly excited about it. What do you see like the continued innovation we talked about, but what sort of gets you jazzed about your role in the industry right now? Yeah. So, I think it’s a little bit of, you know, I’ll use a reference. I probably shouldn’t and everyone would just say I shouldn’t use this but you know in the movie you know there will be blood Daniel plain vu goes and tells you know Elijah that I drink your milkshake and I want to have that moment for and again I have friends in the industry we have our own mutual funds but we’re going to do that to mutual funds ETFs will drink mutual funds as milkshake and what I mean by that is right now globally mutual funds are around 40 trillion where we are from a trajectory perspective and our growth we have 2.3 trillion on target for this year. That’s my projection. We have had 7 trillion of inflows over the last 10 years. Mutual funds have had outflows. You can only compound from a market return perspective the equity risk premium for so long and build your assets. You you start you need to have investment as well and ETF and investors are using the ETF to build portfolios. So our projections by 2035 the global ETF industry will be bigger than the global mutual fund industry and we will then solidify as the default deacto primary tool to build portfolios. not just for index exposures or tactical trading, but also for active building outcome to asset allocation and just be that sort of one-stop shop. So, that is what I’m excited for cuz I love to make predictions. Uh I I like putting out forecast. I like being wrong. I like being directionally correct, but I want to sort of put that out there and be like, “Yeah, we called that a good 10 years ago and we nailed it.” I I can’t speak intelligently about the genesis of ETFs. My instincts suggest they were built as an again in for investment portfolios, but they become you just said for tactical traders, it’s a critical part of what he or she does on a daily basis. Does that surprise you or is that sort of the evolution? No, it doesn’t surprise me at all. And if anyone we can go chapter and verse on the creation of ETFs uh because we launched the first one in the US and a lot of it has to do with the SEC reading um regulatory review books and policies out of the flash crash from 1987 and trying to solve for uh a basically physically listed futures contract to stop programmatic trading from having massive amounts of draw downs in the broader equity market. So having physical collateral to back a futures contract that’s sort of the 22nd version. And so if you think about it from that perspective, it was a trading vehicle. It was an access vehicle. It was to help traders position in severe periods of market turmoil. And that 100% remains today. We see a strong correlation between the average VIX level and ETF trading volumes. We see it within our suite because we have just so many liquid products across our sectors, our gold franchise, all in S&P franchise, all of these different things. We see a very strong correlation when markets fall, volatility spikes, investors rush into the ETF ecosystem to transfer risk in real time between willing buyers and sellers with transparent vehicles with trading costs of about a basis point and reposition portfolios based on their current market view. And we have seen that through many many many different market environments. And there was years ago, if we had this conference maybe 10 years ago, we would have had probably a whole panel of like, do ETFs cause market draw downs? Can they actually withstand systemic market risk? And we would have won up here and we would have showed how that claim or that narrative would be wrong. Now, we don’t have to do that because we’ve lived through so many of these. And ETFs have passed the test time and time and time again. And we definitely see them utilized as trading vehicles, as wealth accumulation vehicles, income generation vehicles. They really are sort of that army knife in terms of building portfolios, structuring portfolios, and helping position for whatever the market brings next. It’s always good to be on set with a fellow paiz ladies and gentlemen, Matt Bardellini. Thanks, folks. We’ll see you a little bit later. Thank you, Matt. Thank you.

Another round for Guyami and Matt Bolini.

All right. Right. Well, we just spent some time looking at how investments product investment products are evolving. Uh but now we’re going to talk about something even more fundamental to the market when you can actually trade. And this is obviously, you know, we launched 245 a couple years ago and everyone’s talking about how do we get more access to the markets? How do we expand trading opportunities? talked about the keynote last night, how news and everything that happens over the weekend overnight. So, how do you actually build an always on market? And so we’re going to talk with uh the CEO of Bruce Markets, Jason Wallik, and he’s going to sit down with our very own Robin Hood chief brokerage officer, Steve Quirk, and we are going to discuss how markets never sleep, the evolution of market access with Robin Hood and Bruce Markets.

big, but our names are little. Yes. How we doing? Good. Did you guys sleep last night? Uh, yeah. Got some some sleep. Okay. The markets didn’t, but but we did. So, uh, I I’m Steve Quirk, chief brokerage officer here at Robin Hood. Been here for about five years. Um, with me is Jason. I’m going to let him tell you about his journey and let him, uh, kind of introduce himself. Thanks, Q. Uh, thanks for having me here as well. Um, Jason Wallock. I’m the CEO at Bruce Markets. Uh, we are an equity ATS that operates during the overnight trading session. Uh we run five sessions a week. Uh they start at 8:00 p.m. Eastern on Sunday night, running through 4:00 a.m. uh Friday morning. Uh as you heard last night, that is evolving over the next few months uh as we begin our journey with Robin Hood as our partner to uh support Robin Hood to fill the gap and offer a 247 trading week. Um so it’s really exciting. Uh I’ve spent most of my career on the electronic trading side uh mostly with equities but um have focused a lot of my time on um innovative opportunities to continue to propel our market structure forward. um enhancing things like execution quality um access and um addressing growing demand uh really across the globe for uh products uh access and um you know evolving opportunity. Yeah, I think this is going to be a fun session because um like J Jason can describe a lot of what like it you know people just have an assumption that you know hey we would of course everybody wants to be able to to act on news that happens in the after hours or on weekends but um there’s a lot that goes into providing that capability and so we can we can lean on him to dig into that a little bit. But I think just setting the table, um, we we’ve always known, you know, that there’s a gap that exists for people who want to be able to take advantage of of opportunities that are happening on weekends. And like there are a lot of market moving headlines, you saw some last night, that are happening on the weekend. We we covered, you know, the 245 session. We the the weekend’s been the gap um in terms of our volumes. And I’ll let Jason talk about volumes overall. You know, the volumes have continued to grow from retail customers um both here in the US but also globally u that have interest in many of the names that are most popularly traded across the globe. But I think what we’ve noticed is behave from a behavior standpoint. There are a lot of event driven you know volume spikes. But if you said, “What’s the busiest day of of of the overnight session that currently exists?” It’s Sunday night. Now, we can all figure out why because you have two days of news bunched up. So, right away at 8:00 p.m. when that market opens, there’s there’s a lot of activity based on what’s happening. So, I mean, that itself paints a picture of why, you know, the weekend is so important. I think the other um areas where we see real big spikes in volume in the overnight session are earnings. When Nvidia has earnings, huge numbers, you know, because of course you get the the results, you get the guidance, but then there’s the reaction to the guidance that sometimes moves that stock in ways that people um didn’t assume it was going to move it in. And then uh when there’s events, you know, any of the events that have been happening that are geopolitical events or other events just spike volume like crazy. And uh Jason and I were talking about this a little bit last night. Um you know, the skepticism around the clock trading has always been, oh, who needs to be trading at 2:30 a.m. and you know, is the liquidity there? Those the liquidity question has been answered. There is liquidity there. But as as far as um who needs to be trading at those hours, like if you think about it through the lens of a of a Robin Hood customer who’s newer to investing, um we have 28 million customers. Half of them are brand new to brokerage. Um they’re actually kind of puzzled by a model where this market isn’t open all the time. Many of the asset classes already are crypto and others. And so, you know, Amazon doesn’t close. Why would they? It’s an electronic marketplace, right? Um, and so in their mind, if I do my research and stock ABC I think is a great buying opportunity at $10 and I set a limit price to buy it at $10, I really don’t care if I buy it at 3:00 a.m. or at 2 p.m. It doesn’t it just doesn’t matter to me. Um, where where I think the the narrative kind of went for a while with people was, oh, you know, people are going to be day trading at 3:00 a.m., you know, back and forth. That’s not really what we see happening. So, I’ll I’ll kind of let you expand on that a little bit. Yeah, I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head. The market moving news does not stop. It is a 247 business, right? And it it is delivered faster than ever and more broadly than ever, right? This is a global world that we’re operating in. You also have, you know, global corporations listed in the US that are trading on our markets and the news breaking, you know, during their normal business hours. But I think one of the pieces you talked about really was was that the access, the element, the the convenience, the optionality, right? In the US, you’ve got investors that, you know, may want to come home from work and be with their families, cook dinner, put the children to bed, and ultimately by the time they have the opportunity to actually sit down, evaluate their portfolio, evaluate market news, and react, it’s past what have tradition have been traditional market hours, right? To be able to have that convenience and that flexibility to do it according to one schedule. It’s proven itself and you’ve seen it with the volume. The overnight trading volume across three ATS’s that we track, Bruce included, um, year-over-year from August August has gone from 22 million shares a night uh, to roughly 109 million shares a night uh, across those three ATS’s. Uh, and from a notional perspective, we’re looking at 1.2 billion in executed notional uh, to 5 billion in executed notional. So that’s nearly a 400% increase um from a volume perspective. Um so the demand is there. It’s growing. It’s largely uh thanks to the resiliency that has been provided to the market but also the reduction and the barriers of entry from firms like Robin Hood um that have promoted this and really provided the access to the customers. Um the other piece I would say is you know you talk about like why would somebody want to trade at 2 a.m. Right? And so when we think about that question, we like to use a a metaphor about driving. So I’m going to ask you a few questions here. Um Q and I share a home state of Wisconsin. We’re Packer fans. Packer fans. Not a very good year, but hey, we’re going to we’re going to fix that. There we go. Hopefully. Indeed. So I take it you still have family in Wisconsin. I have much many family in Wisconsin. And you drive back to Wisconsin from time to time. I do. How often do you drive at two o’clock in the morning back to Wisconsin? I try to avoid it. I would think so. But in the event of something similar to what you mentioned, a corporate event, let’s say the death of a CEO, the uh you know, a a disruption to production, but a family event where ultimately you wanted to drive back at 2:00 in the morning, you would. Mhm. And at the time you’d be happy to know that your vehicle is there insured, fueled up, safe, reliable, resilient, ready to go. Yep. Correct. Yep. Well, the same thing holds true for an investor, right? Whether that’s retail or institutional, right? Just because the market is 24/7 doesn’t mean you need to trade every second of the day. But to have these opportunities available because news has turned into such a 247 quickly distributed product, right? These opportunities are there. So, the confidence that you gain being able to drive back at 2 a.m. with that reliable vehicle is the same confidence that we want to instill to investors with the platform we’re offering, the partnership with Robin Hood to make sure that access is available as news breaks um and investors can, you know, feel confident in their ability to manage that portfolio. Yeah, I think I f first thing I I would say is our customers, we know this, 60% of them do their homework, education, research when the market’s not open. And so they’re a little puzzled that they can’t put that, you know, make that trade or investment, you know, when they are doing that research. So this is kind of their sweet spot. But I would also say if you think about it, the news cycle, the technology, everything has moved here and the the hours haven’t caught up to it, right? I have a phone that gives me information 24/7. I have uh the ability to act on that 24/7, but I need to be able to do it, you know, in a liquid marketplace that’s open. And so it’s just playing catch-up and and you know, we’re going to close that gap. Um, I thought what would be a really fun thing to do cuz Jason is a student of history is um is to do a little little quiz before I let him uh unleash his uh historical knowledge on us. Um, here’s the question. And by the way, there’s going to be a prize. I think it’s a t-shirt or a hat from the uh from the store. Um, has there been equity trading on weekends? I see a couple. Oh, here it is. Okay. Uh, and I see a couple people from exchanges in here, so no cheating. We’re not going to call on you. Uh, has there been equity trading on weekends previously? And if so, what year did that start? Closest to the pin here? Anybody? And there’s mics up here or you can just yell out or stick your hand up. And by the way, there’s no harm in taking a guess. You get a hat and a and a shirt. So, Sorry, I couldn’t hear you. 2006. 2006. Okay, another one here. Any other guesses?

2004. Let me guide you. 2012. I I would go the other way. We’re getting close. These prices, right, rules or where? I think you’re winning. Go ahead. Let’s go there. So yes, we’re going back to the 1800s here. But you know, I think it’s really interesting. You know, we’re going to talk a lot about the development of technology and the to support growing demand. And if you look at the history of our markets, that’s exactly the story that’s told. So you go back to 1792. 1792, you’ve got the Buttonwood Agreement, right? Essentially the birth of the New York Stock Exchange, right? At the time and for the next almost 80 years, markets don’t trade on a continuous basis. There is no ability even during set market hours to trade you know throughout that session. It is one or two call auctions a day. Everything concentrated to those two events. It’s not until um 1871 that you actually see the introduction of continuous trading and that was 5 hours a day. Few years later in 1887 a Saturday session was launched two hours 10 to 12 on Saturday and this continued uh until 1952 right Saturday session was over. We started to see the birth of an actual like 5day trading week as we know it now. Now go into the 60s. This is where the popularity of trading begins to pick up. And now remember at the time all of this is a manual process right including not only the trading side but the back office side as well. So significant amounts of manual processing significant amounts of paperwork. In the 60s the trading gets so popular we see 10 to 13 million shares a day trading. Just to put things in perspective in September I think we’re averaging roughly 17 billion shares a day. So things have come a long way but at the time with that manual processing that was a lot. So what happens 1968 Wednesdays get shut down. So we go to a 4-day trading week. Really interesting. And that was really known as the paperwork crisis. So they needed Wednesdays to actually catch up on the back office. Fast forward a little later in the 60s we start to see the introduction of extended hours trading, right? And ultimately it’s really an institutional space and this is after hours where you know large asset managers are matching trades to um you know fine natural counterparties. 1985 we see the establishment of the 9:30 to 4 trading day as we knew it I should say right uh and then what things get really interesting in the ‘9s in the 2000s. He’s looking at me cuz I may have been around during that period. That’s what that look was. So, in the 90s and 2000s, you have the online brokerage platforms addressing retail demand and having a major influence on our actual market structure, right? We start to see the pre-market and the postmarket expand. And over those years, we end up with what was the 4:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. trading day. Now, obviously, we are in a world where we have 245, and in a few months, we will have 24/7. um thanks to Robin Hood here. And so it it’s really interesting as you look back on this history and you see how technology has been forced to keep up with demand, how the markets have really committed themselves to doing so. And it speaks to really what our mission is here with Bruce, which is a commitment to make sure that our equity markets really stay in front of what is this global opportunity, this multi-asset ecosystem where all of these assets, whether we’re talking about her or futures or crypto or equities, um I’m sure eventually options and fix them, these these coexist and that coexistence creates opportunities. Um, and so it’s not about whether one asset class is is better than the other or this or that. They coexist and their opportunities and their tools for investors to really manage their their in their portfolio. Um, and so using that technology, we’re determined to make sure that our equity markets really stay up top. Yeah. But I think you brought it up the basis for even if you want option trading, you know, to to follow suit, the basis for that is having the equities because you need reference. Absolutely. And so that’s that’s going to be important. But um in terms of the roll out um you know the the way that we’re going to proceed will be with a limited number of symbols and then quickly ramping up as liquidity becomes more of you know as we become more comfortable with the liquidity. But it’s all it’s this is the same way we we rolled out 245. So we’ll follow a similar model. But you should anticipate that, you know, the the the goal is to get to the full suite of uh tradable assets that exist in the in the uh normal session, the day session, if you will. Um but I’m Jason, I know we talked a little bit last night after, you know, the the announcement and I know you had a lot of interest from a lot of entities and you know, I don’t know how much you want to go into there, you know, both in the US but also globally. Yes. Well, your news from last night has made its way across the globe and you know, I woke up this morning to inbound interest um from several firms um in the APAC region um especially South Korea which you know I think has made the news several times is a large participant in in our equity markets. we now have historical high levels of of interest globally uh to invest in our markets and and you know that is again as I said part to you know the opportunities at the market level but also the the reduced barrier of entry that brokers have offered today um so it’s growing but you know it puts on us really a a mandate to make sure that we are delivering a solution that can be trusted globally as well right not only by your customers but all of these investors around the globe that help create a healthy market ecosystem, right? The more liquidity, the more participation you get, the more competitive you get at the market level. And that’s ultimately what drives uh compression of spreads, right? Better prices for investors. It forces firms like Bruce to be innovative, right? To bring opportunities just like this weekend trading for the first time. And that’s coming as a result of the demand that’s coming from retail. You know, when we think about change in our marketplace, it really comes from from two things. One would be a regulatory mandate, right? Regulators change a rule. We react. We have to build. We deliver. Everyone has to be compliant by an effective date. The other is a market-based solution, right? 245 trading and now 24/7 trading. That’s exactly what that is. It’s addressing demand and delivering to the market a solution that we as market participants know is in the greater interest. And in order to do that, you really have to continue to build to deliver institutional-grade technology, right? To deliver a customer experience that has that confidence and forces them to adopt. Look at what the retail investor community has done with 245 so far. We have exchanges reacting. exchanges will be live during the overnight trading session in the next few months. You have the institutional community reacting to this news, preparing to participate. So, the overall market is just going to continue to get bigger and create more opportunity for the participants. Yeah. And I I I think what could be interesting for the audience here is there like how does this happen? like what what has to happen you know just from a like a a background standpoint for this to be facilitated like who had because obviously there are counterparties you know with respect to market all these things that are important to make sure it is a robust and liquid market it doesn’t just happen we can’t just will it to happen so like just I mean not too wonky but you know so yeah so so there’s a lot more than just keeping the lights on for two days is really the way to think about. So um it starts with the technology right for the matching engine itself. So Bruce ATS you know uh what we do is essentially accept orders from brokers such as Robin Hood. We put out our market data so that you know brokers like market data and their customers can see you know the bids and the offers that sit in our book when opportunities arrive for orders to cross. That’s essentially what we do. We serve as the marketplace for affecting those transactions and we complete all of the required reporting to the tape. Um so you can see all the last sale information. Uh we uh required reports to regulators to back office services so on and so forth. So uh at its core we are the marketplace. Now in order to make that happen there’s more than just as I said keeping the lights on, right? There’s a clearing side of things. So we have to work closely on the clearing side to make sure that the back office process the risk associated with that interacting with the central clearing party you know all of that is available. We’re working closely with regulators to make sure that what we’re delivering um is one compliant but also recognized is in the interest of you know a prog a progressing and and modernizing equity market. Um but also as you mentioned liquidity right as I mention the more liquidity the better that is for all of the investors involved. Um, so we’re working closely with large liquidity providers to ensure that there’s a concentrated and and healthy book of liquidity available for participants when this launches later this year. And I think that that’s the one thing that we’ve had experience with is um, you know, the liquidity providers, the market makers that are going to be there to provide that essential liquidity. when you think about it, they actually have to take a little bit of a leap of faith because you don’t know what that volume is going to look like. Um but I think in talking to many of them and we have for years they’ve been very pleasantly surprised by how much growth there has been and uh how robust that you know trading at least as uh demand is from a and we can only say from a retail side because we’re not institution but you know I think from the institution side you’re having the same you know conversations and um and demand Right. It it it’s taken a little longer to get there, but certainly, you know, this was a retail phenomenon. This was driven by demand at the retail side both internationally and and domestically and and we’ve seen that in the growth. The institutional side is responding. And I think it’s really interesting that, you know, retail has become such a force representing, you know, 20 to 30% of our our our traded volume every day in our markets coming from retail. there’s an opportunity to truly affect the future of our market structure here and we’re seeing that in real time um with with 247 trading and so you know we’re excited to be part of that we’re excited to welcome the institutional community in and and there is budding interest there and as I mentioned um the exchanges will be here soon so yes we are watching a maturing market ecosystem um that has really been driven by by retail investors I find that fascinating to think when you think about asset classes and capabilities Many of them start with institutions and retail is kicking the door saying I want in, I want in, I want in. Like you know, traditional futures, you know, those were really not designed for retail customers initially and retail customers now have, you know, are a decent participant there. But then you have other asset classes which are completely uh retail and then institutions are adopting those. think of event contracts and some of those things which now you know 100% retail and now institutions are are working their way in. It’s always fascinating to see which way this goes, you know, which which is the starting point. But I think to your point with retail continuing to be a bigger and bigger percentage of of volumes in every asset class, I my anticipation is it’s going to be driven by retail more so basically everybody here. Um, so we only have a couple minutes left. We have three microphones that are in each aisle. Curious if anybody has questions uh on any facet of of this trading uh that uh they would like to ask. I would give you another t-shirt, but I don’t have one. But I can get one

for the first question. Oh, here we go. All right. Um, so this is a very specific question. I trade at all hours and I’ve noticed that sometimes when I do um orders, it’s only market orders. You can’t trade limit orders. Is that going to be changed or different when we have the 24 or 25? You know, the when the Bruce markets open? We I think it’s only limit orders, not market orders, right? Oh, I’m sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a great question. So, if you look at our broader market structure, the concept of a market order, the availability of it really doesn’t exist outside of the core session. Um, that’s one of the protections that has been in place for investors for many years. Um, it has not changed. Um, that is not part of our current launch plan. Whether that changes in the future, we will see. Um the reason I really like the question though is that as I mentioned we have this this growing level of competition amongst this overnight ecosystem with the exchanges coming on board. So it is a question that could be asked as we see this evolve and we see this continuous trading day um continue to develop we may see um changes of that nature but for the moment it we’re going to remain limit orders only. Yeah, I think I think the rationale was it’s not you know when it starts it’s not going to be as robust as the day session. So those protections are in place so that you don’t gap gap a stock. Um but I would anticipate that if we get to a a place where these where the volumes are similar to what they are in the day then the capabilities would be similar as they are in a day as well. So, thank you. Of course. And by the way, what are you trading all night? Individual stocks that I already own. Oh, that’s very cool. Is it based on news or just that’s your um news after hours? Sometimes Yep. You know, when futures start? Yep. It It’s very volatile and I find that sometimes I can get out of positions before opening. Ah, got it. Okay. Very cool. Thanks for the question. Hello. Hi. Yeah. So, for the timing of the market, has that been mostly driven by regulation or just back office reconciling, that kind of thing? The the timing of this of being this capability being launched, right? Yeah. I I’ll let Yeah. So I mean part of it was uh regulation historically but right now you know obviously everything we’re doing is pending regulatory review but from a technology perspective there’s no reason the market should be closed. We’ve seen that with other asset classes. Equity certainly um you know where we’ve been at the forefront of this uh for for years and years and years in the US um continues to be there should be there. The technology can support it. From a regulatory perspective there’s actually nothing preventing us from putting a trade up on a Saturday today. But we do work closely to make sure that the solution we bring to market um again is in line with expectations. there’s clear understandings and also investor protections and market integrity always being top of mind globally. globally. Um, are you guys working with other markets globally to also enable this or it’s a what we’ve seen I think as the US has really set a model here. We’ve set a standard um and Bruce, you know, came out of the gate when we launched in 2025. Our goal was to deliver a new standard in in overnight trading with the institutional grade technology with our consortium of strategic partners, Robin Hood, Peak 6, um firms that have stood behind um our business uh and and brought solutions to their clients um making sure you know that it is something that they feel confident and shows the resiliency that the market deserves. What we’ve now seen is we’ve seen the first levels of interest coming out of markets such as London and Korea where we’re we’re hearing of interest in developing 245 solutions you know in those jurisdictions. Um I think the news from last night of uh the US uh starting to go towards 24/7 um really will get some further interest but yes I expect develops developments in these other jurisdictions as well. Thanks. Thanks for the question. Yeah good one more. Uh so you said revenue or trading re revenue went up 400%. Who’s the majority of that increase? So the stat I spoke to was the increase in trading volume overnight. So uh we track three ATS’s that operate during the overnight trading session. Of course, Bruce being one of them. Um it’s the executed volume on those three ATS’s from August to August was up 389% to be very specific. Yeah. But you’re you’re saying who’s the composition of it? Who’s the main like is that institutions retail? It’s it’s primarily a retail market at this point plus um we’ll call liquidity providers and market makers. Um we’re beginning to see the introduction of the institutional community as I mentioned. Um, one of the stats we find really interesting, uh, is that the overnight market is is an anomaly in that retail is actually trading with retail. So, as we look at our stats, we see retail versus retail on what we estimate is about 25% of the shares traded. Um, which is a really interesting factor of the overnight. Um, that will change over time as institutions come on board and the market expands, but um, it’s a very very retail driven market at the moment. Thank you. Cool. I think that wraps it up. I want to thank Jason for for being here. Uh appreciate it and uh look forward to um to doing a lot more. Likewise. Yeah. Thank you. And thanks for coming. Thanks everybody. Appreciate it.

Thank you. Thanks Jason. Thanks everyone. We’re almost at lunch, but we have one more really great session coming up here. We just went behind the scenes on the always on equity market, but for our next session, we’re staying behind the scenes, but moving over to my favorite market, the futures market. And this is easily my favorite transition of the day because apparently I don’t have to go anywhere. So, we’re bringing one of trading’s leading podcast, Chat with Traders. Anyone listen to hear of Chat with Traders? Highly recommend it. They talk to some fantastic old school traders that uh have been very successful. a lot of the market wizards, a lot of uh former professional traders. And so we’re taking that and we’re bottling up into a fun discussion here where we take the point of view of a retail trader, the point of view of a market maker, and the point of view of the exchange in between. So joining me are Kevin Avery, host of Chat with Traders, Rob Kramer, president and CEO of Geneva Trading, and Craig Buick, senior director and global head of retail education at CME Group. And we’re going inside the futures market from your screen to the exchange to the market maker on the other side. This is chat with traders one trade three perspectives sponsored by our friends at CME Group.

Welcome Houston. How are we doing? How many here have heard of Chat with Traders? Show of hands. Yes, let’s go. Well, hey, I’m Kevin Avery, host of Chat with Traders, and the theme of this year’s summit, engines of creation. And it’s very fitting when you look at how Robin Hood keeps innovating and creating. One reason Robin Hood keeps innovating is that its people are also its customers. You guys saw firsthand Steve Quirk. Q was on just a second ago. I love Q. In fact, we learned last night he invented the QR code. He’s great. So, he was on Chat with Traders. Amazing insight. And Robin Hood started by serving a generation of firsttime investors. That’s you. That’s you. The 1500 people that showed up here today, that’s the reason we exist and were able to were able to do this. So give yourselves a round of applause.

You know, Robin Hood, they introduced it was mobile first and then commissionfree access. They’re increasingly sophisticated tools and they continue to push and democratize markets for more people. As Q put it, the playing field has been leveled. Well, today we’re taking one futures trade and we’re looking at it from three different perspectives. We have Obie, the retail trader, Rob, the professional market maker, and then Craig, the exchange perspective at CME Group. So, let’s meet the panel.

Obie, I want to start with you. You’re Robin Hood’s education lead, but you’re also a trader and a Robin Hood customer yourself. So give us a little background on your path into the markets and what your role looks like today. Now be next year 20 years in the retail brokerage industry. I started in 2007 at a a firm in Chicago that focused on options trading uh and found my way to a futures desk around 2010. So speaking of markets never sleep, I worked two years on an overnight trading desk. So I literally didn’t sleep for two years. Um and that’s where I got involved in the futures market and helping customers you know whether it was placing orders monitoring the order routing uh work you know working with uh customer service teams overnight uh but during that time I got interested in trading futures and going through the same path as you guys like I’ve never been on on Rob’s side of the desk um I’ve gone through the same journey and fits and starts and I tried this indicator and then I changed to this uh strategy and went from this product to that. Uh has helped me as an education lead hopefully create good content, engaging content that helps get you guys from A to Z and to a point where hopefully you can be a successful trader. Excellent. Now Rob, you joined Geneva Trading as a trader yourself in 2001 and eventually you became president and CEO. So for someone who may not know Geneva, what does the firm do and how how did you get into this role? So the the firm has evolved as as you would expect over the years. We’ve been at this for 27 years now. Um the firm is a principal trading firm. So we trade our own capital. We’re not managing money for anyone else. And at the core of what we do is to identify and develop professional trading talent. and we support them with our capital and professional trading technologies uh to allow them to become successful. The firm is is a diversified organization. So we have groups that are focused purely on market making. We have those that are doing systematic trading or algorithmic trading and those that are also discretionary trading. So we’re involved in all aspects of it. As for your question about how I got into it, I was really I mean it was almost a fluke. I um spent the first part of my career in the tech space. I was a tech entrepreneur. Um and a friend of mine, one of the co-founders of Geneva gave me the opportunity or encouraged me to come over and see what he wanted to do and how he wanted to build a an electronic trading firm. And I went over and I was taught to trade by him. First went over in late 2000 and started in 2001 and the journey just kind of evolved from there. Excellent. Now, hey, Craig, you’re the global head of retail education at CME Group. So, give us a little background on your career and at a high level, what does CME, you know, what do they play in the futures ecosystem? Yeah, so I started in futures and options right out of college. So, I’ve been in it my entire adult life, uh, going back to the mid9s as it were. And in fact, I’ve known Rob, it’s a small community back in Chicago. We’ve known each other for probably 25 years. Um but most recently I spent about nine years at one of the market making firms in Chicago. Um and then joined uh CME in 2016 in this retail role. I think what’s kind of interesting about that story is that in 2016 the role was kind of sold to me as retail is a high priority at CME. uh we see it as a growth area at CME and that was true but we couldn’t have possibly predicted what was going to happen in the last five or six years uh with the explosion in in retail trading. So, it’s really been a fun ride. And as far as CM Group itself goes, uh, by many measures, we’re the largest futures and options exchange in the world. Um, by volume, I think by market cap, but I think more important to maybe this crowd, I think we also offer arguably the most diverse set of products among any futures exchange in the world. So, you can trade equity indexes, you can trade single stock futures, interest rates, foreign currencies, things with feet like pigs and cows, metals, energies, uh, cryptocurrency futures. So really there’s a lot of different options for people that want exposure to all these different things. Excellent. And we’re going to get into why futures too, but Obie, let’s go back to you on, you know, how does not only leading education at Robin Hood, but you’re also a customer. You know, we learn I learned that with Steve Quirk in my interview with him. You know, they’re c Robin Hood’s so customer ccentric and they focus on the customers, but they’re the trader themselves and that’s how they know how to bring that product to the market. So, how does that change the way you think about educating traders and then building out these future products? Yeah, I mean, well, first off, I want to get a sense. How many people here trade futures? How many people are curious about futures? And then how many people are like, I have no idea what a future is. Okay, that’s a good mix. Um, you know, I I think I like to use analogies, so I apologize. There’ll be a lot of analogies over the next 51 minutes, but this reminds me of like when um like a golf equipment company like a Tailor Made or Callaway or something are building clubs for golf. They work with the Rory Mroys and the Scotty Shefflers and they hit clubs and they hit them and hit them and they the feedback from the golfer to the the builder creates this wonderful cycle that hopefully puts a fantastic product in someone’s hand to execute a job. And when I think of Robin Hood’s trading products, like that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to build the best trading platform so that you can execute a job or a task as a trader. The product itself does not make you a good trader, but a bad product harm basically stops you from being a good trader. So, we’re trying to make the best experience possible. And when I sit down with the product teams, you know, they come to me and other um you know, people within the firm that trade futures and we’re like a focus group for them. So the same things you guys want OCOs and these indicators and custom charting and and all of that like we are advocating for that from the inside on top of your guys’s feedback. So I think it’s just once again having a someone who understands the product as a trader but then also being on the other side of uh the role in terms of working with the product teams and engineers. It’s just a great development cycle. Perfect. And you know Craig you were speaking about how this market has just exploded the future space you know why do you think retail participation you said over the last 5 years I mean why do you think it has grown tremendously what makes these products attractive to the individual trader today? Yeah, I think that’s a great question particularly for for this panel because I think what makes futures attractive to individuals is the same thing that makes them attractive to the institutional players, right? And we’ve got to start with the capital efficiency of futures. So, it’s this idea that you can make your money go further. And and I think whether you’re OB, whether you’re a proprietary trading firm like Geneva, whether you’re an international bank or hedge fund, we’re all capital constrained at some point. And futures have that capital efficient nature to them. Now again we never talk about that and another way to say that quite frankly is leverage and we never talk about that without also talking about the other side right which means that you have to be a very strict disciplined trader when you’re trading with these products. So that’s that’s I think the main reason that people are attracted to futures and then beyond that is the 24-hour access. Um and and then I think in the last 5 to 10 years the access in general, right? We have firms like Robin Hood that are now providing the technology and the access to these products that make it just easier and more approachable uh for individual traders. And I think we’re going to get into the sizing that we’ve done uh in a little bit. Yeah. And a follow-up question to that, Craig, I mean, you you say futures are very, you know, they’re capital efficient. we can control more notional exposure with less capital. But is that also what can get some people in trouble is having that amount of leverage? Sure. And we never sugarcoat that. Um we think it’s an attribute that does attract a lot of people to futures. So for example, let’s say you wanted exposure to the S&P and you were looking at the spider ETF or or the E- mini. Well, if you’re trading on margin, as they say in the stock market, you’re required to put up at least 50% of that exposure that you get. Well, if you’re looking at that same exposure in the futures market, that’s more like five or 6%. So, in order to hold the same amount of exposure, you put up less money. Well, that means that you’re also risking that money. So, again, you do have to be a very strict risk manager when you are trading these more sophisticated products. Absolutely. Now, Rob, I want to come to you. You’ve developed and hired traders who’ve achieved 8 figure results. you were telling us and you know what’s the role of a market maker in this industry? Are you simply making the market or is there more involved in it? Do you actually take directional trades and have bias there? Well, it’s it’s our organi organization now is quite complex. So, we have uh market making groups and directional trading groups. um a market maker. You know, if you really think about it, there are times when uh individuals, farmers, oil companies want to come to a market and they need to hedge and there’s not liquidity there for them. We provide that liquidity. We provide two-sided markets in the products that we trade. We we try to provide fast fair prices for everyone. Um but but of course we do have in in doing that and doing it well perhaps a directional bias. It might be shaped by our own risk and inventory we have on what we’re seeing in the market and it could be informed by a lot of correlated or other other markets that we’re observing. So our approach is very complex. Okay. Now Obie I want to come back to you because now we just heard the professional side. Let’s get some the retail angle on this. And what do you think a key difference is between a trader like you, trader like Rob? Yeah. I mean, you just think about the concept of a professional versus retailer. Let’s just use sports again, like a professional versus an amateur. You know, if I was playing a round of golf with the world number one Scotty Shuffler, and we went to a tea box, right? We both have a club, a ball, and we’re playing the same hole. I may look down the fairway and say, “Man, I just want to hit the ball straight and far, and hopefully it goes where I’m hoping it goes.” Scotty might get on the T- box and say, “All right, wind’s coming out of the right. I’ve got water left. I’ve got a bunker at 280. I’m going to pull a 3-wood, land it on the right side of the fairway because the tea is back left on the green.” the amount of times that a professional does something, it creates a habit and a routine and a process where it’s like breathing for them. I think for newer traders and retail traders, there’s a mix of still learning the fundamentals while putting on risk and understanding the craziness of the market. The your brain our brains are just not as adept to make all those decisions. Plus the amount of resources that a professional firm has, which I think with the launch of all the agents and and everything that we’re doing is starting to narrow that gap. So, at the end of the day, Kevin, it’s really about if this is going to be your full-time job, there’s just such an advantage to that versus, hey, I’m going to trade 1 hour a day as sort of like a side of the plate task or, you know, even using the word hobby. Like, trading futures really isn’t a hobby. You really have to uh you know approach it with some some discipline and rigor. Excellent. Love that. Hey, I just want to quick note for the audience. We have three microphones here. So, while we’re in discussion, go ahead and think of some questions you may have and towards the end we’ll do a Q&A. So, we’ll you’ll line up at these mics and just go ahead and line up towards the end in about 20 30 minutes and I’ll point you out. Now, Rob, I want to go back to you. So retail traders sometimes think market makers maybe they’re just providing liquidity by capturing that bid ask spread. Is that really all market makers are doing? You know what risks come to you by for providing liquidity? So I can’t I can’t speak to everyone in the industry but I would say based on my observation and discussions most of the larger trading firms like ours are multi-dimensional. So we’ve got uh groups that do provide uh market making providing liquidity in in the various contracts primarily in futures. They are also developing directional biases. They may have strategies that are are directional in nature. So it is it is complex. I think if you were looking at it and I’ve I’ve heard stats about people quoting and I can’t confirm whether they’re true or not. Maybe Craig could, but somebody once said like 80% of the revenue or P&L that’s generated in markets is from liquidity taking or directional trading, not necessarily from the market making. I I would guess that could probably be right. Yeah. I mean, we don’t necessarily comment on the customer mix like that, but certainly the ecosystem doesn’t work without the market maker, without the end user, and that end user is so varied. Like I said, it could be a a multinational hedge fund. It could be a bank. It could be an individual like OB, you know, and and really it all comes together to make that market market work, that market efficient and and liquid. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I want to debunk some myths here too if we can because a lot of traders think that people are after their orders. By show of hands, how many of you have been bottom or top ticked on a trade?

Some of you have never traded before. Well, some traders, they think, you know, that the market’s out for them. So, Craig, coming to you, is is this a myth? I mean, can you debunk that? Yeah, I think for this question, I’d probably actually draw on my my sort of past experience when I worked for a firm similar to Rob’s. And obviously I’m not going to give out any trade secrets here, but I I would say sort of at least in my experience and again like like Rob said, we can’t speak for every firm out there. It’s a resounding no, right? And and and our job was simply and that literally is the job of a market maker is to provide bids and offers so that the end user can transact on them. We want the end user to transact on our bids and offers. Um but we have absolutely no idea who’s who’s hitting our bids and offers. And again, I’m saying are this is a past life of mine. Um, but you know, it’s it’s something I hear a lot. You know what I say to people is I if you’re an individual trader, those are the markets you want to be in. You want to be in the market where there’s a hundred firms like Robs that are competing for that trade. And and believe me, it’s as a competitive a space as it gets. So they’re competing with each other for your trade. And that’s again, that’s the market you want to be in because if it’s good enough for those hedge funds that I just mentioned, if that market is good enough to deal on for them, I would suggest it’s good enough. And and with all due respect, Obi for Obi. You know, it’s funny. Back in the day, I had a a trader who used to I mean, this is a professional trader, so people are feeling like the world’s watching him. He used to say, “Do they have cameras on me?” like he you know when he’d be in a trade he’d feel like somebody must have seen something that the markets are like that in some ways. Yeah. We we feel like they’re watching us. They’re after us. So you know I want to come back to you Rob because you were actually you you were speaking on this a little bit earlier how orders are kind of anonymous these days. I spoke to a trader recently on Chat with Traders. They said back in the day that there used to be kind of like an order ID and you would kind of know who’s on the other side of it. But these days, I mean, you don’t know you if you’re taking I mean, if you’re providing liquidity, adding, removing it, you may not you don’t know cuz the orders could be broken up, right? It’s all anonymous. We have no idea who’s on the other side of any trade that comes at us. And, you know, sophisticated players are slicing and dicing up their orders. Um, it’s really hard to decipher who you’re getting your fills from and what’s happening. You ultimately are just managing your strategies and your risk and you you should be accepting them and wanting them at the prices that you’re quoting. But you’re right. I I grew up with Globex over the last 25 years and in early early days you could we had the the exchanges and I think this was common amongst all exchanges did display that counterparty and you would hear things like if this bank ABC was on the other side of my trade I knew I had a 30 second wick on that trade. Those days are long long gone. Long gone. Well, Rob, how do large professional traders, they have bigger size, you know, how does how do they manage their orders? Do they break them up? Do they hide their size? How do they approach liquidity in a different way? Well, the answer is yes. And I there’s no one way that is a correct approach. There are a lot of firms that will try to manage out of positions and and kind of uh manage their portfolios with larger blocks or executions over longer periods of time. Others just just have the philosophy of once I’m ready to get out, I’m just going to go to market and I’m going to get out of my position. And so it’s it’s really there’s no no, you know, right way wrong way. But but to the point of they do and as we do, we do not want to signal to the market our intention and we will try to get out of our positions in ways that won’t create a market impact. Excellent. Yeah, great great answer. I appreciate that. You know, Craig, back to you. We’re we’re going to we’re seeing a lot of new traders enter this market. You’ve been around for for a while. You just gave us some examples, you know, from from back in the day. So, what do you what gives a trader longevity? What separates the trader that’s still here 5, 10, 20 years from now? I do appreciate you saying I’ve been around a long time rather than calling me old. So, thank you for that. Um, but I have, you know, and I think it comes it’s it’s very simple and and a a good trader is synonymous with a good risk manager. I think we all have whether it’s with myself, whether it’s OB, whether it’s a firm like Geneva, we all have indicators, we all have strategy methodologies, whatever it is that makes someone decide to put risk on, to put a trade on. None of us know if the market’s going to go up or down. What makes the good trader is that we know that not all of those trades are going to go the direction that we thought they were. So, it comes down to knowing when it’s not being able to sort of cut those losses and live to see another another day and another trade. We used to tell, you know, prospective traders uh that would interview us, a good trader is confident enough to put on the trade when they think there’s an edge, but humble enough to take it off when they’re wrong. And those can be juxtaposed sometimes. Sometimes that’s not the easiest thing to sort of learn and it’s not the in terms of sort of self-discipline uh and mental discipline. You’ve kind of got to learn that skill. I’ve heard it put another way. I had an interview with Peter Brandt recently. Did you anybody watch that one on chat with traders? Got one fan. Yeah. Strong opinions weekly held. Hey, rings true. So Obie, you’ve seen some newer traders mistakes in real time. you know, tell us about what are some common ways that traders get into big trouble. Yeah, I mean, I’ve I’ve like I said, I’ve been in the industry almost 20 years and I’ve always been on the retail side. So, uh, having the ability to take phone calls from customers and we do that, obviously, you know, we bring up your account, see what you’re doing, answer your questions. I’m going to share a personal story here because I want you guys to, you know, I’m I’m not anyone special. I’m just like you guys. So, my first trade on the S&P Mini. All right. So, I I started on the overnight trade desk in January of 2010. I spent 6 to 8 months learning. I got my series 3. I started paper trading. I discovered um our lesson from a legend in Miami, Mark Fiser. I learned his trading methodology. I set up my charts. I had all my levels, my opening range, my pivot points, and I decided, okay, today’s the day. I’ve got some some capital. I I funded my account. I think it was like $8,000, and at the time, Craig, the the margin was like 4,000. Now, it’s like 6 a little bit more. So, this was the day, right? I get home from my overnight shift. Markets open 8:30 Chicago time. It’s an opening range strategy. If it breaks below the pivot point, you get short. It breaks above the pivot point, you get long. Your stop gets placed on the other side of the opening range. Mistake number one, you lose the force for the trees. Too many times I see retail traders staring at their charts with blinders. And I did this on this day because we broke below the pivot point. I got short one E- mini. I put my stop above the opening range just like I was supposed to. Then all of a sudden, oh, I’m I’m I’m up. It’s going down. It’s going down. Like, oh, I’m up a couple hundred bucks. I’m feeling great. And then all of a sudden, just the biggest green candle just went right to the top of the opening range. I was stopped out in 5 minutes. I lost $1,600, which about 20% of my capital in one trade. So, mistake number two, trading too big. And the the moral of the story was I was so focused on my charts and my indicators, I failed to realize on TV at that moment, former Fed Chair Ben Bernani was testifying in front of Congress announcing QE2. And that was the last time I think I was short 1168. I remember that level. That was the last time the S&P ever traded at 1168. So, I bottom ticked the S&P in 2011 because I wasn’t paying attention. You bottom ticked. I didn’t see your hand up earlier, Obie. Well, hey, love at first sight, right? Look at where you are today after that. So, Rob, let’s come over to you. So, from the professional side, what separates the trader who’s you to survive and adapt from the ones who don’t? Well, I don’t I mean, I think I’ll I’ll go to Ob’s uh golf analogy. Yeah, I mean, you know, the basics of the game are all the same. It doesn’t matter if you’re managing an enormous capital base and trading in bigger size or more complex portfolio with more sophisticated technologies or approaches to trading. The reality is a great trader and Craig mentioned this earlier is a great risk manager. You have to be disciplined, focused every day when you get in uh to the office. You got to be prepared for what’s coming for that day. You got to do your homework. You got to have a game plan and you’ve got to execute it. And it does not it does not change. If you’re going to be a trader, risk management is really the number one theme. Some of you maybe have heard of the great Jack Schwagger. He was on Chat with Traders. Had a conversation with him. Guess what the I mean the common thing theme theme amongst all the wizards over hundred years risk management. Well, enough of talking about trading. Who’s ready to see a trade live? All right. So, Obie, let’s let’s bring it up. Let’s bring up a trade and then let’s do a thesis, a bullish thesis on the S&P 500. Craig, if we have this thesis, you know, how how can we put it together? Yeah. So, I’m wearing a shirt that says CME Group on it. So, when we think about S&P exposure, I’m might be a little biased, but I’m going to go naturally to the S&P futures market. Um, but beyond my own personal bias though, more practically, the S&P futures markets are the most liquid S&P markets in the world. Like if you were to compare the amount of trade, the amount of notional trade that goes through the E- mini or micro E- mini S&Ps in a given day versus something like the spider, the futures dwarf what’s going through on the security side on that ETF. So I would start with saying I want to be in the most liquid market that I can be and for the reasons I mentioned before. I want to be where those institutions are, deep, liquid, transparent market. So, I’m going to start with the S&P futures. Then beyond that, then it becomes more of a sizing issue. Do I want the size of an E- mini S&P, which I think is somewhere around $380,000 these days, or do I want to start somewhere smaller with like a micro, which is onetenth that size, 38,000, and then we even have a smaller size more recently called an Eano. So, then I think it starts to come down to sizes. And and maybe we’re going to let Obie talk a little bit about that sizing aspect. Yeah. So, what I’ve got up here, and you know, this is not too far off from kind of what I’m staring at every day on my Robin Hood Legend. I don’t have my personal indicator set. The only thing I have on here for just simplicity of the demo is the uh daily pivot point. So, just looking at yesterday’s high, low, close divided by three, and it kind of sets a No excuses, Obie. Put a green trade on. Who wants to see a green trade? Um but you know the the idea here is you know long above the pivot short below the pivot identify an area. But uh you know just looking at the tape today we’re up um you know I mentioned I’m an opening range trader. So kind of looking at that 830 uh to actually this is going to yeah right here. Here’s the 8:30 candle. Let’s just draw that so we can we can see where the opening range has been today. Uh where are you at? There we go. Uh here we go. And while you’re doing that, Craig, I have a follow-up question for you. I mean, cuz these products were once just for institutional traders, you know. So, how did we get to a market now where everyday traders have access to this? Yeah. And I think that’s again what I mentioned at the onset. That’s one of the things that’s invited so many more individual traders into these markets. And the evolution is kind of interesting. If if you go all the way back to 1997, the only S&P product that the CME offered was the what we called the standard S&P. It’s no longer around. But that was a product that was worth 500 times what the the the level of the S&P was, which when you consider the S&P at that time was only 900 points. It was a manageable product size for for institutions. But even at that time, 500 had become a big a big product, a big futures contract. So in 97, we introduced the E- Mini. Fast forward to 2019, that E- mini was a mini in name only, right? Because of the appreciation of the S&P index itself. What was an e what was a minisized contract in 97 was now an institutional for for the most part size product be just simply because the S&P had increased by so much. So in 2019, we we introduced the micros. We heard demand from the customers, the mini’s too big, we need something smaller. So, we introduced the microiz contract in the four major indices, the S&P, NASDAQ, Dow, and Russell. I’ll put you on the spot, actually, Kevin, and and this kind of speaks to why we’ve now released an even smaller product called the Eano. So, I just mentioned we were we launched the the Micros in 2019. Kevin, what do you think the NASDAQ 100 was trading just six or seven years ago when we launched it? Oh, goodness. $1, Bob. What’s that? $1, Bob. Oh, I I did this on purpose. So, just in 2019 alone, the NASDAQ was trading at 7,700. Today, the NASDAQ’s trading at over $30,000, I think. So, what was a microized contract, what was worth about $15,000 just in 2019 is now a $60,000 contract. Now, that’s still approachable for a lot of individual traders, but it has been the genesis for us to launch the even smaller product that we have now called the E Nano. Perfect. Hey, we actually have a question from an audience member. I want to go ahead and direct our attention over here. So, if we can get that mic hot.

Yeah, go ahead. Thank you. Um, I have a question. You mentioned leverage is one of the benefits of futures, right? Um for individual stocks, why don’t we have futures for individual stocks? That’s a great question and we in fact do have futures on individual stocks and in fact it’s one of the newer products that we’ve launched this year about 6 weeks ago. So about six years ago, we announced single stock futures on 55 different names. 22 of those names have microsiz contracts. So we do and you know we’re working with Robin Hood. Um they’re not available on Robin Hood’s platform yet. Uh but we are working with them. Yeah. Hey, that was a great question. Hey, so Obie, where are we at? Yeah. So, uh if we’re going to approach this and put this on, the first thing Craig mentioned is all right, what product are we trading? This is a demo account, but we are trading with house money. So, 29,000 in this account. If we were going to go to the ES, which is the S&P mini under the contract specs, we can see the margin requirement 28,700. If we put this trade on using the ES, we would be basically using our entire capital. And, you know, doing the math, that’s about, we’ll call it $1,000 of wiggle room. And on one E- mini, that’s 20 points. That that can happen in the blink of an eye where we would go from being in a position to being in a margin call and have to bring up funds into our account or close our position. So this contract would be too big for our account size. What we’ll do, as Craig mentioned, is let’s go down to the micro, which is forward/mees. That’s going to put you on the active contract. So typically futures traders retail 99% of the time we’re trading the front month active contract. It’s not like options where we’re picking an expiration. This is where all the liquidity is. Uh and this is essentially where we have the best sort of uh entrance point as a retail trader is that front month active contract. Now notice the margin requirement on this one is 2871. So onetenth the size of the ES. And with our $30,000 account, as I mentioned earlier, I like to do kind of like whatever half of my account size is, that would be my max risk. And this is where futures, you don’t have to understand the crazy math of options and understand theoretical pricing models in Greeks. The uh you have to be really good at what we call cashier math. You know, quick quick simple math. In this case, the margin requirement is 2871. We have a $29,000 account. If we had a position size of of five uh micros here, it’d be roughly $15,000 in capital we’re deploying. Uh and so that would probably be my max position size. So if we have an A+ trade setup, maybe that’s when I’m going in on the larger size, a sort of maybe B+ B minus setup, we go to two to three. And if I’m just maybe doing one like a feeler trade, just want to be involved for the day and we do one. But for this, my inner contrarian is telling me maybe we fade this rally uh from this morning, right? The we uh market since um 6 a.m. kind of hit a bottom at 7720 has rallied up to 77.82 is now trading 65. Uh if we go back to the ES chart, you can see that’s kind of sitting near the top of the opening range. If if I’m an opening range trader, I realistically wouldn’t be putting a position on here, Kevin, because to me, the opening range is no man’s land. I want to be long above it, short below it. Uh but for the purposes of this demo, I don’t know. Anyone want to get short? Got some hands. Who wants to get long here?

All right, so let’s do this. We’re going to get short here. And uh let’s define our trade. uh if we get short at 7765, let’s explain how to you’re going to the ladder. Explain the the ladder there and how traders can utilize that. Yeah, if you’re a futures trader and you’re not using the the trading ladder, you’re kind of doing it wrong. Uh unless you’re a longer position, if you’re an active trader, actively getting in and out of the market throughout the day, there’s no effic more efficient way to trade than through the ladder. You can set your orders like if we want to put a buy limit below. There we go. We’ve got an order working with one click. If we want to change that order, we slide it up and down the ladder. We’ve cancel and replaced. We want to cancel an order, we’re out. Very quick and efficient way to get in and out of a position for this. Let’s get short. And I’m just going to sell two at the market. So, we’re going to risk Oh, we’re in the big boys here. Where’s my risk manager? Sorry. Uh here we go. Mees. So, we’re going to put roughly a little bit less than $6,000 on margin requirement. And I’ll change my quantity cell two. And we’re filled. Uh, and you can see this line here. We’re filled at 66 half. And every tick this goes down. If you click the P&L button here, it’s going to tell you how much we’re making or losing. But this is where knowing this stuff cold is one of those mistakes retail retail traders make is they’re still learning this contract spec area before they move to the ladder. And so I know a contract size of two on this. Uh every point we’re making or losing uh what is it? 10 bucks. Five bucks. Thank you. See, I’m just I’m Well, how important, Obie, is it to predefine all of this before entering the trade? Like where where do you see a lot of traders messing up? Yeah. So, first things first, like we put in an order here, but we haven’t put in a stop or a target. Uh if let’s just say we’re going to put our stop back at the the top of the opening range today and that would be 70 uh 79 and a half. So first things first, we’re going to put a buy order in at 7780.

And you can see where the volume is sitting on these price levels. And there’s some liquidity up there which would make sense. And we’re going to put a buy stop at 80 and a quarter. And if we go to our P&L, we’re now risking 137 and a half. All right. So, if we we get stopped out here, that’s that’s what we’re going to take. So, know where the stop is prior to even the entry cuz a lot of traders will focus on that green lever first before ever and then perhaps even adjust them risk parameters mid trade, which is what a lot of amateurs do. You got to focus on the risk that we discussed less the money. So now that we’re in the trade, Obie, you know, you got the stop in the you got the target in as well. I mean, so where do you go from here? Where do a lot of traders mess up when they’re in let’s say whether green or red on the trade? You know, where do traders go wrong at that point? And Obie, I’m going to I’m going to jump in just one second to clarify that $5 uh question that you just had. We’re short two. Short two. So $10. So um for those because there were some people that weren’t familiar with futures and this is just one of the basic tenants of futures that I just tell people you simply have to learn. It’s not you don’t have to split the atom but futures trade in what’s called a multiplier. So they don’t trade in a number of shares like if you’re used to trading stocks and you trade a 100 shares of stock and that stock goes up by a dollar. Well that’s a $100 impact to your P&L. Futures have what’s called a multiplier. And that’s what changes among these things like e- minis, micros, and nanos is that multiplier. So if he has two of these micros on, the multiplier on a micro is five. Which means every time that the S&P moves by one full point, that’s a $10. That’s two times five. $10 impact to your P&L. And again, it’s not rocket science, but it’s just one of those things that you have to get used to if you’re making a transition from stocks to futures. Yeah. And this is where the cashier math comes in. Notice the price levels on this future go in quarters. So there it’s not like trading stocks where everything moves in pennies. So every tick in the market is a quarter point. There’s four quarters to a dollar and we have once again two contracts on the multiplier five. So now our multiplier is 10. That’s $10 of risk or profit. Every full point and every tick uh we’re sitting at is $2.50 of profit or loss. And Kevin, you had mentioned like what is sort of what happens now that we have a position on that maybe a trader gets in their own way. Well, it’s real easy to start seeing negative numbers and your brain starts playing tricks on you. So, this is one of the reasons we have a trading psychologist coming at the end of the day. Now, $25 isn’t going to get our heart racing, but imagine if we had 10 ES on or in Rob’s case, maybe one of his traders has a a 100 lot or 500 lot. you’re making or losing a lot of money really quick and your brain is trying to protect you from loss. And so a first mistake might be someone takes this stop and drags it down and tries to say, you know what, I don’t want I don’t want any more of the pain. Uh the other option if this turned into a profitable trade is instead of letting the trade work, they move that stop into a break even too fast or even at a profit, they get stopped out, take a small profit and then the market moves the way they wanted. And that is almost feels worse cuz you’re like, I was right and yet I was wrong. Yeah. Absolutely. And so, you know, if if we were looking at this, you know, I would keep an eye on this and, you know, maybe we’re looking to get out uh if if it tests the the daily pivot point. Once again, this is just sort of a generic example. I think we would have a little more nuance to this if we were uh trading for real. I I see I see is that Bob Aino at the mic? It is. Yeah. We have a question from the audience. Hey, go ahead. Go for it. So, I have two questions. So, I’ll just ask him and I’ll sit down. One is for Rob and that is do the traders that are market makers for you. Uh I remember being in the pit. We had slow days. When we had slow days we would put on longerterm speculative positions. Do your market makers have the freedom to do that in your firm? And then the second question is for both Craig and Obie as we speed toward 247 trading in absolutely everything. Do things like the opening range still exist and for how long? I know every trade that I do is entered on the close of the day. I mean, charting patterns have to mark a close, but if we’re 24/7, are there any closes anymore? Are there any opening ranges? So, whatever order. Thanks, guys. So, I I’ll I’ll take the first question. So um do our market makers have latitude to trade size on a slower day? The answer is yes. Um the the uh trading groups and every trader in the firm has a very active dialogue and relationship with our risk desk who assigns VAR and risk parameters around everything they have. Once those are assigned to the to the trading desk and the person that’s responsible for the risk, it’s up to them to do it. I would not advise people to trade bigger size because it’s a slow day or it’s boring or whatever um going on. But the answer is yes. They have full latitude uh to trade size and a lot of them have um capacity to do a lot. I I I’ll start OB and I I would just say that CME Group has has been offering we’ll call it 23×5 trading for decades, right? So I I think in terms of is there an opening range if that I think that’s already been answered, right? Because I’m not sure that the extension of the weekend really impacts that opening range that much. Now, I think there’ll be a different liquidity profile for weekend trading versus the sort of Sunday night through Friday afternoon trading, but certainly as you know, as you well know, you know, the liquidity or the the volume that happens when the the cash stock market o market opens in the morning tends to be greater than it was the couple hours preceding it and things like that. So, I’m not sure that the extension to the weekend really really changes it that much. Yeah, I would just add, you know, I I was chatting with Jason from Bruce uh about this a week ago when we were prepping for his panel to be determined, but I I I you know, whatever you do as a trader, whether it’s opening range or something different, typically you need volume and volatility for that stuff to to work. And you know, right now as an S&P futures trader, having a VIX at a 15 or 16 really makes it hard to trade intraday compared to when VIX is above 20. When I when I when VIX gets above 20, I perk up and all of a sudden I’m like, all right, the indicators and and pivot point levels and sort of the intraday expected range implied by the options market tends to come to fruition more. And as a a futures trader, like what we’re seeing now is is it’s pretty boring. It’s like watching paint dry. We want something to hit a level and then boom, drop, go up. That’s where, you know, as a futures trader, if we’re in the right side of the position, we can get in out of a position quickly where today, you know, it’s just kind of chopping around and it may be a day that I would, you know, probably not put a trade on. And and you can see we’re just sort of floating here down 35 bucks. But, um, yeah, I think it’s a good question, Bob. And you know, as a trader, you have to evolve with the markets. Yeah, these are great questions. And again, this is this whole event’s for you guys. So, continue to step up to the mic and ask questions. We actually have another one center aisle here. Go ahead with your question. Yes. My question is uh institution investors have research teams, sophisticated models, better technology and more resources than the average retail investor. So what if any sustainable edge does a retail investor actually have? I I would I would love to take that one. It’s what you just saw like we get to decide when we get in and out of the market, what our size is, what product we trade. A market maker, they’re obligated to make bids and offers. Like, they take the other side of our trade. They don’t have the discretion and directional opinion that we have. Um, now there’s trade-offs with that. There’s benefits to that. But as a retail trader, you get to define your risk. You get to pick what you do, when you do it, how you do it. I think the mistakes that a retail trader makes is they may go into a product that’s a little less liquid. They may not understand the fundamentals of something. They may trade too large. They may focus too much on their charts and not on the bigger market picture. Um, but I think that’s a a valuable edge to be able to sort of choose your own path where Rob maybe a market maker doesn’t have that freedom. I I think another dimension there is that you know I you got to think about the markets in kind of a a fractal nature right so a large institutional investor is not looking for a short price movement they’re not scalping the market right so they they’re looking to execute typically larger size take a position that fundamental research has to be justified with enough you know gain out of it to warrant the research and work that goes into that trade very good, well disciplined traders don’t can operate a lot more dynamically and nimly in the market than someone that has the burden of having to manage an enormous amount of of capital. Excellent. All right. Hey, we have 10 minutes left, so these will be the last two questions here. We’ll start with you, sir, right here. Hi there. Um, I’ve been playing around with the ladder in the app and I was wondering if there’s any feature coming for like a trailing stop order. I’ve been moving the stop and sometimes it the market price flies past me while I’m doing that. I think it cancels one and places another order. Yeah, I’m with you. I’m I’m on Grace and the rest of the futures team on that. We announced OCOs last night for equities. Uh, and I will be the biggest advocate for getting that over to the future side along with trail stops. I think, you know, there’s a trade-off with that. It’s nice to have your hands off. Um, but sometimes it’s it’s nice to have that precision of where and how you place your stop, where you move it, when you move it, where a trail stop is a little less precise. Um, but I think OCO’s for example, like this would be a perfect time to, you know, buy stop above the opening range, put a a buy limit order below. uh go to lunch and and not worry necessarily uh you know what happens with our position. We’ve defined our risk and we’re trading a liquid product. So, you know, we’re not going to probably you know, stop order is not going to rip through uh in the middle of a day unless something crazy happens. But quick followup. So, are there plans for those order types in Robin Hood? Say that again. Are there future plans for those auto types in Robin Hood? Yes, I all that stuff is on the road map. Uh if you go to the booth, find Grace, find Adam from the futures team. Uh they could probably give you more information. Great. Thank you. All right. Hey, last question here. This gentleman here. Hi. Um yeah, so futures options give us like great way to play around with futures at least for beginners or even like you know when I’m in a position how to manage it. Now ECM working with Robin Hood to launch futures options anytime. We are indeed. You know, we would we and that’s a great point cuz when you talked about how do you get exposure to the S&P, we went straight to futures. We’d be remiss not to talk about the fact that you can also get similar options exposure to the S&P through futures options that you can with options like S&P or Spider and we are in fact working with Robin Hood to try to get those on the platform as well. It’s a great question. Awesome. Thank you. Can we expect any timelines? Uh it’s on the road map. I would hopefully sometime next year. Uh but you know once again Grace and team can can provide more information but I’m almost positive probably sometime next year is is likely. Uh the one thing I’ll say though is like options versus futures is an important distinction if you know if if you’re out there trying to scalp intraday movements on the S&P. You know the efficiency and what’s the right word? um precision you get with a futures contract relative to buying a call or buying a put. When you buy an option to to scalp a short-term price move on an underlying stock or indicy, you’re bringing some additional factors into the picture. Uh especially on the shorterdated options that the you know the time premium is going to come out of that really quick if you’re wrong where with futures whether it’s S&P, oil, gold, you’re directly trading that without some of those exogenous factors that options bring in. I think futures options allow some really cool ways to define and create specific payoff diagrams combined with trading volatility and other things where this is much more of a directional approach. Thank you. All right, great. Hey, got a couple questions left as we’re wrapping up and as we’re wrapping up that trade. Uh Rob, I want to jump to you with uh as a professional liquidity provider, you know, are you when you’re on the other side of this trade, are you making a directional bet that OB’s wrong on this or are you perhaps just maybe even hedging a position? Well, it’s a it’s a great question and I think you know there are misconceptions around like what are you seeing on the screen? Is that the market maker right there? And and the reality is is that the order book is comprised of so many competing parties with a lot of different ways that they’re trying to make money. If I look at an offer in the S&P 500, I don’t know whether that person is going to be trying to hedge in a basket of stocks trading against the ETF, maybe they’re an options firm who’s gotten some risk on in the options side. The all of the markets are so integrated. That contract there represents 500 companies. And so there’s an enormous amount of data and complexity that goes into that. We are are making markets actively day in and day out. We are not I mean we don’t win on every trade. I mean there’s there’s a lot of people that I think it’s public like a lot of firms that have consistent P&L with only 51 or 52% success rate. So, a lot of people are making money as the market maker loses on trades and they still are able to profit due to the volume that they do. So, it really depends on the market. In some markets, it’s different than others. So, there’s a lot of depth there, it sounds like. Well, hey, Obie, where are we at with the trade right now? Yeah, we’re kind of treading water. We’re slightly down. We’ll call it break even. And and you know, for sake of time, we got five minutes left. This is this is another concept that I learned that I think is valuable that retail doesn’t think about. We have a physical price stop in but there’s also a concept of a a time stop. Uh something I learned from from Mark Fischer as well. So we’ve been in this position what maybe 10 15 minutes. You know if if a position doesn’t go your way in a certain amount of time sometimes that’s a sign like you know what just get out of the position move on to the next one. Uh and and now as we turn profitable, it’s like, okay, if if we think we’re just going to sit around here, maybe our initial thesis was wrong, which was very short and quick, but um you know, in this case, we may want to just cover the position and and go to lunch without risk on the table. We’re going to jump to the closing question. So, if you want to leave it up and running or uh or take it off and come take a seat. Yeah, let’s buy them back. We’re filled. You know, we made a half a point. So, and then, of course, cancel your stop and we’re out. All right. Excellent. Obie, the closing question to you is going to be, what’s one mistake you’d want every retail futures trader to avoid? I think it’s the size. I I think that’s the the biggest thing I see retail is they and let’s imagine you had that $29,000 account. they would put as much risk on as they can afford and give themselves no margin to be wrong. And I’ve seen that over and over and our customer service teams deal with that a lot. And when you’re in that position, you’re stressed. Uh you can get angry, but at the end of the day, as I pointed out earlier, you can avoid that. You can avoid that by sizing properly. Understand the math. So, if you’re wrong on a position, is it going to draw down, you know, 25 basis points to your account, a half a percent, 1%? Uh, too many times I see retail where they put on a trade and if they’re wrong, their capital’s cut in half. And at the end of the day, you’re trading capital is your lifeblood. Like, if you don’t have it, you can’t trade. And trying to hit the home run when you know a single will do. Singles add up indeed. Well, hey Craig, closing question to you. What’s one thing that every new futures trader should understand about the marketplace they’re participating in? Yeah, and I think Obie covered sort of the practical answer to that question, which is size and and make sure you’re not overtrading. So, I’ll get a little bit more, I guess, philosophical with my answer. And and I think regardless of of what market it is, I think new traders need to understand that the market’s probably not wrong when you consider all of the different market participants, all of the different liquidity providers, institutions, retail traders that make up that bid offer. And I was I know Tom Sausnoff is here today and he’s doing a keynote at three. I was lucky enough to be on the road with Tom for 10 years. And one of my favorite things that he used to say is when I look at the screen and I see a bid offer, that’s probably the right price because of all of the things I just described. So when you get long the S&P and the market goes down, it’s probably not because you’re right and everyone else is wrong. And I think that’s one early lesson that traders need to learn. And and then that goes back to that humility, being able to admit that I’m wrong, cut the losses, and and live to see another trade. 100%. And Rob, to you, what’s one misconception about the person on the other side of the trade you’d like to eliminate? Well, I I I think one misconception that’s it’s really unhealthy is thinking market makers are seeing singling out a particular uh market participant like retail. Um, you know, we’ve been in this business for a long time. There wasn’t any retail that, you know, we really saw in our markets in the early days. I mean, it was more of an institutional market. Um, but, uh, I think it’s more of to Craig’s point of like it’s a highly competitive market. And, um, you know, I I think I want to echo something that was said earlier for people that are looking to get in the game. It takes even for professional trading firms a long time to develop successful traders. You need to focus on a developing a pattern of success and a track record in your trading that gives you the confidence and the data to allow you to know how to scale. I wouldn’t even jump into like really trying to press what you’re trying to do until to the the the analogy of the golf swing. Get a predictable golf swing. get your swing right and then you know then you get out on the course. Yeah. I to echo what he said to use the golf analogy full circle. Really bad golfers go out and they play swing. The whole day they’re trying to figure out their swing. A really good golfer goes out and plays golf and they can put the ball where they want it. They can avoid the water. They can have fun. Trading is the same thing. Especially futures. You have to know those contract specs. You have to know the basics of my buy limit goes down here, my buy stop goes above, my sell limit sell stop. I see simple mistakes like that. And then at the end of the day, try to make 10 points a day, whether it’s on one nano future, which I think is a great tool. was like a practice tool so small that you can trade real money with very little risk as opposed to going to a simulator and then graduate to a micro, graduate to two, three, four, make 10 points a day before you start saying, “Well, I’m the best trader in the world and I’m going to go to the big boys and trade five or 10 ES and then all of a sudden the market will will come for you.” It does indeed. Well, hey, we’re out of time. I wish we could sit and chat for another hour, but uh hey, we started guys with one simple trade, a bullish view on the S&P 500. For Obie, it was about the thesis, the position size, execution, and risk. For Rob, it was about liquidity, inventory, hedging, time frame, and managing exposure. Uh for Craig and CME, it was about the marketplace where all those different participants and objectives come together. So, it was the same trade, three different perspectives. Houston, this is Chat with Traders. Thank you so much. Please give them a round of applause.

And once again, I get to stay up here and do my answers. Rob, pleasure. Craig, Kevin, thank you. Thank you. Thank you guys. This was a fun one. Appreciate you letting me sit in on this one. With that, we made it to lunch. Don’t forget before you head out, we’ve got a stacked afternoon starting at one sharp. We’re back here with the midterm elections panel. Then Robin Hood Ventures takes aside private markets and disruptive innovation. Kathy Wood is on that. Then we have Jared Tendler and the mental game of trading. And of course, we’ll close out our programming with Tom Sausnoff and JJ Kahan for lessons from a legend. And then me, Vlad, and Q will officially put a close to the summit. For everyone watching online, don’t forget the stream stays live through lunch. Set yourself an alarm for 1 pm central time and we’ll come back with the big afternoon ahead. Everyone here in Houston, grab some lunch, check out the booths, enjoy the break. We’ll see you back here at 1 p.m. sharp.

All right. All right. Welcome back, everyone. Do we have a good lunch? Anything good out there? Food’s pretty good this year, right? Well, I hope you had a good lunch. Everyone from the live stream, welcome back. Take yourself off of uh whatever you’re doing and and and welcome back to the live stream. So, as I tee up this next session, I want to just preface a few things. When we came up with this idea, we’re like, will this work? Can this play? Um because yes, this is about the 2026 midterms. This does involve politics, but and I want to make this clear for you guys here in the live stream. This is not about left versus right. This is not a session about political punditry. It’s not going to be a segment from cable news. Uh we’re not here to debate the individual candidates or the issues at play. As everything we do, this is about trading. And unlike the presidential cycle where we actually launched our prediction markets product for uh the the race between President Trump and and Senator uh Harris or Vice President Harris. This cycle is a midterm cycle. So there are hundreds of potential events that you guys could look at and trade across House, Senate, gubanatorial, down ballot. And so this is like approaching the S&P 500. How do we narrow that universe down and find tradable opportunities? Which ones do we lean into? Which ones do we avoid? Or do we just use this as information to help us trade our normal financial portfolio? So, what we put together here are three experts from three different perspectives. We have a campaign strategist, we have a pollster, and we have a trader. And we are going to try to build a methodology for approaching the midterms like we would with anything else. So, please welcome to the stage Walter Hickey, who’s the executive editor of our media brand, Sherwood uh News. Danny Moses, who if you guys were at the trading lab just now, veteran investor uh featured in the Big Short, he’s going to be our trader. And then Matt Rose is a veter veteran political strategist, former campaign manager for Mitt Romney. And then Patrick Rafini, founder uh uh founding partner of Echelon Insights and one of the country’s leading pollsters and data strategists. So without further ado, welcome to Prediction Markets, the 2026 midterms, building your trading plan for election season.

Hello. Thank you so much all the folks for coming out. Hope you had a good lunch. Uh thank you for coming out to this session. Today we’re going to be doing something pretty specific. Uh we’re trying to build a game plan for trading the 2026 midterms. We’ve got three very exciting, very different lenses on stage. Matt uh from the political campaign space, Patrick from the polling space, Danny from the trading space. As we kind of kick this off, I want to just go a little bit around the horn. And behind me, you’re going to see the Robin Hood midterms election hub as we get going and kind of dive in on each of these individual races. But um let’s start from the very top. All right, we’ve got a very big outcome on the board. Uh we’ve got just fewer than 5 weeks until election day and I’m interested in how you’re viewing the race. Uh Danny, do you want to kick us off? Sure. Thanks for having me. Great to be here. Um, over the last several weeks, we’ve seen the chance for Democrats to take the Senate, which is really was the only one that was really in play at this point. House, I think, is up to 93% probability, from a 50/50 to roughly 63 or 65% chance, which inversely would be 35 or 37% chance for the for, you know, Republicans to take the Senate. So, what does that mean? I try to trade policy, not politics. So, how I would think about that would be what industries in the stock market is it potentially good for, who is it bad for? And and what does it mean to basically future policy legislation as to go so far as to say, will the government shut down on December 12th, which I don’t think enough people are talking about, which is another event that’s trading out there. So, I kind of try to take it all in. And then to your point, what’s priced in and what’s not priced in? I don’t think the Dems’s taking both houses in Congress is priced in yet. Uh that’s just my personal feel even though the prediction markets are telling. So something I’m watching. Matt, what are you thinking about right now? Yeah. Well, look, it’s great to be here. I know you guys are an educated bunch because you are investing in all these races. I feel like the media, no offense, Walt, is just kind of waking up and now they’re paying attention and they’re starting to write about some trends that you guys probably saw come about 6 months ago, some of these trends a year ago. And in our country, and I’m always looking at trends, whether it’s looking at polling data that’s coming in from a public standpoint, um historic trends in any given state, but in 11 out of the last 13 elections we’ve had, presidential and midterm, there’s been a change in either the House, the Senate, or the White House. So, what does that tell you? That tells you the American voter is in a mood to reject. They’re rejecting people left and right. If you read the media reports right now, you know, if if this is a date, like, you know, we’ve had rejections where they don’t call you back, the way the media is going in some of these public polls, this is a throw a drink in your face kind of rejection, but there’s still opportunities and and and Danny just hinted at that. You know, the House is the House. It’s the smallest majority anyone’s had going back, I think, to 1932. So, the margins are very small for Speaker Johnson. But in the Senate, the map is a good thing. And I think even some of the media outlets that are covering this, and they’re always going to do the horse race. That’s part of the trends that you guys got to think about and know about. And Patrick will get into that a little bit more. Uh but they want the horse race. It’s closing. But the map is such an ally. We’re in some very r very very very red places including the state that we’re sitting in now which you know is a huge pickup need and I say need for the Democrats to become the majority party in the Senate. So I agree with Danny there’s still a lot of I don’t want to say a lot of time there’s still time in the Senate there’s a lot of competitive races and the map is not the Democrat’s friend. Patrick I want to talk a little bit about some of your work. What are the polls saying right now? Now, are they saying a similar story to what we’re seeing in the markets? Are there any meaningful differences that you’re picking up? Well, if anything, I think the polls should be telling or the market should be telling a more different story than the polls. I don’t think um you know what we’ve seen um and I looked I looked at this coming in coming into today um that you see in most of these states that the probabilities at least on the vote hub uh forecast and uh you know and looking at Cali um you know uh they’re within a point or two and then there’s one glaring exception where there’s about a 20 point disagreement um in Kansas between um the polls and or at least the fundamentals and the forecasts right um the Nate Silvers of the world um and the markets. Um and those are all polling based markets, right? Um so, um I think if anything, um I think markets can add a lot more um because as a pollster, I would be the first to say that, you know, you should be taking a lot of the polls you’re seeing uh with a grain of salt. Um, you know, we’ve seen historic a historic trend of the polls not capturing in particularly some of these Midwest states. Um, the white non-ol population, which is a majority of the electorate. Um, this was the reason Donald Trump was able to surprise everyone in 2016. Um, we’ve seen states like Ohio, Iowa consistently miss uh on um, you know, and Republicans um, not pull ahead in those states until mid-occtober. um well, Democrats were always favored and I think we’re are we seeing a repeat of that or is the wave or is the fundamentals of this particular election cycle enough um to keep Democrats rolling through all the way through election day? I think that’s the fundamental question right now. Um but I think the markets play a useful role in correcting I think some of these historic mistakes that even as a pollster I would tell you um those are things you really need to be concerned about and watch out for. Uh, I want to back out a little bit and Matt, I I want you to take this because I want to talk a little bit about just midterms 101. We’ve got a lot of folks in the audience who are very very experienced with markets. We have a lot of folks in the audience who might not be as familiar with what makes a midterm election particularly new or interesting or unique outside of a presidential. So, could you just give us a framework for what makes a midterm a unique and kind of difficult to predict uh election compared to maybe some other national races? Well, again, another historic trend. midterm elections, much smaller turnout. And with all the transformation that’s happened in politics and the emergence of President Trump and the MAGA movement, back in the day when Patrick Graffini and I were working together on campaigns in the Bush Cheney world in a midterm, we’d want low turnout. But now, President Trump, Republican party, they want higher turnout. So when as an investor, if I’m looking out there and I’m looking for opportunities to invest in, look at a place like Texas, which the horse race theory is totally in play when you look at some of the public polls and some of the media coverage, but there’s a saying we have on campaigns and the political side. It’s not scientific, but when we’re looking at vote goals and vote totals, we talk about ducks on the pond. How many votes are out there that we can get? and with Attorney General Ken Paxton and talking to some of the folks that you know know him well and work in his his orbit. One of the reasons why in some of the public polling data he’s underperforming a little bit and is lower in the polls at least from a public standpoint than Governor Abbott the Republican governor of Texas is right now he’s he’s seems like he’s underperforming in rural parts of the state. So, while you guys are sitting in your hotel rooms tonight and you start to look at some of the political ads, I’m going to take the the over that you’re going to see a Terrico or a Paxton ad on TV. And the ad you’re going to see on TV, and I noticed this last night watching the Yankees destroy the Boston Red Sox is that it’s focused on a rural voter, not a college educated suburban voter in Houston, uh, or the suburbs of Houston. And so that tells me he’s got room to grow. There are still ducks on the pond for Attorney General Ken Paxton. Meaning there’s voters he can pick up. If a Republican, a conservative MAGA Republican like Ken Paxton can’t pick up and find some more rural voters in the state of Texas, then well then he’s got a problem. But I think he can. Yeah. This is again to your point, this is a race with h there are hundreds of races around the country and it’s not all down ballot from one at the top. Patrick, I I want to actually go to you real quick. And you know, we have lots of polls at the state level. We have lots of polls at the national level. How do you recommend folks kind of make sense of this on a race by race basis? Yeah, I mean, it’s uh there more polls than ever before, and I would say there’s more incentive uh for uh you have a lot of lower quality polls uh coming in. There were a couple fake polls earlier this cycle. Um and um you know, and I think it’s part of the media ecosystem that we’re uh in. There’s more and more people. There are rooms like this of people who are never would be interested in elections before. Uh would never really play in elections and are now playing in elections. And so um to feed that interest, you have lots and lots of polls. Um not necessarily always the highest quality polls, not necessarily the polls that we as campaigns are um are uh uh you know, really uh you know, and the way we conduct polls. Um, you know, we’re very careful to look at voter registration, look at um, every single if we have 3 million voters in a state, we have the voter file on all three million voters in the state. So, we know what that electorate. We think a few points or two is going to look like and we’re conducting polls on that basis and not everyone is doing that. Um, so, uh, you know, what you get sometimes are polls that, you know, can look like extreme outliers or don’t, um, wait on things like education. Don’t wait on, uh, are really not in the ballpark of how this state has ever voted in the past. What I like to do is take um you know, you have uh your polls in an individual state, but I like to combine all the polls in all the states at the state level and just look at what’s the shift from the last presidential election to uh this current election. Um cuz that’s going to tell you, right? And the reality in this midterm, I I like to um you know, say it’s like a big wave but a high wall. Uh, and the wall for Republicans is the fact that the state that you need to take control of the United States Senate is a state that voted for Donald Trump by about 12 points. Um, so, uh, that’s a pretty big home field advantage. Uh, right. And sometimes, you know, the White Socks can come to Houston and uh and uh beat the home field advantage, but there is a home field advantage that you have to take into account as a traitor and thinking about because political fundamentals, the sort of we would call political fundamentals. Um uh you know, the basic partisanship of a state, how many Trump voters, how many Harris voters matters a lot more than it ever has. Uh, and the the variation the the uh the spread between these races used to be a lot bigger uh when uh Matt and I were starting in politics and now it’s just a few points. Um, so Democrats really I still think have their work cut out for them in the Senate. That’s that’s so interest again. I love the line of a big wave with a big wall like that. That’s really interesting in terms of how to view this race. Uh Matt, I want to go with you as well. We’re still talking about the Senate a little bit behind me again. you’ll see on the midterm sub uh the Senate map. Uh like what are we missing for those of us who aren’t plugged in to the decisions that are being made right now on the Senate level, right? Like you’ve had like insights and and access to lots of really interesting rooms over the course of your career and how party decision makers, money decision makers are investing and deciding where to kind of go like what what are we not privy to necessarily that’s going on now? Uh, Matt, well, at the national level, whether it’s national super PACs or the national campaign committees, they’re making decisions just like you all are investing in these races. They’re making the decision on where should they invest their their resources. And so many of these decisions quite honestly should have been made uh and could have been made over the summer. But like where can we find our path to victory? And we keep going back to the Senate. And so as you guys look at races to invest in, you should follow where the money’s going to go. And there’s races that have been discussed in the last week or two where Republican national uh campaign organizations aren’t going to invest in. But where the action’s going to be, and again, if if Republicans lose three seats, they’re still in the majority. It’s a 50/50 tie. And there’s a plausible chance that that could happen. Um but follow the races, follow where the money’s going to go. You’re going to see a lot of action. There’s three seats that Republicans need to to at least keep two of the three. Alaska, Texas, which we talked about, in Maine, where Senator Susan Collins is the only human being on the face of the earth that could run statewide in Maine as a Republican and still be competitive and and win. There’s no other human being that could do it. So if Republicans win two out of those three races and then pick up a race and two of the races that are going to still be looked at and people are going to think about investing in are Michigan with Mike Rogers and another pickup opportunity in New Hampshire with former Senator Cenounu and the Cenounus up in New Hampshire are kind of like the Republican version of the Kennedys but not as good-looking. Um but they’re a great family and we’ll see how it all turns out. So like that is a plausible pathway and that’s where the money is going to go on the Republican side. So as you guys think about your decisions, you should follow those races and see what decisions are made because it’ll start to come out all these media buys, especially broadcast TV. Um if people start pulling and plugging in different places, you know that there’s polls, internal data, and vote goals, especially when they start adding in the early absentee voting, which is going to be starting next week. Is it October 6 where a lot of it starts where smart people like Patrick Rafini can overlay data on some of the returns and kind of have a good indicator of how bad or how good we’re doing as a Republican campaign. I want to jump from the Senate to the House real quick. And Danny, I want to go to you because a lot of what you’ve been talking about here is not just like the actual races themselves investing in, but also, you know, the the ramifications about it, the data center trade, the AI trade, the regulatory policy, and and the House is going to be very instrumental in all of these, right? even, you know, how is a, you know, potentially split house or a deadlocked, you know, legislature going to handle a Republican president? And so, what are you looking forward to when it comes to how are you how are you factoring in the house, I should say, when it comes to your overall investing decisions and your overall portfolio? Let me just say since this conference is about the stock market, a lot of people invest in the stock market. Historically, the stock market is the economy and vice versa. Never have it been in a period of time where that was this separated so much different. You have x amount of stock supporting the stock market and you have x amount of consumers, you know, supporting the economy. So it’s really bifrocated when you think about the breakout of the economy and that’s kind of what you’re seeing within this election outcome. So, so I think, you know, banks would not do well historically in a highly regulated environment that might happen if Dems get both houses and congress, right? So that’s one thing. As far as the capbacks and AI, we’re at an inflection point anyway. I believe on AI, forget safety for a second. Let’s leave that to the side. There is a mismatch of supply and demand going on in the AI trade. You can use it as an excuse that the Dems win. Oh, they’re going to halt it. That’s why I don’t think that’s why these stocks are kind of booing right now. I don’t think that’ll be a reason. I think that it’s too important to the economy on both sides uh to have this build out in a very smart way. Um, so I think that is a little bit of a misnomer, but could be used a as an excuse. Like I said at the opening, I don’t think the market trading in. And you bring up crypto and Bitcoin, a lot of people here own that as well. They if Dems take both sides of Congress, maybe it’s a negative, they’ll think because there will be less Clarity Act chances, things like that. So there’s a lot of moving pieces. Um, so it’ll be interesting how it plays out and I know we’re going to get into some of the specific maybe how to trade it and what to look for. Um but uh you know and with MAD in terms of um you’re going to get surprises. Yeah. I I think there’s a lot more volume to come in to these prediction markets um over the next five weeks and there’s going to be a lot of ups and downs I think here coming. So I’m skipping ahead a little bit but actually on that point I’m super interested in what your thoughts are on some gubernatorial races particularly as it relates to the data center issue and how it reflects the data center trade. Are you looking at these? What’s on your mind? I haven’t done enough work on with I mean I know the states where a lot of these centers are being built. Um I know that it’s going to be important part of how people vote potentially. You’re already getting complaints of energy prices up in an area noise complaints obviously for data centers. But again I also think that it’s actually not a negative for the AI sector if things were to slow down a little bit. That’s a whole another podcast segment obviously what it means. Um, so I haven’t paid, you know, enough attention, but it’s definitely going to be going to be a focus, um, for sure on some of those races. So, so I I want to talk about some close races here. Uh, and I’m interested in kind of where you folks are looking on the map. I mean, Matt, you know, you’ve been the RNC before. You know, how people assess this large national map. You can kind of identify folks who are outperforming potentially. You know, what has your eye, what has your attention, what’s a close race that you’ve been looking at? Yeah, on the House side, I think there’s a couple races you should really look at to kind of make a decision from a broader standpoint of how the night’s going to go for for Republicans in general. Uh, one is Pennsylvania 8, uh, which is a Republican seat, but it’s in the Scranton Wilsberry market, which is a very, no offense to Scranton Wilsbury, a very cheap investment from a financial standpoint to buy TV and media up there. And so the Democrats, you know, wisely are spending a lot of money in that market uh in Pennsylvania 8. So that’s a race to watch. If Republicans were to hold that and Pennsylvania came in early, you know, that means that a lot of these public polls were showing more of a surge or wall than was expected. another race that I always go back to and I feel like I go back to it every cycle and he’s a buddy of mine and I love to to pitch him too. So like unlike Danny, I have a a heart on some of this politics. That’s why I like listening to him. He has no heart. He just wants you guys to make the right investment. But Lawler, Mike Lawler, New York 17, that’s uh Rocklin County. So just north of the city where I’m from, we call that downstate New York. Um it it’s it’s a true swing district. Mike Lawler though is one of those guys that you constantly see out there. You might not agree with him, but you know, no offense to a lot of members of Congress in the US House. A lot of them don’t do much. Mike’s out there, you know, even when he disagrees with the president, he does it in a way that the president actually listens to him and pays attention to him. And you saw that on salt tax policy back in the state of New York. Um, if he can hold on there, then it’s not going to be as as bad of a night for for Republicans either. and he’s got some really some things going for him. One, dynamic personality that actually does things. People know him. They actually hear about him constantly out in the news media. And there’s some voting blocks there. There’s a huge Jewish vote in Rockland County that I think is going to come home for Mike Lawler. So, when you’re looking at investments and you’re looking for ducks on the pond, you know, there’s a lot of ducks on the pond that I think Mike Lawler can bring home on election day and put him over the top of New York 17. So, I’d watch that. That’s a very expensive race, too. And the president just invested out of his own super PACs, I think $8.8 million. So, that’s that’s another encouraging sign for Mike. And it shows that you can have a public disagreement with the president and he still can love you and give you a big $ 8.8 million hug. And uh the president did that. So, keep an eye on New York 17. It’s so interesting because again like that is a very expensive media market but it is a reminder that like in as much as nationaliz politics have become nationalized all politics still is pretty local and that race in particular candidate quality really does matter. Patrick I want to ask you is there any part of the map that especially in the house that we’re not paying that close attention to. Obviously there was a lot of redistricting this past cycle that took a lot of races off the board put some on the board. Where are you looking for interesting races? Yeah, I mean on both sides of the redistricting equation are um you know you have seats where here in Texas Republicans uh tried to draw themselves five extra seats and they may be lucky if they get three of them um because in this environment right um you know you can’t um even if a Trump plus 10 seat is not safe uh for uh maybe you know next cycle it may be safe but for now it’s not a safe seat. Um and you also have um particularly with these uh districts along the border um where uh you saw a huge surge to Trump in both 2020 and 24, but it seems like a lot of those voters might be moving back and Democrats have done um a good job with candidate recruitment in some of those districts where some of these Hispanic heavy districts in Texas um even beyond those districts on the border, Texas 35, um even Texas 15, it’s one of those border districts. Uh Trump won it by 18 points, but Democrats have put up a a very strong candidate. And with the Hispanic vote, you can’t predict because they vote differently down ballot than you do at the presidential level. But I think we’re also seeing an interesting divergence. Um it’s not um between some of the blue states, what we’re seeing in some of the blue states and the red states. And I’m always a little cautious about this when people start talking about, oh, there’s a bunch of states that are going to vote completely differently. So, I would I take that with a little bit of a grain of salt. But you’ve seen polls out of Minnesota, very close race. It’s a very blue that’s a pretty blue state. Not not massively blue, but Democrats reliably win there. Um you see, um polls out of the Oregon governor’s race where Republicans uh you know, have a shot. And I think in particular um where they may be alpha um and but I think it requires um really knowledge of the states, knowledge of the environment is in gubernatorial elections. We’re talking a lot about congressional elections. We don’t talk as much about the gubanatorial elections because we don’t have the scoreboard who’s going to of partisan control. Nobody keeps track of that. Um, but that’s where you see a lot more openness of voters kind of switching sides because it’s less about what’s happening in Washington, more about what’s happening in their state. I look at a state like New York. I don’t think Republicans are favored in the state of New York, but the governor of New York, we saw it in the last time, and she’s trying to run for a third term. She’s very unpopular. I mean, uh, you know, she’s, I think, underwater by 15 points favorabilitywise. Um so some of those states you’re seeing a little bit of a signs of a split environment um and particularly in some of these statewide and guminatorial elections uh where people aren’t happy with um you know governance in those states either. Um if this is an anti-inccumbent wave it may hit um some of those Democratic incumbents in blue states too. It’s been so interesting at the gubernatorial level as you said you see states like Nevada as well where you’ve got again like states that are very much in the mix at this point. You’ve got also, I guess, Phil Scott in Vermont who’s a Republican who’s really running very very well in a traditionally blue state. It really seems like those tend to defy some of the conventional wisdom. Yeah. And that’s and that’s the thing. I mean, like I my thesis of this election, right, the wave meets the wall. Um, but that really applies to Washington doesn’t apply as much to the state level. I mean, you’ve seen some pretty idiosyncratic. You have a Republican governor in Vermont. You have a Democratic governor in Kentucky. Um, so that’s where politics really gets interesting. Um, and you know, as much as you know, there are a lot of races on the board, um, and a lot more maybe offensive opportunities for Democrats this cycle, um, you really have seen a real decline in the number of districts, um, particularly with redistricting and particularly with this hyper efficient and hyper optimized redistricting cycles that we now have. um where you’re really talking about two dozen seats in the House that are really competitive and are going to attract tens of millions or multiple millions of dollars in outside spending. Yeah. There’s just a lot of going back to the beginning rejection and it’s not good to be an incumbent whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat. And I was fascinated on the rejection theory looking at the state of Rhode Island. obviously not a bastion of conservatism, but they had two primaries, governor and the mayor of Providence, and they threw out both Democrat incumbents. And then you’re like, well, let’s look into it, you know, and partisans would want to look and say, oh, it must be AOC, you know, Democratic socialist candidates that just, you know, storm the gates and beat back these Democrat moderates. And that wasn’t the case at the ginatorial level. the the incumbent Democrat governor was beaten on the right and then in Providence it did happen there, you know, the candidate was beaten on the left and these were primaries on the same day and it just shows you the power of rejection out there. So when you’re in the majority and you have the White House, the Senate and the House, there’s an opportunity for the other side to try to run up some scores. Yeah, Danny, I want to talk a little bit about trading mechanics. You know, earlier Matt was telling us all about New York 17 uh behind me on the board. I’m going to pull that up. Um, and I would love for you to kind of talk a little bit about what you look for in these races, how it compares to, again, are you looking for volume? Are you looking for uh, you know, various different like do you where do you want to see these asymmetries? Do you want to see a race that has a lot of interest? Do you want to see a race that has a little uh, I’m just pulling up behind us uh, in terms of how this actually looks, but can you walk us through how you build a strategy with the trading mechanics on this? Sure. I think this is an interesting race because it’s East Coast and again, I don’t know the timing. everything comes in and polls are closing and so forth. But when you get an upset early, if Lawler, for instance, was to actually win or he was projected to win, it would swing things rather dramatically in terms of what people would predict. I think moving forward from there because maybe affordability wasn’t as big of issue as people thought, whatever it might be. So that’s one thing I think a race you would look at key and I would I would totally defer to Matt on which races he would look at on the East Coast that might be a bigger signal for what’s happening the rest. But in something like this, trading uh one of these markets, right, there’s two ways. Obviously, Dems’s getting the house is already trading at 93%. So, I would never really own anything at 93 cents to make 7 cents. That’s just not a great riskreward. But in something like this, maybe down ballot or, you know, in in a local house race, if you think Lawler’s going to lose, I I can’t see exactly where it’s trading, but the risk, you say to yourself, is there really a 65% probability that Lawler’s going to lose? Maybe. And I would watch it during the course of the evening, right? And so again, I would put limits in to sell things because things get obviously very uh may may get over it skis early. So maybe have something in at 90 cents. So maybe the you know the first 10% reports in that precinct and Lawler’s losing by a lot in an in a particular area of the of the district where he was supposed to do well, then you’ll go to 90%. I don’t want to be around for that last 10 cents. So use limit orders, use smart and look for liquidity. And so I would screen on this app by volume which you can do and anything below uh you know in terms of volume and open interest total you’re not so such little money could move those markets that it can send you know a false signal. So you got to be really careful uh with the volume and use limit orders is what I would say. So yeah, let’s also talk again about maybe a close race too like behind me I’ve got New York 11 the Staten Island race uh between the incumbent Nicole Maliotakis and you know you’re seeing here that you know these limit prices are rather these prices are adding up to over a dollar as in it seems like there’s a big skew between what you’re asking and what you’re bidding on this. So that comes down to market makers willingness to um basically provide liquidity into a market. So all event contracts should have add up to a dollar in a perfect world. Maybe with the bid to offer maybe dollar two since things are supposed to realize either at zero sense or at a dollar. So those should add up to be the same. When they don’t that tells you there’s lack of liquidity and there’s not a lot of market depth. So to me it’s a it’s a signal that I would stay away from the market potentially because obviously these market makers aren’t providing enough liquidity and it could move and you could get taken out of your position andor uh get scared out of your position rather quickly. So something else, you bring up a good point, something I look for as well there. So that’s really interesting. Anything else that you would kind of add on some of the trading mechanics element of it, like how are these similar to more traditional assets and what kind of strategies work just as well in this versus versus elsewhere? Well, this is a 24/7 market obviously. I know Rob had introduced pretty much 24/7 trading last night, so you could trade stocks with it. So they’re very different, you know, in that regard. Um, again, there could pockets of liquidity moving on a headline. uh that may be misunderstood in the media that gets picked up by an algorithm. So again, you got to be very careful on what’s moving it and um you know certainly not for the faint of heart, but it’s it’s a nice I I use these prediction markets a lot in general as a news source to help me in other things that I’m doing, not just with elections or whatever it might be and the implications of it, but it brings it makes you think about I didn’t even realize that that was even an event to be concerned about or that might be occurring in the next few days outside of elections obviously. So I kind of use it as part of Wall Street Journal, the FT, bottomup research, reading AKs, and then looking at event contracts, tell me what’s happening. So I want to talk a little bit about what you know makes these unique and why elections might be there’s some unforeseen elements of this, right, Patrick? I want to talk to you a little bit about what we can expect on election night, election week, couple days after, the idiosyncratic ways that these states might tabulate their votes. like what is would be might be new for traders who are more accustomed to a uh more specific settlement time than than elections might offer. Yeah. I mean um I studied this during the primaries. I don’t trade on prediction markets cuz I consider it as a pollster. You know I don’t trade on anything I might be pulling which could be anything at any given point. So I just don’t trade but I do I do think I do follow it closely. um I do um you know as an alternative source of information and um you know I was looking at the primaries and there was very clear biases in terms of how these the markets behaving oddly on election nights in these primary elections where um you know it seemed like there um was maybe almost an overreaction to these early ballot drops that in particular when they favored these progressive more progressive candidates um you know early in the Right. Um Elsa, yeah, was up to I think 99.9% on one of the markets. Uh and the race that was up within one point, right? Um so I think there’s a lot of emotion still that in in politics that there isn’t in other markets that you can take advantage of as a trader if you have a majority if you you know know that um and you can tell that a majority of traders on a particular contract want one outcome to happen. I think taking the other side of that is is probably a good bet because they’re going to believe any bit of good news, right? And if it’s even if it’s legitimately or seems outwardly to be a piece of good news that favors their preferred candidate, they’re going to tend to believe that faster than they’ll believe the good news on the other side of the equation. And uh it’s really complicated, right, coming in. You really have to know on election night the order um that ballots come in uh which counties which counties are reporting early votes uh which counties are reporting election day votes. There’s a dramatic difference between mail ballots and election day ballots. Um so there’s all this complicated thing and it changes from uh just because a state did it one way the last time, they don’t necessarily do it one way the next time. there are uh you know aggregators uh you know great accounts to follow that that do keep track of this. Um but at the same time you know I think and and but the markets I think in some ways were overreacting to some of those accounts. Um uh so um you know but there were pretty clear biases in the primaries that I think um you know light the path for uh I I pulled up California behind us just because they have a shall we say unique strategy of counting ballots that can kind of have some of those mirages as we saw during the primary. Yeah. I mean in California you know specifically I might say it’s a very blue state. Um but um you know in particular I mean that’s something that’s coming come in late in the night. So, um, uh, you know, I I think they’re probably, um, you want to be paying attention to maybe some of what are some early bell weathers early in the night. Um, like Kentucky 6. It’s not like that’s considered a competitive district, but it’s kind of a suburbish district that didn’t vote for Trump by a huge number. And it’s going to report very early. It’s going to have full reporting very early, and it could give us a good indicator of how the rest of the night is going to go. But um but you know in California remember during the primary I I was polling for one of the candidates in in California and uh you know Tommy Styer was up to be based on uh the way I think one of these accounts was characterizing the ballot drops the late ballot drops in California which obviously as we know California counts like takes forever to count. um based on how they were characterizing it um the markets went up to 50% and I you know I was pretty sure that there was no more than a 10% chance of Tommy Styer but I think there happened to be just a lot of sty bros there happened to be a lot of Hong supporters there happened to be a lot of supporters on these markets so that’s you know if you can really pick up on that I think that’s an opportunity Patrick can I just say something so Patrick and Matt bring up great points and they’re much more in tune with what’s the idea to to buy a contract at three or 5 cents does make sense if you believe that it’s you know 20 to1 which you’re the payout would be is way mispriced and so it’s not for me to decide cuz I’m not in the weeds like these guys are but I’m sure if you screen them then you could look at them and say that okay he might lose or she might lose but no way should it is it 20 to1 it’s probably like 2 to1 and then you can have opportunity but I think I think it’s key to point out that on the night of the election the market’s going to be very wide. So you talk about adding to a dollar, they might add to $180 because the market makers won’t be able to get the information that they’re going to have or whoever sources they’re using in time to get caught off guard. So just wanted to add that. Uh on the note of interesting data drops and things like that, Matt, can you tell me a little bit about Alaska? Uh this is going to be a race that’s going to trip some people up. Like rank choice, I know you’ve got some strong feelings on, but what can we look forward to in that kind of specific environment? Yeah, first off, Alaska is six hours behind and I’ve been on the receiving end on Super Tuesday needing to win Alaska and not getting any credit in the media after you you have because everyone went to bed. And if it comes down to, you know, the 5050 and it’s all rank, it’s all about Alaska, it’s going to be a long night and the the cable stations are going to go nuts in in large part because it’s a competitive race, but also because they have rank choice voting up there, which is just a variable that I just think our system, not just when it comes to you guys investing, but our system as a whole, as a country, just can’t handle. we’re there’s too many conspiracy theorists on both sides in this party in this country and people just can’t handle it. And so when you’re ranking out who’s first and second and you have all these in a place like Alaska, Patrick made the point in California, you’re going to have so many early votes, absentee votes, people in the military, um it’s going to be a long long night and it’s going to it’s going to create a lot of heartburn. So if you’re looking to invest in that overnight, like I’d be I’d be careful. I’d be careful because I think that there’s going to be some chaos there if that’s as competitive as it seems to be right now. The other thing I would say and the Democrat Mary Pelatollah has, you know, she’s she’s gotten the horse race factor. She’s gotten some good public data. There actually was a vote there because they have rank choice primaries and so they had their primary vote in August and she ended up beating or leading Senator Sullivan in the rank choice primary by seven points. Um, you know, honestly, I like Senator Sullivan. I wish he trailed by one or two points. That would make me feel better. Uh, unfortunately for Senator Sullivan, you know, we’ve got rank choice and then this is the state where the Democrats went out and recruited a second Dan Sullivan to to vote who I think received 2% of the vote. So, a lot of chaos up there in Alaska. But, I’ve done referendums as recently as 2020. And I keep going back like where for a Republican are there pockets of voters that can still turn out and I can tell you we did an oil and gas referendum up there in 2020 that I was a part of and we did our last big poll statewide uh in late August kind of make our final decisions about spends and media and everything else and it was right about the time where they just had their primary vote and excuse my French we’re getting our asses kicked and President Trump. This was President Trump versus Joe Biden uh race. And at that point in time, President Trump ended up winning Alaska easily. Uh but what was going on is Republicans hadn’t come home. They hadn’t come home for President Trump yet. And they certainly hadn’t come home. Uh and they were a key part of our our our voter pool that we needed to win. And we were able to win and and Republicans did come home. And so I’ve seen it happen. So that’s one to keep an eye on. Will Republicans come home for Senator Sullivan? But I think even if they do, it’s going to be a close race, a long night, and I worry about chaos up in in in the great state of Alaska. Uh before we do our final whip around and ask what we got to be looking out for over the next 5 weeks, Danny, I want to go to you and just ask essentially like what are the down ballot races? What are the outside races? What companies do you think you have an eye on heading into this uh this final stretch? Obviously, there are some companies that you alluded to earlier that have a lot of exposure to, you know, Congress and and the regulatory infrastructure. What is on your mind as we finish out these last five weeks? AI and data centers obviously within each of the states where they’re being constructed certainly uh that’s one of them. Um solar panels and green energy alternative sources of energy is a whole another sector. the potentially is going to get impacted in various areas. You have as much as the stocks and the dump gambling companies on online gambling companies, you know, there’s certain states maybe voting for that as well. Cannabis in various states, legalization, things like that. So, there’s a lot of them and I think it people aren’t paying enough attention to them and I think over the next month a lot of analysts will start to write about it. Um but in general I think people are focusing on the bigger picture which the bigger ones governor races which are probably AI data center related and potentially halting construction and so forth. So things one of the things I’m looking at Matt you want to address that? Yeah there was two things that have happened over the last two years that really surprised me from a polling political and policy standpoint. One is how quickly President Trump completely owned the economy and was no longer able to blame President Biden for everything, which really worked well for us in the last election. And it was a great tactic because in the past we, you know, I’ve been on the receiving end of this. President Obama was able to blame our former boss, President George W. Bush, for everything for almost eight years. But like there’s changes in the environment and how we consume information. Now, unfortunately for Republicans and President Trump blaming Biden, people washed their hands of them there. His own party did. We should have learned from the Democrat party itself during the campaign. And then the second thing, and Danny keeps talking about it, data centers and the impact that they are having, especially with incumbents, incumbent governors who, you know, it it seemed like brilliant politics, brilliant economics to recruit and get data centers to come to their state to create economic growth in communities. And I have never seen an an issue like data centers plummet as quickly as it did over two years. And I have some theories behind it. I think in the beginning in places like Northern Virginia outside of Washington DC, uh there was some people playing with matches out in the woods and sparking uh some what felt at the time organic opposition in places like Lden County, but now it is full organic like it spread everywhere. And to think that the numbers would drop as quickly as they did over a 2-year period and you could see it coming. It’s just I feel like again it was the media is late to the the ball game. No offense. Um and everyone’s starting to pay attention to it, but it’s shocking and that it’s an impacting in a negative way. Yeah. Especially governor’s races. I never would have saw that coming two years ago. It’s been wild to see that even in like Nova where they’ve been jamming data centers in there since do like it’s been fascinating to watch. That’s a great point. Patrick, I’ll finish with you. like what’s something heading into November that we haven’t chatted about that’s on your mind that that you’re interested that you think might be uh good last note for traders to think about? Well, I think the minute uh 26 is over 28’s going to start. Um so I think um I’m always fascinated by this period um right after the midterms in terms of what lessons the parties learn um whether or not somebody like JD Vance will be we you know weakened or strengthened um by the midterm results um and which Democrats are going to potentially emerge. I mean, we’re not going to be taking very much of a break uh after this election’s over. That’s amazing. All right. Well, I want to thank our panel so much. Danny Moses, Matt Rhodess, and Patrick Rafini. Let’s give him a big hand. Thank you very much, folks. Thank you very much.

Guys, thank you. Just setting this up for the next panel. How’s everyone enjoy that? Was that pretty good? Yeah, I thought so, too. I mean, to get that much mental brain power on the the midterm elections on one panel and then you throw in Danny Moses, uh I I think that was uh fantastic. I learned a ton. So, we just spent the last session taking a huge uh universe and narrowing it down to some opportunities. This next one takes the same idea but applies it to private markets and private companies asking questions like how do you identify business and technologies that could shape the future? How do you evaluate them before they reach the public markets and how do you broaden the access to those opportunities? And that’s the purpose behind Robin Hood Ventures. How many people have heard of Robin Hood Ventures? Excellent. So, we put together a panel once again to help us understand it all from the ground level on up. And so, please let’s welcome Robin Hood CFO Shiv Verma, head of Robin Hood Ventures, Sarah Pinto, and Arc Invest founder, CEO, and CIO Kathy Wood, and your moderator, co-founder of Risk Riverful Media, and co-host of CNBC’s Fast Money, Dan Nathan. This is Inside Robin Hood Ventures: Private Markets, Innovation, and the Future of Investing. Enjoy.

Hello everyone. Uh really excited to be here. Uh as far as all the content we’ve had today and yesterday, absolutely amazing. But I’m super excited about this conversation because for me, as somebody who’s been in the markets nearly 30 years, I’ve spent so much time staring at screens like a lot of you guys do and having at the tips of my fingers ways to transact. But I think some of the most interesting things going on in the markets are going on in the private markets. And I, you know, we’ve been talking a little bit about this in the leadup to this conversation. Um, I can’t remember a time where so much of what was going on in the public markets is being driven by what’s going on in the private markets. And so these folks right here are giving access to private markets in a manner with a level of diligence from an investing standpoint um in the private markets as you’ve accustomed to or become accustomed to in the public markets. All right, so enough of that. Um, I I want to start here because people know of ARC and they know of Robin Hood and you guys obviously all know them pretty well for having access and tools to the public markets. Why? I’ll start with you ship. What What was the um inspiration for offering this to your customers? because I think knowing your company and being involved as a a partner for the last 3 years, there’s been this evolution of aspirational products and we learned about a lot of them last night or were refreshed with them during the keynote, but what is it about access to private markets that is really interesting for this cohort here? Yeah, great great question. So, when we talked to customers, one of their main pain points was they didn’t have access to these great private companies. And so actually we started think about this in 2021 and a couple things all came together last year. Uh first new administration they put out great guidance. They actually said the best way to hold private assets for retail is in these 40act funds. The second thing that happened was a lot of these great companies were staying private for longer. No no surprise there. And then third we liked to launch products when we have a push not pull meaning our customers were asking for these. And we go through and the number one thing I kept hearing from customers is how do I invest in open AAI or data bricks and stripe. So we looked at the way to do this and the vision statement was can we do for private markets what we did for public markets and we came up with four tenants. The first was best-in-class names like if you do it you want to have really really great companies for customers to invest in. Uh the second was daily liquidity. We heard from all of our customers they’re used to trading. They’re used to getting in and out and so how can you have a vehicle where they can actually get liquidity? Uh the second or third one was no accreditation. 85 to 90% of Americans are not accredited. So it was a huge pain for customers. They couldn’t invest in accredited funds. And the fourth is they wanted competitive fees and a way to do it. And so that’s how we came about it. We launched our first fund which was late growth. Awesome portfolio data bricks openai stripe some of the largest names. We then heard from customers they want to do early stage. So our second fund was focused with YC and early stage customers. People love that. Uh, and now we’re getting a lot of new in inbound demand and and Sarah and the team are cooking some other new funds and we took a lot of inspiration from Kathy because she’s actually one who pioneered this with private public market funds and how to do this. So, yeah, we love the vision and and we’re going to keep innovating for customers. Yeah, Kathy, you know, uh, I think a lot of these folks know you as someone who’s a prolific innovation, a tech investor. I think it’s not just if you’re not invested in Kathy’s funds, you probably use a lot of what she has to say about markets, about individual names, about themes to work into your own processes. And so I’m just curious because you’ve seen lots of cycles and you’ve seen how innovation can really transform different industries and the like. What was the this obviously sounds like a logical, you know, sort of evolution for you. Um, what was it that you at ARC decided to create these sorts of vehicles? So regular investors unacredited here and there can invest either solely in private but also public private. Yes. So um we got the idea from our clients. Uh we had a lot of uh young clients working in the tech industry who were saying how is it that we who work in this industry and understand these companies, understand the technologies better than institutions, better than family offices, why can’t we have access to them? Uh because we don’t make enough money. Uh our net worth is not high enough. Uh, well, that’s just unfair. And I and I I agreed. I said, that’s unamerican. So, let’s try and figure this out. And uh and so we’ve done it in a little bit of a different way from uh Robin Hood. Uh and they both have their their pluses and minuses. I think uh 100% liquidity, which is your hallmark uh at Robin Hood, very important. In our case, uh we have quarterly redemptions. So daily inflows, quarterly redemptions up to 5% of NAV. Now uh what that means is that our portfolio is always selling at NAV. Uh whereas of course uh Robin Hood’s portfolios can go to uh premium or discount. Now, uh, when I first saw, and I we were talking about this earlier, when I first saw that Robin Hood was going to put private into, uh, a closed end fund like that, I thought, my goodness, the only example we have out there is Destiny Tech 100, which at the time was at something like 600 premium to NAV. And I think what Robin Hood has done beautifully is educate. So before you buy one of their funds, you know exactly where it stands uh relative to NAV. And right now I think you’re in the 10 to 15% range on both. Yeah. Ship, just really quickly tell us what were some of your considerations like with that structure. Yeah. So we debated a lot. You know, Kathy pioneered the interval fund and and we started closed end funds. There’s pros and cons of them. The main thing was customers wanted day liquidity or our customer bases and the only way to do that was in these closed end fund formats. Now the converse is as Kathy said the fund can trade at a premium or discount to a NAV. I think a sweet spot is if you’re kind of plus or minus 10% on either side and so when we talked to customers we said that’s a known risk. You can trade at a premium to discount but you can get day liquidity. And so that’s why we chose to do that. The converse is in cap these funds, you know, you’re always going to get in or out at NAV, which is great, but you might have quarterly of liquidity. So, I think the best thing for customers is you choose where you want to be on the spectrum. If you want day liquidity, great. We have a product to do that. If you want something with less liquidity, but you know you’re going to trade at NAV, you can go to Cathy’s funds and then it’s your own choice for where you want to be on the risk spectrum. And I’ll just say I think both of us um have started with a direct to to a a direct to cap uh table psychology. So um we are not invested either one of us in SPVS which and layered SPVS which include fees upon fees upon fees that are kind of hidden um in other products. I think both of ours direct to cap table is one of our calling cards. Yeah, absolutely. The other thing we did as we were talking about this before is every investment we made, we went through the front door, meaning we talked to the company and so you take OpenAI, you take data bricks, you take Stripe. We spent a lot of time working with them and we had had some things in the press where initially they weren’t so sure if they wanted to do that. But once they understood the power of retail, how important this is for their brand, for their company, that these were their customers, uh, now not only are they in the product, they’re actually promoting it. They’re telling other companies, “Hey, you should talk to Sarah. You should learn about these products.” So, it’s been a fun year. We went from the new kids on the block trying to get in uh to now people coming to us and saying, “Hey, how do I join part of your fund?” Yeah. And I was going to say, Sarah, you you kind of have one of the coolest jobs I think in this entire room here because, you know, if you are someone who’s curious and optimistic and really focused on innovation and finding value for others, um you’re that’s your seat right now. And so, I look around the markets and you know, a lot of the stuff’s picked over. We all trade it every day, right, on the Legend and all that sort of stuff, but it’s the stuff again going back to the private markets. I think they’re driving a lot of the stuff that’s going on with the companies who have been public for a long time. So, talk to me a little bit about being on the doorstep of some of the most interesting companies and I think we can say that any of us have ever seen. You got to go back to the 80s, you know, when Apple and Microsoft and all that sort of stuff. So, talk to me a little bit about that experience. Yeah, of course. Thank you. And look at that. You get a round of applause. Got a nice cheer for you here. Thank you. Um, so I’ve been a private investor in the venture market. Something cool is happening there. Um, I’ve been a I’ve been an investor in the private market since 2010. And so when I started, it’s always been fascinating. It’s always been interesting. But when I started, companies would go public when they were worth 10, maybe a hundred billion. And for companies like Shopify or for companies like Square, you could have bought at the IPO and done extraordinarily well in the public markets with a lot of the growth and a lot of what these companies are today happening post IPO. And what we’ve seen in the last 10 years is that that is just not the case anymore. And companies are staying private much longer. And so much of that value creation is happening exclusively in the private markets. We now have companies worth trillion, one trillion plus that are still private. I I never thought I would see this in my career. And with this AI movement, we’re just seeing an explosion of opportunity and of incredibly cool innovation happening. And I just didn’t think it was right that so many of us, so many of you wouldn’t have the opportunity to benefit from that and to learn from that and to gain from that. And so that’s why I would agree. I think I have one of the coolest jobs. But to give you an example, I was lucky enough uh and probably somewhat smart enough to invest in Anthropic in early 2023 when it was pre-revenue and largely pre-product. And you know, it’s it’s probably a unique example in the history of capitalism. Seeing that company go from where it was then to where it is today has been the ride of a lifetime. And now that we’re building this at Robin Hood Adventures with RVI and RV2, we’re making that kind of ride accessible to everyone, which is incredibly fun. So Kathy, what Sarah just said is pretty fascinating in in the scope of my career, your career to see value creation to this scale in such a short period of time. And you know, your point about anthropic is like, think about it. Chat GPT had just come out in late 22. People Anthropic was not on the tip of most people’s tongues. If anything, they were like, you know, well considered well well behind and look at how we’ve just had this sort of flipping a little bit. We’ll get to that. Um but uh like speak to like past cycles when you’ve seen this sort of stuff. Is it something that has longevity or do you have to be so good at nailing a theme but also picking the winners because I think in technology often times it’s been winner take all. If you think of like Amazon, if you I mean there’s no shortage of examples going back to the late ‘9s. Google’s a good example too. So just help us think about that. Put that in some context for us. Yeah. And I’ll just set it up. I mean it was beginner’s luck maybe, but we our fund started late 22. So the end of a bare market and one of our first investments was anthropic. Uh and believe it or not, back then I think it was a $40 billion valuation back then. No, it wasn’t. It was a $4 billion valuation. $4 billion valuation. And back then because we had been in such a terrible bare market, the public markets, you know, there were founders who really wanted to talk to us about what we were doing because they knew about our research. Very often our research ends up in their pitch decks, our our big ideas research. And so we started our relationship with the founders at at a very interesting time. In terms of your question about this relative to past cycles, the difference is there are so many technologies evolving at the same time. Uh so the five major platforms uh AI, robotics, energy storage, public blockchains, multiomics sequencing and the life science space. Those five major platforms involve 15 different technologies and they’re all converging like we’ve never seen before. And so think about scurves, you know, uh we we have innovation slowly slowly then all at once slowly slowly then all at once. What we’re seeing right now and the reason we’re seeing these valuations scale so quickly is these scurves are feeding each other. Uh if you think about Tesla, it’s the convergence uh among AI, the autonomous vehicles will be powered by AI, but also robotics, robo, robo taxis are robots and energy storage, they will be electric. So that’s three scurves feeding each other. And yes, autonomous vehicles. uh we started doing the research 2014 when I I founded ARC and we thought it was on the horizon on the horizon and 12 years later here we are but it’s going to happen really fast now and the market is beginning to sniff that out and of course AI is speeding everything up when the cost of something drops 99.99% per year as AI inference costs are dropping now. You’re going to get an a lot more of it. So that’s why we’re seeing this explosion. It’s pretty exciting. So Sarah, um Kathy just laid out these kind of different converging sort of themes when you are constructing a portfolio because I think that a lot of folks out here like you know they’re not just oneoff trading this or buying that or whatever. They think about it holistically a little bit. How do you think about it? Because again a lot of these themes are kind of overlapping. the vend diagrams or you know and that I’m I’m sure it poses challenges sometimes for concentration purposes but it also lets you kind of really lean into some of the themes that you really believe in how how are you thinking about that right now because I have friends who are in VC and if they have not invested in all the names that you guys have early you could call it dumb luck I don’t believe it um you know I mean that sort of thing it’s really hard to raise money right now if you are not in open AI anthropic and agile I mean the list goes on and on so how how do you think about it from a portfolio construction production standpoint. Yeah. So, we thought long and hard and we think long and hard about what products can we build that will be attractive to retail that will perform. We obviously we want products that will deliver outstanding performance and that we can uniquely build very well. And so we started with a concentrated portfolio of what we think are the top 15 to 20 companies out there. And the bar there is extraordinarily high. So, think of data bricks, open AAI, Stripe, 11 Labs that just announced an up round today, Revolute, Ramp, and a few others. It’s it’s a it’s a fairly known universe, but we have to get these companies, we have to pick the right ones. We have to get in front of these companies and get them to say yes to us. And so, that’s that’s one strategy which we think is incredibly attractive because we think these companies have a lot of value creation ahead of them. And we actually think that a lot of value, a lot of talent, a lot of interest continues to acrue to these winners kind of as they become big, they become even more interesting often. And then we have a second strategy which is our second fund RV2 which is the other side of the barbell. So as you think about what AI is creating is it it’s really opening up every category from consumer to enterprise. Everyone is looking at their tech stack and rethinking what they’re using. And so we think it’s a really interesting time to have exposure to early stage. And the right way to do early stage in my opinion is to have a very diversified portfolio. And we picked Y Combinator as the right ecosystem to go and hunt in because it’s they they just have an incredibly high quality proven track record of attracting and creating amazing companies, many of which we actually have in in our first portfolio. And so that one is a different kind of portfolio construction that will be attractive to certain customers. We just want retail. We want everyone to have the kind of choice that very high net worth individuals and institutional investors have. If you want diversified early stages exposure, we have a product for you. If you want concentrated lateage household names, we have a product for you. And it’s just the beginning. Okay? Now, listen, we have these mics here. All right? And if you guys don’t line up behind, I’m going to leave a bunch of time because we got a couple legends up here and I really want you guys to be able to interact with Kathy and and obviously Sarah is building amazing uh you know portfolios and and Shiv’s building great products. So you guys were all here last night and you heard about all the different products. I know you guys know about most of them, but as they’re rolling out different ways to kind of uh execute trades and manage risk and all that sort of thing. Chip, Chip, give me your best pitch on why someone out here who has all these tools at their fingertips now, right? And all these different products, why they should consider putting these products in their portfolio. It’s not something that you guys are going to be able to see every tick of every day, you know, that sort of thing. And maybe that’s a good thing, right? because it’s not something, oh, I want to trade that and I know that there’s some liquidity, but what’s the best pitch of why someone should buy this or one of these funds, put it in there, and not look at it. Yeah, I mean, I I’ll start. Uh, the main reason is it’s just a diversified way to private markets. So, you can trade as much as you want in the public markets. We stand for access. We think that’s fantastic. But if you want to invest in Open AI, data pricks, etc. before they go public, this is one of the best ways to do it. You can get data liquidity and get low cost. That’s it. Now in your own portfolio you should decide what your allocation is going to be. Some people will want a lot of access to private some will want smaller but for us just having access that’s the way to do it and then you design your portfolio how you want. And I I would add uh another reason important reason is um thanks to the speed at which things are happening today technology is progressing there is going to be a lot of disruption disintermediation in the traditional in the traditional world and a lot of the larger benchmarks around a lot of highfrequency trading is based uh a lot of companies companies in those benchmarks are going to be disrupted. So if for no other reason but to have a hedge against the disruption because these companies are if you think about every sector transportation is going to be completely disrupted energy completely disrupted almost every sector is going to be disrupted so I think it’s important to at least have a hedge in my own case I think this is the way the world’s going to work so this is where I have most of my exposure all right so you use the term hedge just so you guys know and Kathy mentioned the research that she puts out the big ideas. Um you’re not going to find someone who’s just giving of their brain and their thought process. Um it’s all out there. You can get it. You see her on TV a lot and and that sort of thing. And and you got to love transparency and access when you’re thinking about investing. So I give you a lot of credit there. Um when I first met Kathy, uh it was I think late 2017 and Bitcoin was 1,700 bucks. I just want to be and you were taking a very long-term you were not somebody who was saying by the end of this year it’s going to be 10 grand or 20. That’s not what your thing is. You’re talking about the reasons in which you think it could go to these sorts of levels. Where are you right now? Because I’m sure you have a lot of views about these private companies that are going in your portfolios and they’re informing your views about your existing public market investments. What do you do when you get I you just used the term hedge, but some of these companies that are in your portfolios are going to get decimated, right? Is that fair to say or no? I mean, when you think about it, you mean in in the public markets, in the public portfolios, a bunch of the private stuff you’re investing is coming for your public stuff, like to the point you just made as far as disintermediation. Oh, yes. Are you I’m I’m having a little trouble hearing here. So, you’re saying that uh that some of these private companies moving into the public? Well, I what I mean is you taking that long-term view like you did in Tesla and EVs and Bitcoin and SpaceX and that sort of thing. Some of the investments you’re making right now, you’re taking a very long-term view of how do you think they’re going to affect, you just talked about disintermed disintermediation. How do they affect some of the names that are in your portfolio? Because maybe it’s helpful for this group to kind of think about that if they have access to these products. How might they think about moving out of some of their public equities? Well, I think you know even within the public markets there is uh for companies that have very little cash flow or not big cash cushion, there’s still risk aversion. Uh we’re seeing that especially in healthcare. Healthcare has been the most difficult uh space in the last four years and we think there’s going to be massive disruption there but a lot of those companies are in the public markets because venture wasn’t as open to funding them in the private market. So interesting. This is why having a public private portfolio which is what ours is 80% uh private 20% public gives us an opportunity to arbitrage between the relative valuations or even the existence of opportunities in either or space. So, so Sarah, um, when I think about, you know, you just used that term private for longer, you know, when companies um, are looking to get liquidity or an exit, it’s a dual path for the most part, dual track, it’s, you know, IPO and M&A, right? And so when you talk about some of those names that you’ve had access to, Stripes and Data Bricks and the these are amazing companies and they have valuations that would put them in the top easily 50 of the S&P 500, that sort of thing. How do you think about okay maybe these folks they don’t feel any need to do it you still are getting the acrruel from a value standpoint but what are you seeing on the on the lower end you know what I mean are there are you just seeing amazing opportunities in companies that are just kind of bubbling up and doing some new things like how are you thinking about the early stage because to me a lot of the money has been made for the for the time being until you get an exit in the open AI and anthropic and and some of these other names where are you seeing what what parts of the private markets in around AI are you seeing the best opport opportunities, the most exciting opportunities. Yeah, I I think the winners are still really really interesting, which is why we invest in RVI in some of those even though they would appear to be really expensive. We we build an investment case for each of them and there’s very good reason why we pick them because we think they have a lot of growth in front of them. But in an early stage portfolio or in an early growth portfolio, which is also a category that can be really interesting, we think about strategic value all the time. And if it’s a if it’s an N of one team, if it’s exceptional talent, if they’re building something that is really valuable in this moment in time, then chances are that they’ll be very good M&A candidates as well. And we’re seeing it with Stripe acquiring Open Router and AMD acquiring World Labs and, you know, Cursor being acquired and and lots of these companies. You never hear about these acquisitions because they don’t happen because those offers are turned down. But I actually think we’re seeing a resurgence of really interesting M&A now. As coming back to your previous question, some of these large incumbents want to bring AI native talent inhouse, want to diversify their offerings to meet this AI moment and maybe sometimes the best way to do that is in organic. That that’s such a great point about the M&A. When you think about Stripe, I I don’t think a lot of folks maybe maybe Kathy was thinking about it, but like how do they become integral into this AI economy and they buy a company that’s been around for two years at a valuation like wait what you know but that may prove 10x you know in two years that sort of thing. Um, I want to get to some questions, but ship, I gota I got to ask you one last question on the product front because I know that you guys have been branching out trying to offer different ways in which we just spent a lot of time investors can have access to things. IPOs is one of them. How does this strategy fit within you gaining credibility with companies but also other underwriters to make find your way into let’s say these you know underwriting groups when these companies are coming public? Yeah, it’s a great question. So, we have two constituents here. One is the retail customers and one is the companies. For the retail customer, our goal is you should be able to invest across the entire life cycle when they’re private, when they go public at the IPO, and when they’re when they’re publicly traded. For the companies, it’s a very similar pitch. Our goal is any stage of the life cycle you need capital, the Robin Hood customer can be there to support it. So, you’re in early stage round raising your first capital. Great. The early stage fund can do that. You’ve grown, you’re going to the growth round, we can do that in the growth fund. you want to IPO, we just announced we’re an underwriter, so we can help you there. And then after you go public, we can help you engage with retail. For example, you can use our save product where you can talk to customers. We do that on our own earnings calls. You can now live stream your earnings in the app. And so the appeal is we don’t just want to be there once. We’re not a VC. We’re not just going to provide you capital and go away. We’re going to be there for the entire life cycle. That’s the vision. And when I talk to Vlad and the team, what does success look like? Success looks like in 5 years, every company that’s raising says, I want Robin Hood on the cap table. every company that’s going public says, “Can you help me with my retail strategy?” And that any public company that wants to gauge with retail knows we’re the destination. And you can see the pieces now. And it’s because of everybody in this room and listening. And I think we’re getting we’re getting pretty close. Yeah. Um All right. Listen, I want to get to a lot of questions, but you got to do me a favor. Let’s treat it like a speed round. Let’s have you know short questions and we’re going to give you efficient answers because I know there’s going to be a lot of you. Let’s start right here. Hi. Uh my name is uh Hong and uh uh by the way thank you uh Kathy for all the good content you released regularly on internet it’s really good. I have uh two macro questions. The first question is uh uh a lot of people say AI is going to give us a production boom and I agree with that but some people say that it’s going to solve the debt problem. uh if we look at the uh history of the United States for the last 100 years, it seems like the spending of the government and has been accelerating much faster than the uh uh booming of GDP and uh I don’t see how necessary AI booming is going to change the behavior of the government. So what could be a possible way of the solution for the debt problem? The second problem uh second question is related. Let’s just do let’s just do the one dude like I love you. I love great hat Kathy. Give it to me. Okay, thank you very much for the compliment, but I am standing on the shoulders of an incredible research team. So, that’s where I’ll start. In terms of the the debt problem, I know that that $40 trillion is grabbing the headlines. Uh, and I I I feel as though I’m back in the early 80s when I first started my career. Uh, and the same question, it was the exact same question. And the deficit as a percent of GDP was 5 a.5% back then as well. And the right answer was we grew out of that deficit. And while the debt never went down very much ever, uh the economy grew and the wealth in the economy grew so so much that it began to shrink that debt as a percent of GD GDP. So, uh, I think that’s the main answer and I think this, uh, S-curve feeding S-curves couldn’t have happened at a better time because we need that kind of growth and I think we’ll get it right here. Okay. Yeah. Hello. Um, I I really wanted to ask about the Robin Hood venture funds and the fact that, you know, they have a negative NAV in both of them. I wanted to understand that a little bit better and I also wanted to see you know as some of these companies that are venture start to become public you know we’ve seen some of these other use cases before that that could really drop you know the price of the overarching fund sometimes depending on allocation so I just want to understand what you guys are thinking about and how to address that I can take the first piece so our uh our navs more or less in our two funds at this moment in time are about $25 5 a share. Um I haven’t checked in the last few minutes, but last time I checked, our first fund RVI was actually trading at a premium to NAV. And that’s been true for most of its life. Um it’s it’s you know, obviously I don’t comment on the share price, but that’s been true overall as a fact. We most importantly the what we can control is the inputs which is getting you guys access to the best companies that we believe will deliver performance at scale and then making sure that we pay the right price and then making sure that we every quarter deliver a valuation that is fair and there’s a very disciplined process to do that. It’s highly scrutinized by the SEC, by our internal teams, by audit, external auditors. And so every single quarter, these both of these funds will release a full asset byasset fair value. And that is what the NAV per share will be based off of. Our second fund, which is our early stage fund, last time I checked, again, was currently trading at a slight discount. It’s it’s not it’s not surprising. It’s a new fund. It’s a new product. It’s a diversified portfolio of very early stage companies. I’m I’m incredibly again what we can control is be in the right universe. I I would definitely stand behind Y Combinator as the right universe. Make sure we have the right portfolio manager. Rich Aberman is incredible. He’s a exited successfully exited YC founder, former visiting partner. and making sure we’re in the right companies. Uh in the last in the last pre in the previous batches, we aimed for 40 companies out of 200 which we believe are the most promising and we got there and we got 40 companies to say yes to us even before the fund was public which I think is quite an achievement and would be very difficult to replicate for any individual retail investor. She have anything to add there or no? Um, I think when you look at the clos fund structure, it’s the for the early stage fund, it’s not surprising. This is a long-term time horizon. Most of these companies aren’t known. What you’d expect is some of these companies would do well, some won’t. But as soon as you see a company do well, the NAV should go up and the fund should trade. In the in the uh growth stage fund, as Sarah mentioned, for the life of it’s actually trading at a premium. I think a healthy premium, if you look at historically closed end funds, is about 10 to 15% and for the most part, that’s where we’ve been. But the nice part is investors can make their own decision. If you think it’s trading cheap, you can go in and buy it. If you think it’s trading rich, you can sell it. I think that’s a feature, not a bug. It gives the investors the ability to uh to trade in and out if they would like. Over here, hey, uh Kathy Wood’s uh Arc Investments funds have underperformed QQQ since the insion. So why did you based on what credentials you guys invited her uh where there are many people who are putting their money return expecting great returns. Thank you. May I answer that question please? So this is also making the headlines right and uh there’s a lot of endpoint sensitivity involved here. Uh, so you’re looking at the five-year record. If you look at our oneyear, threeyear, this is as of I believe the end of August. One year, three-year, 10-year inception to date, our performance, ARC’s performance is in the top five to 10% in each of those periods of the morning star database in our category. Now you are comparing us to QQQs. Uh that is an incorrect comparison because we are focused on technologically enabled innovation across all sectors. One roughly 30% 25 to 30% of our portfolio right now is in health care which we believe is going to be the most profound application of AI. The QQQs are not involved in health care or in financial services. It’s barely involved in financial services. So there’s no comparison. Thank Thank you, Kathy. Um,

let’s go over here.

Uh, so first of all, super happy that you’re here, Kathy. Thank you for taking the time and traveling to us and I’m super excited to hear your thoughts on my question. So a theme a major theme of this year has been space right not only of this conference but of the overall market. So I’d love to hear your thoughts especially with the recent pullback in a lot of these stocks. What are the areas that retail investors should be looking at whether it’s infrastructure launch connectivity IoT that are you think are underpriced by the market for long-term value? Or this is specifically on the space space. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Uh well, you know, when uh people ask us about um about the ramifications of AI on everything and talk about job losses, uh we we actually bring to life to them this new world that is opening up. And I I think it’s going to create part of the boom out there. Now, it is very interesting. SpaceX has been taking most of the oxygen out of the room. Uh, understandably so because it is going to be the most important company not only in space, but I think potentially because it probably will acquire Tesla, probably uh it will be the generational company of our time. And I think if you’re listening to to Elon, he’ll tell you in or that chips of course are the biggest gating factor for him because he’s not looking at just launching rockets or at Starlink. Uh but he’s looking at his neocloud business terrestrial and soon to be in space uh which is going to solve our infrastructure problem here. and he is also looking at chasing open AI and uh anthropic and becoming the premier frontier uh AI play. So we’re we’re we’re looking at space as a big part of enabling AI. It’s a big part of the infrastructure play. Uh so I was just in uh I’ll this is the last thing I’ll say. Uh I was in New Zealand, got to visit rocket rocket lab Peter Beck uh just last week to 10 days ago. uh and uh just uh talking to him uh I began to understand that what SpaceX is doing it and especially since it’s going to phase out the Falcon 9 is opening up a a whole new world for for companies like rock rocket lab who are thinking about vertical inte doing this vertically integrated way. So I think that variable is what you should really be looking at. What who is helping these uh companies that want to vertically integrate uh with reusable rockets move into space and help create this new world. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, good afternoon. Um so my question is uh what challenges this is open for anyone. What challenges have you faced um evaluating early stage or early growth companies and what signals gave you confidence to navigate through the um ambiguity and noise to find strong candidates that yield potential? I’m happy to take that one. Um look, that’s the that’s the job, right? Um first and foremost, for early stage and for early growth companies, it’s all about the team. Is this an absolutely outlier group of people that is going to beat the odds whatever they do and that is going to be a really attractive group of humans for potentially a larger company to want to bring on. And and that’s kind of what we’re seeing for some of these amazing teams that are getting these crazy acquisition offers from large companies is it’s not so much their product. Some of it is, but it’s really the ability of this group of humans to build something really special and to do it in a way that is extraordinarily differentiated. And honestly, that just simplifies the question because when you think about is this person a top 10 people I’ve ever met in my life, it would I quit my job to go work for this person? Then you kind of get to the answer a little bit more easily. I was just going to add to that. I agree the talent is absolutely critical. It’s the number one score in our scoring system. I also think doing research on these new technologies uh and actually uh choosing the the right technologies is critically important here. uh and trying to understand how what is the learning curve of this new technology and how is it going to scale across se sectors and become a really big opportunity which with with AI we have so many opportunities is this kind of company going to be able to do it and you’re right whenever things are not going well I think about the last conversation that we’ve had with the management team looking in their eyes and uh you know you can see conviction in eyes. I’ve been doing this for a very long time. Uh and sometimes you just pick up the phone and you say, “Hey, uh what is going on here?” There’s a lot of confusion. So being able to call management teams, I think is really important. Thank you, Kathy. Hi, Kathy. Um thanks for all the work that you do and your amazing team. Shout out to Tasha, Brett, Daniel. really excellent team. Yes. My questions regarding SpaceX and the AI compute buildout. Uh so Elon has said next year that they’re forecasting 8 GW of AI compute. Uh possibly more 8 to 10. Yeah. 8 to 10. And it seems to me like institutional analysts broadly do not think that that’s going to happen. Um I I believe that when you uh assign elite uh space engineers to these problems then good things happen. Um but I wanted to know do you feel that this is priced in and uh what’s your sense on them achieving that goal in the next year? So, um, one of the things we’ve all learned is there’s time and there’s Elon’s time. And of course, Elon thinks things will happen a little faster typically than most most people do. So, our view is that it won’t m they’ll they’ll get into the five to 10. That would be heroic if they do anywhere in that range. But in terms of really scaling this business, we’re looking more into 28 29. We have a fiveyear investment time horizon. So that would be wonderful if they if they got Now he’s saying uh that he expects uh you know much more than 10 gigawatts in the in the 5 to 10 I mean in yes in the fiveyear time horizon. Um I agree with you institutional investors are finding this difficult to believe. uh but and they’re being appropriately cautious. I think that’s good news. I love the fact that there’s a lot of concern, a lot of caution that we’ve got institutional skepticism. This is the wall of worry we need to create a very durable bull market in not only SpaceX but a lot of other stocks out there and I think that’s what’s happening. Uh last one very sadly guys. Oh, perfect. Good afternoon. Thank you panel for being here and your inspiration to us guys. Um for Miss Kathy and this kind of piggybacks off the previous gentleman when evaluating an early stage disruptive technology particularly AI and robotics how do you distinguish a company that has genuinely crossed the promising technology into a scalable business from one that’s still primarily a compelling technology story and thank you Miss Sarah for what you said too because in my job people are the mission but technology and scalable and crossing over. How is that? Yeah, that’s a I can take the first pass and then maybe if you want to add on, but um that’s a great question and it’s particularly true with physical AI, robotics for example, where there’s there’s a lot that needs to be proven, lots of safety questions and issues. And often times the best way to figure that out is to talk to early customers that are deploying these technologies as pilots and also to see where in the background of these founders have they defied gravity before. So for example, Tesla engineers or SpaceX engineers tend to be very good secondtime physical AI founders because they found ways before to think from first principles and do things that were you know maybe not even science challenges but engineering challenges and solve them. So, a combination of has this team done something like that before and can we talk to a lot of early customers to figure out if it’s kind of tipping into that um usefulness. I’ll just add I I think you nailed it uh Sarah, but I I all I always say follow the developers. Developers love hard projects. And if you see a company attracting more talent, again, we’re back to the talent question. And we’re probably going to be talking more and more about follow the agents given what we heard from open AI about dots yesterday. So uh again even this monitoring for success world is changing very very rapidly. Listen great question. Um thank you all for being here. This I could have done this all day long. This is amazing and uh we really appreciate all your uh you know insights here and uh I hope you guys check out what they’re all doing because I think they’re taking a very very interesting approach and they’re bringing it to you and I think that’s what’s really important about this the access and democratizing that seems like something that is a theme here and this is my third hood summit and it seems like they keep building on that every year. So congratulations to you guys and thank you Kathy for being here. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Well, they didn’t disappoint. Thank you, Dan, Kathy, Shiv, Sarah. All right. Well, where’s everyone going, guys? This is it. This is We’re getting to the finale. We’re in the bottom of the eighth inning here. Uh penult penultimate session before we get to our finale. But uh we spent a ton of time today talking about markets, where potential opportunities are, how we find them, how we put capital to work. But now we’re shifting away from the market and we’re looking inward to ourselves as traders. Because having a strategy is one thing, but actually following it when there’s real money on the line, something totally different. How many people have experienced that? like, “Oh, it all feels good until you’re in the trade and things go sideways.” I mean, I’m a trader. I’ll be the first to admit I’ve chased trades. I’ve held on my losers too long. I’ve taken profits too early. I’ve gotten frustrated. When I get on a winning streak, I get overconfident and oversized. And my personal favorite, I’m literally looking at the screen and I know I’m about to make a decision that was absolutely stupid right as I was actively making it. And I said, “You know what? This is a bad idea.” and I push the button anyway. So, quick show of hands. Anyone else recognize any of those behaviors in your trading? Great. So, this is basically group therapy now. So, that’s why I’m so excited to work with our next speaker. I I started talking to Jared Tendler uh uh earlier in the summer. Um, one because he’s he’s phenomenal, but two, I need a little help help with my golf game, and he also wrote a book about that. Uh, but Jared spent his entire career studying these mental patterns. Not just how to recognize them, but how to correct them. So, if you’ve ever known exactly what you should do as a trader and then watch yourself do something totally different, we are in the right place. So, please welcome to the stage author of the mental game of trading, mental game coach, Mr. Jared Tendler.

Happy to be here. You have heard from some fantastic speakers over the last couple days, including those who were just on stage. You’ve gotten some amazing advice. Unfortunately, it’s all useless to you. That is useless to you unless you have the right frame of mind to actually make use of it. The best knowledge in the world is absolutely wasted when you’re not in the right frame of mind. When you cannot access it. Look, we all know trading is intense. Your goals are on the line. Your future is on the line. Your money is on the line. Now, being able to have the mental and emotional wherewithal to withstand that emotional intensity, to not get steamrolled, just as Obie just mentioned, where you know exactly what you should be doing and can’t quite actually get yourself to do it, right? It’s one thing to know that you should stay on the sidelines, not jump into a trade out of fear or FOMO, greed. It’s another thing to be able to have that wherewithal in the heat of the moment. you know, you know, you should, you know, not close a a trade prematurely out of out of fear. And yet, what happens? Price dances around, you know, tantalizingly longer than normal, and you just kind of can’t withstand that intensity. Or if price is nose diving right back toward your entry, you’re closing out of panic. And it’s easy to say, stay calm, be poised, sit on your hands, not revenge trade, trust your strategy. But can you do it when it matters? Right? I’ve been a mental game coach for over 20 years. I I have clients in 45 countries. I coach PGA Tour winners, professional poker players, sports betterers. I have clients that are institutional day traders, fund managers trading books of seven to nine figures. But I also work with retail traders just like yourselves. And the reality is you’re all dealing with very similar stuff, right? You know, as a mental game coach, my job is to condition your mind, much like an athlete must condition their body. Now, we know Texas is known for a few things. Obviously, the space program, as we all got to experience last night, uh it’s also known for football. Can you imagine a football player not conditioning their body to compete? It would be illogical. They would get destroyed. They get injured. And yet, just maybe quick show of hands. How many of you actively work on your mental game every single day that you trade?

I don’t see too many hands. And there in lies the point. You’re basically allowing yourself to get steamrolled. Okay. Now, one of the top priorities I have in my career is making the mental game tangible, right? emotions, this mental stuff, like it’s it’s hard to make real and tangible. Well, we’re gonna do that today, okay? And make it a lot easier to help understand how to work your mind, how to condition your mind. Now, today, I am your coach. And I want you to take that seriously. This is an opportunity. You don’t know where the breakthroughs are going to come from. Maybe it’ll happen today. Maybe you’ll plant the seeds for a breakthrough that’ll happen down the line. But the reality is your engagement is essential for that. So, we’re going to get started right now. I want you to open up your Robin Hood app, okay? And I want you to navigate. You’ll see a little button that says watch live. Click on that and you will see a poll.

I want you to answer the question. And for those of you watching the live stream, not here, please do the same. Can you see emotions when they affect your trading decisions? Can you recognize that happening in real time? Now, I’ve done some research on this 5 years ago with a help of several partners of mine. We surveyed over,200 traders from around the world and you’ll see these 90% men, 10% women, stratified across age demographics and from people from around the world. And the effect that we found helds up across all different demographics. 90% 91% of traders had the ability to see in real time when emotions were affecting their trading. All right, let’s put up the results here. 84% can see it. Okay, so numbers a little bit lower, which tells me that we’ve got some work to do. And perhaps what we’re going to do today is going to help you to actually be able to do that. Now, one more question here. Navigate right back to that same spot. You’re gonna see another question. Okay. The next question is, do you have a concrete strategy to be able to manage your emotions effectively in real time while you’re trading? Yes or no? How many of you have that concrete strategy in place? Now, what I found was a whopping 57 point gap. One-third of traders had the ability to manage and control their emotions in real time. Everybody else getting steamrolled. And even worse, when you can see what’s happening and cannot stop it, that’s going to send your mind into a tail spin because it’s inexplicable how you could do something so dumb. You know better. As Obie was saying, you literally I’ve had clients literally grabbing their hand on a mouse and they cannot stop themselves from entering a trade. Okay, so this issue is ubiquitous. It happens around the world. You’re not alone, but there is solutions. All right, let’s see the poll results here. And it looks like the numbers are quite similar. Okay, so 37% of you have a effective strategy. Now, for those 37%, maybe we’ll help to refine that strategy a little bit more. For the rest of you, pay very close attention. Right? This is your opportunity. Take it. We can do something about this. You’re not helpless. I work with I work with traders just like you every single day. There’s a lot we can do. So, let’s drill down. All right. There are five big problems that I see every single day, right? And I want you to open up that app one more time. Last question that I’ll ask you through the app. The rest we’ll do here. Which issues do you struggle with? There are five big ones that I find. Discipline, fear, tilt, which is another word for anger, getting, you know, a little bit of revenge trading, hating to lose, things like that. Confidence issues, and of course, greed. So, which of the issues do you struggle with most? And you’re perfectly welcome to select more than one. I want to understand what we’re dealing with here because as a coach, I like to personalize everything I do, including a group of this size, right? I want to have an impact on every single one of you. So, let’s see what the results are here. All right. 34% lacking discipline, 25% uh deal with greed, 25% fear and confidence. Okay. So, it’s a pretty decent stratified mix. So, the question is well uh let’s go back to the other screen. the uh five mental uh five big issues. So, let’s talk about each one in just a little bit more detail. Okay, I want to make sure that you all have a good idea of what we’re orienting ourselves around. Okay, first off, discipline, which was the biggest issue that you all said was an issue, but do you really have a discipline issue? I would argue that you don’t. Now, it’s easy to look at your violations of your rules as just being a discipline problem, but you must rule out that it’s not caused by fear, anger, a lack of confidence, overconfidence. Overconfidence is a sneaky one, or greed. Because if you try to correct your discipline issues and they’re actually caused by emotion, guess what? You are going to make that emotional issue worse. Why? Because discipline is like the muscle of the mind. You are pushing yourself to adhere to your rules. And there are times where you can squatchch your emotions. And we’ve all done that, right? you know, situations outside of trading that kind of frustrate us, but you can’t really let that frustration out. You’re able to kind of control it in the moment, but trading is way too intense. It’s not like situations in life where you can get away with that. What’ll happen is that ability to squaltch will get overrun by that emotional intensity. And I will explain more about that in a minute. So, the discipline issues that we’re mostly dealing with are boredom, right? like those times where you, you know, mind starts to tune out, lacking a little bit of energy, market’s chopping around, not a whole lot going on, right? And then you kind of just do something random, you know, almost take a trade just to boost your excitement a little bit, have a little fun. Talking about impatience, sometimes that impatience can come from a lack of energy. Sometimes that impatience comes because you have way too much intensity. You’re so motivated to make money that you cannot help yourself. So, you get overrun. Okay, next issue, greed. Now, the greed, fear spectrum that you see popularized is a kind of poor representation of what individual traders deal with cuz there’s not a single person on the planet that I would ever say that Michael Jordan, the Houston Astros are greedy because they want to win championships. In trading, your job is to make money. So to say that you’re greedy trying to make more of it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense except when your efforts to make money actually work against you. Now you’re like one of the Astros trying to turn a single into a double and you get picked off. But as traders, you have to define the line. You have to know exactly when your decisions are being guided by greed that’s excessive versus when it’s actually just your inherent desire to profit, make money. Fear, obviously FOMO is a big one. Fear of losing sometimes even the fear of failure. There’s that overthinking. The mind starts to spiral and go into overdrive. There’s fear of losing, right? You get very defensive, protective of capital excessively. yourself. Now, one piece of advice around fear, especially for those of you that close positions prematurely, regularly, there’s a problem that you have. Sometimes fear actually protects you from success. Imagine you have a t-shirt business and you’re continually selling your t-shirts at a discount just because somebody walked in your door. Like, you can’t run a business that way unless your profit margins are designed that way. So, if you’re protecting yourself by continually closing positions prematurely, not being able to get out the full, you know, scope of your trade, not trading the the way it’s designed, you’re basically guaranteeing your long-term failure because trading is not going to be successful enough to truly make your time worthwhile. So, be very careful about what you’re protecting against because sometimes it might actually be the success you’re after. And of course, tilt. Now tilt comes from poker but basically means anger and frustration. The hatred of losing and many of you are very very competitive. Just quick show of hands. How many of you are very competitive and hate to lose? That doesn’t surprise me. Look, it’s a trait that many people has led to a lot of success in trading and elsewhere. We’re not shy about your hatred of losing. I don’t I don’t want you to lose that. But you got to understand what losing means in trading because it’s not the same thing as in baseball and basketball, right? You cannot think about a losing trade like losing game one. You have to think of losing and trading like maybe striking out in the first inning, maybe uh you know having a small error. You just something just one single play. Imagine playing a baseball game that lasts 3 months. That’s what trading is, right? So, if you hate losing, have at it. But just zoom out and make sure that you’re not thinking of trading like everything else because it’s not. This is a diff very, very different game. You cannot trade the same way. All right, last one here. Confidence. Now, as I said earlier, overconfidence is a very sneaky problem. And I would imagine that very few of you here have the ability to recognize those early warning signs when your mind starts to deviate and starts getting a little high in your own supply, right? Believing that you’re more capable than you actually are. Believing that you deserve all the profits that are coming your way. There’s luck in this game. It is a reality. All right? I work with poker players. Any poker player that comes into trading has an edge in being able to understand that in the short term you are not in full control of your results. But if you believe that you are, your mind is going to start to deviate. You’re going to start to put on more size. You’re going to start to take more trades. You’re going to start to assume that you know what’s going to happen. The best way to know that you’ve become overconfident is that you start become pred start to become predictive of what’s going to happen. start. Solid confidence means being very comfortable with what you have done in the past, but knowing full well that you have absolutely no control over what is going to happen in the next trade. You are a probabilistic business. You do not have psychic powers. But all of you can sometimes get a little bit seduced by it. Look, I’ve institutional traders that killed it in 2020, 2021 and then they absolutely were awful in 22 23 until they started to really understand how much overconfidence had infected their perspective. Of course, on the flip side, right, a lack of confidence, you’re really kind of down in a draw down. It can very easy to question a profitable strategy and you start working against it or maybe even not trading it. Market conditions are challenging. it can be hard to know where your edge still lies. Now, when we start to understand confidence, it’s to understand that confidence is an emotion. It is not something that’s solid. And as an emotion, it’s influenced by your perspective. So, it’s easy to have your sense of your own capacity be altered. I want to ask another question. Quick show of hands. How many of you would like to make easy money? Wish that you could make easy money. Okay. Now, how many of you also believe in Santa Claus? Okay, to me this is adult Santa Claus. Okay, it is fiction. You do not have the ability to make money easily except the trading will kind of maybe give it to you once in a while. Anything hard is worth doing. And if you believe and if you are motivated to make easy money, I can promise you that when you are making money easily, you are going to get overconfident. And when you are struggling, the idea that you can make money easily is going to be eviscerated. So you’re creating a lot of emotional volatility by having that little outdated wish hanging in the background of your mind. Okay. So let’s drill into this a little bit more and understand why it is very difficult to control your emotions cuz I’ve just given you a bunch of advice and as I said at the outset maybe it is worthless too unless you are able to use it. So let’s understand how we can uh drill into your emotions a little bit more uh by discussing a concept called the Jük Dodson law. Now, I am color blind, so I’m going to try to get these colors right. Uh, and the reality is that emotions make us dumb. They allow us to believe things that aren’t real, and they are the primary cause of all of the repetitive problems that you have in your trading. Okay, these are not that’s an R.

All right, so on one side we’ve got performance and down here we’ve got emotion or energy.

Now I’m going to say some important things today. Hopefully maybe a few of that I’ve already said. This needs to be burned into your brain because if you do not understand this very simple concept, you are fighting against reality. You are believing that you can send a rocket into space without any propulsion. Like that you could fly, right? Gravity is real. We all accept gravity. If you don’t understand this concept, you are fighting against the reality in your brain. All right, here’s what this is. So when your performance is low, it’s because you don’t have enough energy or emotion to power the mind. So think about those times when you’re exhausted, burned out, tired, just getting back from vacation, right? Your performance is going to struggle. As your energy rises, performance rises as well, right? But you know, you get up in this space now, this is where the boredom might start to take place, right? You’re there trading but not totally energized. we find ourselves right at the top. Okay, now if this is not green, somebody yell at me. Okay, now this is the peak of your performance. Okay, green means go. Now for the institutional traders, the traders have been trading for 25, 30 years, they’ve got a lot more territory that is green. They can have a little bit less energy at times. They can have a little bit more emotion at times and they will still be rock solid. The more junior trader you are, the less experience you have. You’ve got a narrow slice where you’re going to be at your best. So, you got to know what that looks like. You got to know what helps to create it. Talk about preparing yourself, conditioning your mind like you condition your body. What’s going to get you there? Do you know? I would argue many of you don’t because you’re not studying yourself enough to be able to do that. Now, problem is that’s fickle. So, as emotion or energy continues to rise, you’re going to fall down this this curve and your performance is going to suffer and we end up down in this zone. Let’s call this 80, right? 80 out of 100. This is where mistakes are inevitable. You cannot stop these mistakes from happening. You can only rip yourself away from your desk, from your phone, chuck it, run away. because at that point the emotion uh the intense emotions have shut down your ability to think clearly. This is a fundamental law of human nature. You may have heard of it as the the fight orflight mechanism. Okay. Now higher brain functions include thinking, planning, making decisions but also includes emotional control. So just understand this clearly. The part of the brain responsible for controlling emotions is shut down and turned off by intense emotions. Okay? It’s a sadistic way the brain is wired, but this is the reality. So when you get to 80, you are pretty close to being in a blind rage, on a blind panic or euphorically blind, right? The the language there is real because at that point, you’re not thinking at all. And if you’re not thinking well then you lose access to new knowledge. You lose access to the advice that I’m giving you right now and the other things you’ve learned today. So this is firmly a red zone. Do not go. You have to be able to prevent yourself from getting to that point. And if you do, you rip yourself away. That is your only defense. Okay. Everything else, you know, we’ll say is sort of shades of yellow, right? Caution. Now, there’s a few other points here. When you’re at 75 and 80, one of the most difficult parts about that is that you have awareness. It’s like the last mental feature to be dissolved just before you become blind. You’re still aware of what you’re doing, but you cannot translate your thoughts into action. As Obie Obie was saying earlier, right? Know exactly what you’re doing is wrong. Cannot stop yourself. That is why It’s not some random thing. You’re more emotional than you realize. Now you know and now you can’t make the excuse.

Now from this point down to here, there are early warning signs. And as we begin to develop a strategy here, this is what you need to keep in mind. Okay. So let’s keep working at this and begin developing a strategy that is going to help you to take your trading to the next level here. All right. So step one, mapping your pattern. You all have spent years studying the markets, studying the charts, studying the patterns that exist there to find opportunities for profit. Turn that same skill on yourself. There is no randomness here. There is no randomness on that board. The patterns that you see in yourself need to be studied and nailed down so that you have the warning signs before your emotional system shuts down. You can’t stop what you can’t see. It’s as simple as that. So, here is what you’re going to do. You are going to create a map of your emotional patterns. Okay? And this is an example comes from a client. And I’m just going to read a couple of these. But the idea is you’re trying to create a scale from 1 to 10. The blank spaces are purposeful. Okay. When you’re first getting started with this, you might only have, you know, 1 and 5 and 10, right? Very early warning sign. The signs that you’re in danger, right? Kind of firmly in that yellow. And then the signs of complete mental shutdown, whatever that looks like for you. Okay, this is personalized. You have to spend the time yourself studying your own patterning. Okay, so example here at level one, start thinking about the utility of my money, wanting to lock it up again, right? Want to have a big trade to secure profit. So very clear example of an early warning sign. Now he knows that greed has begun to take hold in his mind, right? the very end here at level 10. Want the absolute best return right now. Give up all control. Only focus on making money. Okay, not very complicated. And this right now is enough to give you some control. As long as you’re taking action early enough, but why stop here? There’s some holes in this. And the more you study your own patterning, I promise you, every single one of you will find more details. This is not something that you’re born with. This is a skill that is developed the more you pay attention and the more that you practice. And this is what you can end up creating. Okay, this took about 2 to 3 weeks. I’m going to give you some advice on how to do this, but it is not overly complicated. And one thing I want you to notice very clearly, step one or level one is different now. Just logging on to this client’s brokerage account was an indicator that something had changed mentally. just logging on because he wouldn’t do that. Now, this is a swing trader. He would not do that if he was truly comfortable with the positions. When he starts looking for more, he wants to get a taste of what that P&L is running at that moment. So, you see the other things that are now filled in. There’s more detail. There’s early warning signs. He set up a phenomenal defense. You want to win championships, you got to have a good defense. This is the beginning of how you develop a good defense. And here is how you do it. You’re going to spend time collecting data around whatever problems you dealt with, right? Whether it’s discipline issues, fear, FOMO, greed, overconfidence. And here’s how you’re going to do it. Okay? Every single day you’re trading, you’re going to pay very close attention to whenever your emotions start to creep up. Right? When you know what is optimal, it’s easy to see when they deviate. You also can do this immediately after a mistake, whether or not you know it was emotional or not. You can do it defensively, maybe every hour, every two hours. Okay? The point is you are actively collecting information that gives you indicators about where your emotions are, right? Study them over time. You do you do this, you know, three times, you’re going to gain more information than you know now. You do it 12 times over a few weeks. You collect these puzzle pieces that eventually allow you to turn it into this. And

there it is. Okay, that’s what you get to create. So, let’s just go through a few examples so you know exactly what we’re dealing with here. Okay, so first you’re listing down the instrument of the situation. Then the trigger, like what sparks the emotion, what sparks the mistake. Was it a loss? Was it market conditions? What are your thoughts that are happening in that moment? What are you thinking to yourself or out loud? You know, I can’t believe I was so stupid, right? Or I’m looking for more money. Uh what are the emotions? Can you identify what you’re feeling in that moment? What are the actions or behaviors? Right? The behaviors might include, you know, death grip on the mouse, maybe you’re leaning into the monitors, maybe your foot’s tapping a little bit more, maybe you actually feel some tension in your head or your chest. And of course, what’s the mistake? Now this last one change in decision-m I do not mean what should your decision-m be I mean how does your thinking about your trading change right now all of a sudden you’re maybe thinking probabilistically you’re thinking deterministically like you know what’s going to happen maybe you’re worried about uh losing profit uh certainly unrealized profit let’s look at an example okay situation bought Apple trigger got stopped out by a tick And then of course it races to your target. Thoughts. I can’t believe this is happening again. Obviously not saying it with the same kind of inflection as you would when you want revenge, right? There’s a lot more intensity there. Behavior. Hyperfocused on finding a new entry to get my money back. Okay. Then of course finding a sub-optimal entry because that’s what you do when you’re hunting. Anything looks good at that point. And then the change in decision-m is being overly focused on making money. So like I said, you spend time doing this enough and over time you have a clearer map of your own emotionality gives you an opportunity for control. All right. Now the next step getting to the root. I want you to just imagine that you experience pain in your foot while you’re walking. What would you do? I mean certainly some of us would just try to walk it off. Maybe assume it was temporary. Maybe you hope it just goes away and maybe it does. But if it doesn’t, you’re going to investigate. You’re going to want to understand what the heck is causing this pain. You’re not going to live with it. Why do you not do that with your emotions?

Emotions are a signal, right? They’re a a pain signal in a sense, right? That there is something wrong. And in this case, what is wrong is with your perspective. The the flaws, the biases, the wishes like making easy money. These illusions that we can easily get, you know, kind of sucked into, they are what cause the emotionality. Emotions are not a problem, right? As we saw on the whiteboard, we need emotion to perform. It’s not bad. What is bad is what causes it to become excessive and have you cross that threshold and have it start to work against you. So, if you’re going to develop a strategy that is going to actually not just gain control, but truly correct your emotionality. Look, the reality is you want to be able to not have to defend against your emotions. If you’re constantly having to be aware of and monitor your emotions, guess what you’re not able to do as well? Focus on the charge. Be as receptive as you want. You want your mind clear and not having to play aggressive defense, but to get there is going to take some work. So, you’ve got to understand what the hidden flaws are. Okay? And these are some examples. I know many of you got the mental game of trading. In the book, I talk about 40 different of these underlying flaws. Just go through a couple right now. Expecting perfection. There’s a massive difference between expecting perfection in your performance and in your results, right? Execution is maybe more in your control. You can have perfect execution aspirationally at least, but if you expect it and you underperform, then your reaction to mistakes and you know can be quite a lot worse, right? The trigger is the loss or the underperformance and it causes you to have frustration because you were expecting more of yourself than you could reasonably deliver. Okay? aspirationally be perfect, right? Some of the best traders and athletes in the world have that desire, but they do not have the expectation, hating bad luck, you know, hating to lose. If you have these beliefs or perspectives in the back of your mind, it is going to produce anger. It’s going to create overreactions when things happen in the market that you do not have control of. Hindsight bias, one of my favorites, right? you see how much money you could have made and then falsely assume that you’re going to be able to do the same thing in the next time, right? That this hindsight should turn into foresight is a flaw that many many people struggle with. Okay? So, your job is to figure out I want you to really in be inquisitive around the mistakes that you have. Now that you’re collecting more data, you’re peering into your issues a little bit more clearly. Ask yourself why. What what is going on in the background? Why am I reacting in the way that I am? and you’ll start to uncover these flaws. Okay, now we’re going to put this all together and allow you to start to correct the problem in real time. Bring the battle to the moment. The reality is conditioning your mind is a lot like conditioning your body. You have to be able to train. And the difficult part about know the mental game is that the best time to train is in the heat of the moment when the weight is at its heaviest. Look, if you go to the gym and you’re only lifting weights, it’s easy. You’re not really going to gain much. So when you’re trading, you have to be ready for those moments to be able to push yourself to have the right perspective in those moments. And when you do that again and again and again and again, rinse, repeat, that is how you start to retrain your mind, that’s how you gain control and ultimately delete these issues entirely. All right, so like I said, I like to uh make the mental game tangible, right? And let’s put this all together here, okay? Just so it’s very very clear. What if we start labeling all of these points much like the map I was talking about there like this? Now we can do the same thing on the discipline side, right? When your energy is too low, but this is effectively what we’re talking about. So the yellow area, right, is your best time to be injecting the right perspective. you still have enough kind of brain capacity, enough ability to think clearly that you can fight up against your patterns, right? If you wait to hear, you’re going to get steamrolled. That is a reality. So, by finding those early warning signs, you create the ability to work against the issue, work against the reaction, and pull yourself back up. And maybe on days where you typically would have, you know, turned towards revenge, taken in several losses in a row, frustrations rising, you’re in a little bit of a draw down, just rough conditions, don’t really see a whole lot of opportunity, right? Well, can you hold? Can you avoid the self-inflicted wounds that maybe have blown accounts before, maybe turn into actual gambling? I mean, to me, betting on a negative edge is gambling. And when you’re not trading with an edge, to me, you’re gambling. So, can you in those moments keep yourself in control and take steps to decrease your emotionality? This is not rocket science. Went to Houston yesterday. I mean, the the space center. I mean, it is remarkable what they’ve done. This is not rocket science. This just takes a little bit of diligence, a little bit of preparation. Right now, I want to challenge all of you right now. Just show of hands. How many of you are ready to to battle in the way that I’m suggesting? How many of you are going to take the time every single day to start conditioning your mind? Okay, great to see a lot of you raising your hands. For those of you that are unsure, understand that the next time you struggle, and you will, if you’re not ready to avoid your mistakes, this is the path forward. I I wish there was, you know, something that could just sort of snap my fingers and make you have the perfect mentality. I wish there was advice that was capable of transforming you instantly, but that’s not reality. We deal with rules. And when you understand the rules of the game, you have an opportunity to develop a strategy that might actually bring things home for you. All right. So, as we wrap up here, uh, I want you to understand just a few key takeaways. Got time for a couple questions. Um, and when it comes to the mic, I’ll be happy to answer any questions about anything I’ve talked about. Uh, any questions that you want, maybe a little bit more personalized, I will be at the Robin Hood booth during happy hour. Happy to answer questions then. Uh, so first off, you cannot rely on emotional control. Why? Because emotional control is a mental process that gets shut down by intense emotions. So what are you going to do? You’re going to understand your pattern of emotions. You’re going to find ways to be really detailed and specific about what you’re struggling with and where and why. And when you do that over time, what is happening becomes queer. You now have something that you can work with. Again, you’re making the mental game tangible. It’s not rocket science. And lastly, uncover those flaws, right? Take the time to ask yourself that why question, right? It can be challenging. Like I I will not not be shy in saying that the biggest gap between my abilities and my clients is in this step. Really being able to understand the underlying flaws. But it is not impossible. You start asking better questions. What a great mentor of mine said, if you want better answers, ask better questions. And just asking a why question is an will give you an opportunity to to do that. All right. So with that, we have a few questions here. Yeah. Thank you. Um when you get to one of those extreme levels where the mind’s turning off, you’re not thinking critically. How like time frame? Think about real time. How long should you wait? Uh what are some indicators that you can check in on to know that hey, I’m ready to revisit this again through. So ideally, you’re catching those earlier warning signs before you even get to that point. But let’s assume that you didn’t. Right. Right. Uh you want to act immediately. If you don’t act immediately, you’re kind of gambling with your mentality at that point. You’re hoping that you’re going to get lucky and be able to, you know, kind of gain control. So honestly, in those moments, just rip yourself away. If you can just stand up and run, I I mean, close the position, obviously. Do what you need to protect yourself. Get away. And then you could do go do a bunch of writing. Do a data collection. Just dump out what’s going on in your mind. It’ll help to make what’s going on a bit more objective. Sometimes when the emotions are kind of running rampant in our minds, it’s hard to kind of see things clearly. I actually had a a PJ tour player who I worked with who u he would send me uh voice notes, you know, after the round and you’d hear at the first few minutes was just all the frustration just getting released and then by the end he was answering his own questions, right? We’ve all had those instances where, you know, once you sort of leave a heated argument, cooler heads prevail. So, that’s my advice. Just run away, get it, get it out as best you can, you know, and give yourself an opportunity to kind of digest a little bit. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Hi. Um Oh, it’s not Oh, there you go. Oh, there we go. Hi. I really like what you said about betting with a negative edge is gambling. And I think when you have an edge or believe you have an edge, like emotions can blur whether you actually have an edge or not, like some people look a technical analysis and then they misread it because of emotions or they might just be mistaken. And I’m wondering how do you determine if you truly have an edge versus something that’s just like an emotionalbased edge. So that’s beyond my pay grade because I’m not I don’t get into anything technical or strategic. So you you need to prove over a large enough sample that you have an edge. Uh you know that’s sort of easy to say but if you need advice and perspective there’s lots of great traders around who can help you do that. But what I will say is it’s okay to at least be questioning, right? If they’re go through periods where you’re having high profitability and you’re not certain exactly what your edge is, if you can’t explain exactly why you’re making money, that gives you an indication as to, you know, what to be looking for, what you at least give yourself some pause for to think here. Generally speaking, I think if you’re not overconfident, if you don’t get too far ahead of yourself, if you’re kind of a little bit cautious about the profitability that’s happening, I I think you’re you’re well ahead of most traders in that regard. Thank you. Yeah. Go ahead. I got time for one more question, then I guess I’ll take the rest elsewhere. Um, thank you so much for this. Like this is wonderful. Um, so my question is basically regarding uh a bias. So many of times you think you have this stock in mind or an equity in mind and you go in with that conviction that okay I want to get this. So I personally try to go to AI and ask it to challenge me right. So I would be like play my devil’s advocate and tell me where’s the flaw in my thinking. But my question really is like if I am the one who’s choosing the prompts, the assumptions, the evidence and everything and then when AI challenges me, I’m like, “Oh, no, you don’t get the context, and here’s the context.” So, how do I actually genuinely make AI give me that right perspective that I might be lacking? Like, what are some of those practices you would recommend so that an AI can genuinely be helpful? The AI training I’m going to leave aside because I think more complexity and uh than I can get into in 30 seconds. Uh what I will say is, you know, have a a a pool of people that you can trust to at least bounce ideas off, right? Don’t just rely on a computer to challenge you. Find people that can do that that you know you respect. Uh but you also can do it for yourself. So if you’re keeping a very clear trade journal, to me that includes lots of trades that you do not take. I think a it’s very easy for traders to only track the ones that they’ve taken. But when you go in with certain biases or thesis, it’s okay to, you know, track how those thesis play out, whether or not you actually take trades or not. Because over time, again, you’re going to see patterning in your own ideology, in your own thoughts, your own thesis, and then how things play out. And over time, you’ll be able to make sense of a little bit more. Again, when you get lost in your mind, when when emotions are swirling, the best way to gain some some objectivity is through writing for yourself. Whether that’s turned into an AI that’s going to maybe help you make sense of it or not, I will be very very clear and honest. AI is awful at mental game diagnostics. It may help you summarize these themes, but it is honestly quite dangerous in some respects. Some of the things I’ve seen come through are quite bad. So just be very very cautious at this point about how much you’re relying on AI for your own kind of perspective. I’m not saying don’t use it like like a lot of things it’s a tool and when there’s a lot of kind of overlapping uh perspectives you kind of converge on a on some certainty. So that’s true with AI it’s true with other people right you we have all it’s impossible to not have bias. So all right that’s all the questions for today. Like I said I’ll I’ll take uh additional questions uh back at the booth during happy hour. At this point, the improvement is in your hands. Okay? My my job as your coach has concluded. So, take the next step seriously, right? You’ve got an opportunity and you know, it’s one that you can take now. So, I wish you well as you take that and uh really make some progress here. So, thank you.

He’s

got visual aids and everything. And Jared, you know, he was worried about his handwriting emotional. I can read it. It’s good. All right,

we’ve made it. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m considerably more aware of what’s happening inside my own head when I trade, which is useful, also a bit terrifying. Um, but we are there, guys. We are at the finish line. We have one session left and this has become one of my favorite traditions at HoodSummit. We started it three years ago because we launched Robin Hood Legend and we were looking for a a fun name to go for a segment. We came up with lessons from a legend. Uh and the goal was simple. Bring someone on stage who has spent a lifetime in the markets. Get beyond the headlines and the hot takes and the mechanics. Actually, this one has a lot of mechanics, but let’s let them teach us what they’ve learned over their career. Two years ago in Miami at our first Hood Summit, it was Mark Fischer taking us inside the world of futures trading and the career that he built in the pits in New York. Last year, we were in Las Vegas. We launched shortselling and we brought in uh Fami Kadir who gave us a totally different perspective on the world of shortselling. And this year, we turned to a legend that came from the options world. But trust me, this one is going way beyond options. Now, I started my career working for this guy back in 2007. I was young. I was new to the retail brokerage industry. And somehow I got lucky enough to be surrounded by this incredible group of people at this company who thought about markets differently, thought about trading differently, and they genuinely loved it. And at the center of all that was Tom Sausnoff. And so a huge part of how I learned to trade about options, thinking about probability, risk, and frankly this entire business that we work in started with Tom. Uh and so the guy that I get to introduce that’s going to introduce Tom, uh he’s also been woven in my entire career as well. Uh I’ve worked with JJ Kahan for nearly 15 years. Uh he’s been a boss, a mentor, and a friend for a very long time. So, getting to stand here and watch JJ introduce Tom and then afterwards sit down with him and moderate a Q&A for you guys, it’s pretty special and there’s really no better home for it than a s a session sponsored by our friends at SIBO. So, let’s finish strong and to introduce our legend, please welcome to the stage senior vice president, head of retail expansion and alternative investment products at SIBO, my friend and fellow White Sox fan, Mr. JJ Kahan.

Thank you, Obie. Uh I’m I’m honored to introduce Tom. He’s been a boss, a co-orker, a friend for many, many years. Tom and I started uh on the floor of the CBOE many, many years ago. I think they actually may even have a picture of it. We stood in the OEEX pit which at the time had 600 people in it. And so uh you can see the yellow uh circle around Tom. I’m actually at the very top left of the picture. If you look in front of the American flag, the guy with the giant forehead, that would be me. And so we were in that pit together for many, many years. Tom went and founded Thinker Swim. I went and worked for Tom at Thinker Swim. And then uh at Tasty Trade, Tom called me and I was CEO at Tasty Trade. And so we’ve been together in different roles for about 40 years. Uh quick thing about Tom before he comes up, he’s probably one of the most humble people I’ve met in my entire life. He really does care that everybody else in terms of being a retail investor is successful. He has all the time in the world. For anybody here, anybody who was a client of our firms when we had brokerage firms, Tom would sit and listen to a story about a one lot vertical spread for hours. If any one of us suggested anything, Tom would say, “You’re an idiot. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Please be quiet.” And uh you know, that was just how he operated is he will talk about, if you’ve ever read anything about Tom, it’s always no high fives. Uh you did your job if something went well. You’re an idiot if it didn’t. And in talking about humility, he always wanted to be one of the team. Uh, one really quick story, my son went to work for Tom as an intern at one time. And so my son comes back home after the first day. I’m like, “How was it?” He goes, “Oh man, it was so great. Mr. Saznoff is so smart. Teach me.” So I I learned so much on the first day. After the second day, Tom calls me that night and he goes, “I’m firing your son tomorrow.” I’m like, “What’d he do? I’ll kill him.” He’s like, “He keeps calling me Mr. Saznoff. I’m Tom. I’m one of the group. He goes, I’m not a hundred years old. If he comes in tomorrow and calls me Mr. Sausnoff and not Tom, he is going to get fired. My son had said to Tom, I can’t do that. My dad will kill me if I call you Tom. But I’m like, well, if it means your job, you better go in and call him Tom. The whole point of the story, Tom always wants to be one of the group. He’s the, as I said, one of the most generous people here. Many of the folks who are now at Robin Hood worked with us at Thinker Swim Around on the pit and Tom was a huge influence in all of our lives. But that’s enough of an introduction because I’m assuming many of you already know who Tom is. And with that, Mr. Tom Sazoff.

Thanks, man. Beautiful. Thank you. All right. That’s the nicest things JJ ever said about me. I’ll take it. And it’s a true story, by the way. Um, yeah, I was never really going to fire his son, but I hate being called Mr. Sausnoff. I hate being called Grandpa now by my grandkids, so I have to. It’s Tom. Okay. Um, no, it’s amazing to be here and it’s uh when when the guys asked me to do this, I was like, “Sure, I’d love to. It’s really cool and it’s been an incredible event and um happy to be here.” I mean, I had a I had a couple of jokes that I was just doing this so I could get a gold card, but uh quick little story. I applied for the gold card, but they rejected me. So, if you’re the only ones that got rejected, don’t worry about it. Happens to everybody. JJ, Q, Obie, I mean, you know, um we have these great stories. We go back 45 years together. 40 years together. I met JJ playing softball, um and found out we were trading in the same pit. I met Q when he stood about 10 feet to my left. The funniest story about the best story about those two guys is that um they when we started Thinkorswim I I tried to bring them over and so first I went to JJ and I said JJ I’d love you to come work with us. We building an education part component to this brokerage firm and he goes you think I’m going to work for you? Never. Okay, that was the rejection year number one. Rejection year number two, same thing. you’re number three. I got him. And uh we’ve been together now the last, you know, whatever 25 years. Uh Q, the exact same story. Rejected me the first year, rejected me the second year, third year he came over and now he’s pretty much, you know, doing all the every running everything at Robin Hood. So, it’s just awesome to see what’s happened. And there’s so many other people and I’m sure a lot of you have anybody ever seen me speak before? Where the hell you guys been hiding under a rock? I’ve been on the road for 25 years talking about options. I’ve probably done 500 600 shows all around the country, all around the world. And it’s how we promote, you know, and um uh I’m the only reason I have this whatever they call it, legend status, is because I’ve outkked my coverage. I’ve lived longer. Legends aren’t anything special. It’s just you live long enough, you keep doing something long enough and it gets kind of um it gets kind of special. You know, one of my big things is uh there there’s very few outliers in life and occasionally you’ll run into an outlier. Like the guy that’s going to come up and close this event, Vlad, he’s an outlier. You know, he turns turns builds this amazing company, turns it into an incredible uh an incredible venture. Those are outliers. Most people uh the key to success is longevity. The key to success is being able to do something like for a ridiculous amount of time like you know I mean Warren Buffett’s probably the best example in the world of finance you know doing it for I don’t know how many years 70 years 80 years um but for a lot of us like this is year 45 for me and you know the long if you can do something for a real long period of time it’s really special and that’s how you get kind of this you know reputation or you get to talk to people like you guys and um I only talk to self-directed investors. I only talk to do-it-yourself traders. I’m on the active side of this business, not the passive side. In fact, I put out another video today which talks about, you know, the dangers of passive investing just but I’m not going to scare anybody. Um, the piece I put together today, this is a relatively short piece to take you through different stages of both my life and also kind of things that I’ve learned with lots of different takeaways. So, I’m going to get right into it. Most important thing, and this is the thing I just want to stress to everybody here that this is the biggest takeaway. Just bet on yourself. Life is all about you get all these different choices and the one person or persons, you know, the one the one thing that you have, especially when you’re a little younger, actually any time in your life. I didn’t build Thinkersome until I was 42 years old. I didn’t build Tasty till I was in my early 50s. Um, I’m not building Lost Dog now until I’m in my late 60s. You know, this is something if you get an opportunity to ever bet on yourself, just bet on yourself. I am a freak about that. But for today, I want to talk about, hey, where do I start? The reason you came to this event and the reason you go to any event like this, the reason you take time out of your day, your resources, whatever else it is, is to figure out, hey, where do I get started down this path? What do I do? How do I get here? And it to make it, how do I make it special? Well, learning how money works is not easy. So, you have to challenge yourself non-stop. I spent 20 years, that picture Jay just showed you of the trading pits. I spent 20 years challenging myself, standing in one single stupid spot that was about a foot wide just to figure out how this business works. I was a political science major raised by a civil rights attorney and a and a art teacher. And so I loved finance. I fell in love with the trading floors. But I challenged myself non-stop. And you know, that’s how you survive. The real risk in life is not really is not challenging yourself, not taking any risk. And when you’re young, and one of the things I stress more than anything else, roll the dice on everything. I I can’t stand when people say measure your risk or think about risk or take a step back and think about what you’re about to do. Don’t take a step back. Don’t think about what you’re going to do. Take as much risk as you can when you’re young because you’re not going to build wealth when you’re 22 or 23 or 25 or even 30 years old. That all happens later on. But if you don’t start when you’re young, it’s really tough. Wall Street’s version, put a little timeline together here. Wall Street’s version of wisdom is to surrender. That’s the tra traditional conflicts. That’s the embedded conflict in Wall Street. There’s something called the 40-year nap. The 40-year nap is is this fun little saying I do that when you’re 25 years old, you close your eyes. You take a nap. You just close your eyes, say, “You know what? I’m going to I’m just going to go to sleep for a few minutes. I’m tired.” You wake up, you’re 65, and you’re like, you look around and you’re like, “Where the [ __ ] did my life go?” And you’re sitting around going, “I’m 65 now, and I got no idea how markets work. I don’t understand strategies. I don’t understand financial markets. I don’t understand options, futures. I don’t understand crypto. I don’t understand anything because you’re 65 now. Take the risk when you’re young. That 40-year nap, it happens to everybody that’s not in this room.

Success is not about marginally beating a benchmark. I want to stress this because it’s such an important thing. People think success is the S&Ps are up 11% this year and I’m up 13%. I killed them. No, you didn’t. Doesn’t mean anything. If you did it passively, if you did it if you did it without strategy, if you did it just because you’re a bull market genius, it doesn’t mean anything. Success is not about marginally beating a benchmark. Success is about learning how to consistently improve against yourself, improve against risk-free rates, improve against whatever the opportunity is. Like if the market’s down 5% and you’re unchanged, is that success? I would argue not. So success is not about marginally beating a benchmark. When you outsource your money decisions, and this is really cool because people in this room are here because they don’t outsource their money, their money decisions, but when you outsource your money decisions as a default, you’ve already lost. Because there’s only so many things in life you can do where there’s an efficient market playing field, where it’s literally an efficient market and it’s literally a laying a level playing field. And when you get to that point, you get to make so many decisions and so many positive things happen. you learn so much and if you outsource those decisions, it’s over. You can’t catch up. So, I’m going to give you a little brief background and then we’ll talk about it. the picture JJ showed before, which I didn’t even know those they orig they had. Um, I grew up in New York and I grew up I got out of college in the late 70s and I moved to Chicago in 19 Well, here’s the thing. I was a political science major and I got in there were no jobs in 1980. I got a I got a job interview on Wall Street. They offered me the job. I took it. Six months later, I met some people. They’ve said, “I’ll put up some money if you move to Chicago.” I moved to Chicago and I never left. The reason I never left is cuz I stepped on the trading floor and it was the last frontier of raw capitalism. It was an insane place. There were people yelling and screaming. I had no idea what’s going on. I’m like, I got to figure this out cuz this is the coolest place I’ve ever been. That’s how I started my career. It was very entrepreneurike before there was the word entrepreneurship. So 20 years I spent trading in the S S&P 100 pit and I stood 15 feet from Q. I stood 30 feet from JJ and my friends that that I still have today. My partner Scott Sheridan and a bunch of other people Tony Batista that I work with. We’ve been friends for 40 years. One of the coolest things is you know a working with your kids or b working with your friends. And I’ve been lucky enough to work with my friends for my entire life. 1999 2000 we built Thinker Swim. I’m not sure how many people in this room have ever traded on Thinkerson or even heard of it, but it’s a pretty big platform. It it was the first platform to democratize to democratize trading for retail investors. I mean, we were a public company. We were bought out by TD Merit Trade and TD Merit Trade was bought out by Schwab. So, now it’s Schwab’s primary platform, which is super cool. And there’s a lot of fun stories about Thinkorswim, but all I’ll say is just to give you just a tiny little bit of background. The name Thinkers Swim, I made it up when I was walking through my living room one night. And a reporter for Cranes Chicago, which is a business newspaper magazine, when we were launching wrote a story that said, “This is the worst name I’ve ever heard for a brokerage firm.” When when this reporter wrote that, Scott and I looked at each other. you go, “Oh my god, we’re going to be successful.” Because you need people that hate your name to kind of motivate you with bulletin board stuff. Well, anyway, the name Thinkersome obviously stuck around because it’s still around today. But when we sold Thinkerson to TD Merit Trade, TD Merit Trade, the first thing they said was their CEO said, “Oh my god, I hate the name Thinkersome. I’m going to change this name to the ultimate trading platform.” I looked at the CEO, I said, “You know what? This is a dumb move. Everybody loves the name Thinkersome.” And needless to say, they went through a couple of different studies. They spent a few million dollars figuring out that everybody loved the name Thinkorswim. And then Schwab did the same thing. And today, Thinkerswim still exists. And outlive TD merit trade. That’s one of my fun stories.

So when I when my when my deal was over with TD Maritrade, I wanted to build another company because I just thought financial media needed something. So I wanted to build this company called Tasty Trade. And I was friends with the CEO of TD Marit Trade. So I went to him and said I said, “Fred, I’m going to leave.” And he goes, “I thought you were going to leave eventually because I knew you wanted to do something else.” And I go, “Yeah, and I’m going to build a network and not another brokerage from the time, but just a network.” And he goes, “Um, I’m sorry I’m going to ask this, but what’s the name?” I go, “Tasty trade.” He goes, “Oh my god, I hate that name worse than thinking.” So I looked at Fred and I said, “I I knew you were going to say that, but” And then he and then he did the weirdest thing. He goes, “But I’m going to bet on you, so I’m going to write you a check.” It was a big check. And he goes, “I want to be a partner.” And we were partners. And um we launched Tasty Trade. And then and then 11 years later, we sold Tasty Trade. You know, those were two billion dollar companies at the time that we sold and now they’re two multi-billion dollar companies. But I don’t look backwards. I want to keep moving forward. Now, we’re building a company called Lost Dog, which is about optimization of portfolios and optimization of careers. And we’re about to launch a the most amazing platform we’ve ever built called One Lucky Dog, which is about ideas. And the reason I love ideas is because as opportunists and as self-directed traders, you know what we need? We need ideas. We need we need we need we always People always say to me, “What are you doing? What are you trading?” You know, “What are you doing?” And it’s just like we all need ideas. I’ll be doing a live show and somebody will say, well, what do you think about XYZ stock? And I’m like, I don’t know, I never looked at it. And then all of a sudden, I’ll look at it. I’ll make a trade in there. So, I love that whole concept. Anyway, that’s where we are today. So, the most important thing and one of the most important things in life, whether you’re an entrepreneur or a trader, whatever it is, a business person, you need to know that you own the opening trade. You need to know that that decision, you control that decision. You control that opening trade. Like after you make a trade, you have no control over what the underlying is going to do. You don’t know if a stock’s going to go up or down, sideways, or whatever is going to happen to that company. You have no control. But you control all the dynamics, all everything that goes into making that opening trade. No matter what it is, no matter what kind of investment you make, you control that point. You control the decision to make that trade based on whatever it is that you’re looking at. And you can never forget that. control what you can or just own the opening trade. The root cause of wealth inequality is just a lack of financial knowhow. It is a fact. People that are not successful or do not build wealth do not have we call financial knowhow. It’s called there’s a it’s called economic bias. And economic bias comes from not making enough decisions and not making enough essentially enough trades.

I talk about this next slide and it’s one of the most important things in life. If you run into anybody that has built a lot of wealth or has been very successful, I can promise you the one characteristic of every single person is they make the quickest decisions of anybody you’ve ever seen. Speed over everything else. Being first is way more valuable than being right. And that’s something you almost never hear from anybody else in the world because I just this is this is my life in a nutshell. I don’t necessarily care about being right. I care about being first because I want that opportunity and I want to figure it out. Most of the time most of the time our intuition most of the time our our sense of correctness our sense of probabilistic outcome is really strong. So being the first person to that has the opportunity to make that opening trade or make that trade, that’s the single most important thing. And every person you run into that’s super successful will be the quickest decision maker. When we put boards and stuff together, I always like to bring in really successful people. And the reason is not because I really care about their knowhow. I just want their speed. I want speed of decision-m. Make a quick decision. Don’t think about it. One of my a quick little story. My son is um when he got out of grad school, he he got a job offer and um he called me up and said, “Dad, I got this job offer. It’s it’s a great offer. It’s just what I was looking for with an amazing company.” I said, “Okay, when do you start?” And he goes, “No, I told him I need the weekend to think about it.” I’m like, “What’s wrong with you? like I’ve been training you for, you know, 27 years to make quick decisions and now you’re going to take the weekend to think about it. If somebody did that to me, I would hire somebody else. So, I told him that. I don’t think it made a dent, but I tried. Most losses most losses from most losses stem from a literacy or a mechanical gap. The business of finance is not rigged. This is not a rigged game. Most of the time when we make a mistake, we do something like we trade too big or we do something else like that. Like people don’t like you don’t know what’s going to happen next. Nobody knows what’s going to happen next. So most of the losses it’s just it’s just hey, you know what? We did something that was mechanically incorrect. We lost our discipline. Whatever it was, the agentive tools that are being launched now on new platforms, it’s really going to solve a lot of that. But for the most part, it’s just important to know, you know what, the counterparty, it’s not rigged. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. You don’t know. They don’t know. Nobody knows. But we do understand how to optimize mechanics nowadays. Going back a couple of years, they said it would end in tears, but it didn’t. when firms when when essentially when we eliminated commissions in this industry and Robin Hood is obviously one of the leaders in eliminating commissions, they thought they thought that no commissions would remove the structural disadvantage that separated retail from the pros. But you know what? Everything is better today. Markets are tighter. Markets are more liquid. Markets are more efficient. Everything’s better today than it ever was. There’s more products, more liquidity, and the technology is so much better than it was, you know, 5 10 15 years ago, it’s just incredible. It is a true level playing field today. Real time experience pays dividends. So, when you sit back and you think, you know what, I’m going to paper trade for a while. I’m going to think about this. There’s lots of ways to do things that are very capital efficient. And it’s really important to recognize that the value is not necessarily in the return. It’s in calibrated judgment over uncertainty. That just means do it. Put your foot in the water. Put whatever. Jump in the water. Whatever it takes. Keep your size in check and and just experience it. There’s nothing that can replace experience. If you’re going to bet on yourself, you have to make lots of mistakes. If you’re going to bet on yourself, you’ve got to take the last shot all the time and you’re going to miss a certain percentage of them. That’s cool, but you’re going to get paid. Most people never get to sit on a cap table. That’s a very fair statement, but trading is what makes it possible for some people or it’s made it possible for somebody like me. the your ability to articulate things because of your understanding of how financial structure works and financial markets work is critical. Once you can articulate things, you can get to places that you’re like, “Wow, I didn’t even know that that was possible. Articulating the mechanics, super important um to everything. If you can articulate mechanics, you can jump ahead of virtually everybody else in the queue. Most people, including most young entrepreneurs, have a really difficult time of articulating the mechanics of how they generate free cash flow, of how they’re going to turn the business into something successful or how they’re going to trade or whatever else it is. Once you do that, opens up a million doors. There’s a fallacy out there. It’s called the fallacy of the crystal ball. And essentially, that’s the assumption that you know what’s going to happen next. I mean, that’s just it’s it’s crazy. There’s there’s no such thing. And so thinking that somebody else knows what’s going to happen, that’s a fallacy. What you need to understand is just how the mechanics work. Control trade size and then you therefore you control your risk. Um that’s all this whole business is about. If you control trade size, you control your buying power, you control your risk. When genius fails, when genius fails all the time, when genius fails, it’s always because tra people trade too big. We’ve owned two brokerage firms, millions of customers, and the only time people blow out is when they trade too big. It’s it. It’s the same thing for everybody.

Understand law of large numbers. Know how that works. Law of large numbers is simple. If you do stuff that has a high probability of profit, a high probability of success, and you do that one time doesn’t mean that much. 10 times doesn’t mean that much. 50 times doesn’t mean that much. 100 times doesn’t mean that much. A thousand times, law of large numbers start to work for you. Your 70% probability test is going to come in 70% of the time. There’s a reason to this day, this year, I’ll make about somewhere between 15 and 17,000 trades. A lot of them will be losers, a lot of them will be winners. Whatever it is, but whatever my statistical probability of success is when I opened every one of those trades will be the exact number with give or take 1% at the end of the year. That’s essentially how you use law of large numbers to your advantage or to your benefit. It’s always decision making speed over deliberation. First person to make the trade. The reason JJ’s up here, the reason Q was up here, professional traders, it’s always about speed. It’s not about being right. It’s just about speed. And life is like that.

I I just ask everybody here because you came out midweek to Houston to meet people, to network. It’s crazy important. All the stuff you’ve done here over the last day and a half is super important to how you network, how you articulate, and also how you carry the torch, how you tell people about this industry, this business, the wonderful parts about finance and the opportunities it presents. So first, right now, everybody in this room, you carry the torch. Next thing you pass it on to whoever that is, your friends, your family, whatever it is, you we we we just ask you when you leave here to hand down fluency. A lot of people focus on the fear part of this business. What happens if the market crashes? What happens if I lose money? I feel more comfortable if somebody else makes decisions because then I can blame them for bad decisions. Hand down fluency, not fear. Fear is this insane meanreverting opportunity. And let’s focus on that. Let’s end this with leave here. Walk out these doors tonight as an opportunist. Nothing else. Just think about this. Everything I learned at this event over over two days. I’m walking out of here as the consumate opportunist. Thank you.

I’m going to bring back JJ. I’m going to bring back JJ. We’re going to do a little a quick little um fireside chat or Q&A. That was a great speech, wasn’t it, guys? How about it?

That’s it.

So Tom, uh, you know, it was great and and I think your messages have always resounded well with people, as I said earlier, Tom, you know, really does care that the people in this room are successful. But those of you those of us who have known you a long time, uh, I think the question people always ask about you is this. How do you stay motivated? As you know, we said in your intro, you you you’ve sold two businesses, you know, for a lot of money, almost a couple of billion dollars, but you work still hard. Tom works harder than anyone I know. If you send Tom an email at 1:00 a.m., your answer is usually at 10:03. Uh, so I know Tom doesn’t really sleep much, but that all said, how do you still stay every single day where you’re always excited? You’re excited to give these talks. I think you’re giving, you know, four or five over the next couple of weeks. What keeps you going that way? I actually going to turn this around on JJ. Well, first of all, I should say I don’t have a hobby. So, like I literally don’t have a hobby. So, that’s a bad thing. But I I think the other thing is I don’t understand like the other like it’s weird. My brain’s wired in a way where I don’t understand the other side. Like I don’t know what I would do. Like I love to work and I work with my friends and I I like and I find technology to be fascinating and I think you know I don’t think Warren Buffett should have retired at 95 or six whatever it is. I really don’t. I think he should have kept going. I don’t think he should have retired. I don’t think anybody should ever retire. If you’ve if you’ve never heard me speak before I don’t believe in work life balance either. You believe in work work balance? Yeah. Um, all right. Well, you know, the second thing, and actually I’ve heard Tom speak quite a bit, but I’ve only heard you give this talk once and you know, and that is you talked the entire talk. It was an hour and a half, and it was nothing about his successes. It was just about his failures. And I would say it was my favorite talk of all the ones I’ve ever heard you give. Not because just because it gave me a few laughs at some of the investments over the years, but what what I really thought was important is people see the glory, but they don’t see all the little things that go into it. And it just translates so well to everybody’s trading. So just talk a little bit if you can about how you transition from some of those bad things into making things successful because you love to talk about entrep you’d love to talk to people outside trading who are just entrepreneurs about this also. I think it’s important that we measure ourselves by a lot of different things. One of the things is not how much we make but how much we give. And other things is I think it’s important that we have lots of failures. The tour JJ’s talking about a tour we did for a couple years called the bad trader tour. I did it all around the country and talked about all the horrible investments I’ve made in my lifetime, which is like millions and millions and millions of dollars. But the other side to that is I don’t know that I ever would have built anything like crazy successful if I didn’t have all these ridiculous learning experiences and and just and and what would have happened if nobody like when I moved to Chicago when I was 23 years old. what if somebody didn’t give me a check to trade with like you know somebody took a blind shot with me and and it worked for them but so I’ve done blind shots with you know hundreds of people and it’s you know some works most don’t but I don’t care I think it’s just important to remember where you you know remember how you got here and and support young entrepreneurs I mean we probably make 30 investments a year in young entrepreneurs around Chicago the Midwest mostly in fintech And to be fair, I’m not sure any of them ever paid off. I don’t even know if I’ve ever cashed a check. Well, I’ve invested with Tom and I remember one time where it did turn out pretty well and he’s like, “Can you believe it? We actually made money.” So, uh, my Irish good luck charm. But that leads to something else. First of all, I think you, uh, you’ve invested in a lot of entrepreneurs. to understate the amount of influence you’ve had in people’s lives and the amount of individuals you’ve helped to hire. Uh when we were at Thinker Swim, one of the women who ran Balancing was the Starbucks uh barista two weeks before that, but she worked really hard. Tom noticed it every morning. It’s like, you want a job? And so, you know, there are a lot of people who I’ve worked with at the firms that, you know, Tom has owned who were doing something completely different, but Tom noticed they worked hard at what it was they were doing and they were friendly, so he’d hire them and let people like that into the financial industry and change their lives. That all Yes, I agree 100%. You know, it’s funny, but I I I go through life with this idea that everybody’s smart. I know that’s not the way everybody else thinks, but I think that I’ve spent enough time on the road, met hundreds of thousands of people. I think everybody’s really smart. I think the difference sometimes is that you you talk to somebody and you realize this person’s actually really likable. This person like like this is somebody I want to spend time with, you know, in a business that I love. I I really like li likeability is super important to me. Yeah. Well, there’s no question. Uh we we we as Tom said we’ve been fortunate. We work with people we’ve liked our whole lives and it’s been absolutely fantastic. Uh so you know Tom we talk about there’s so many new products. I can’t remember a time where the industry is changing so rapidly as it has in the last we’ll say 3 years. As you look at the new products which ones are you most excited about and is there any that you’re like that one kind of scares me a little bit? I I don’t want to say anything scares me because I don’t want to jinx anything. I think that the coolest thing about new products is that it creates new areas of opportunity that you really don’t know, you know, what what it’s ultimately going to turn into. I think if there’s anything scary about it is I I don’t want there to be this gap in knowhow. You know, like sometimes sometimes you’ll find an exchange that will launch a new product and they’re hoping that somebody like me or JJ will will talk about it or or Q and then we’ll talk about the product to help them promote the product. That’s not really that’s not really the business we’re in. We want to promote opportunities for retail investors. And if we don’t think the product’s liquid or it has legs, we’re going to make the exchanges, we’re going to make the product creator prove it. make show us that this product is really good. Show us that there’s show us there’s a market for pers. Show us there’s a market for crypto. I mean, whatever it was at the time. Show us there’s a market for tokenization. Show us there’s a market for, you know, for everything that comes on board. And if there’s a market for it and there’s liquidity, I mean, I’m all in. And, you know, one of the things I I found your talk really good and again, I’ve heard you talk a lot. one, you you talked about a lot of mistakes people make and a lot of ways to think about planning. One of the things I don’t think you emphasize as much as I’ve heard you emphasize perhaps before is in terms of knowing your risk and really setting out your risk before you actually you said own the trade but uh own the opening trade I believe it was but you didn’t talk I think as much about how I’ve always heard you talk about really defining your risk in trading and I think for a lot of people here who maybe have made a few trades going to the next level it’s important. So, I’m I’m pretty much a premium seller and and I do a lot of undefined risk trades. Um, but I think the most important thing is you have to keep your size buying power in check. The one mistake people make is that they they don’t use really simple back of the envelope u mechanics. Back of the envelope mechanics for risk is buying power. So, if you have a $100,000 account and you’re using $5,000 for a trade, that’s acceptable. You have $100,000 account using $2,000 for a trade or $200. That’s absolutely acceptable. You have a $100,000 account using $80,000 on a trade. That’s not acceptable. So, it’s all about trade size and it’s all about how you use capital efficiency, how you use leverage and and none of this stuff is overly complicated. It’s actually very common sense driven when you think about it, but buying power reduction back of the envelope way of really understanding risk. Yeah. And I think it’s really important and I don’t know that enough people actually talk about or actually think about it when they’re first making their opening trades. And then the other question I know you’ve gotten quite a bit in the past and some folks here who don’t know you as well probably wondering it. They were like, “I’ve never heard you talk about any individual stocks or any individual equities.” So, now’s your opportunity. I trade a lot of stocks and a lot of individual equities. I just when I talk I I talk in more general terms. When I trade, I trade in more specific terms. Meaning like when I come out here and there’s an audience of a thousand people that say, “The last thing you want to hear is what stock do I like? Who cares what I traded today?” You know, I bought and sold a bunch of different stocks. I traded a ton of options today. I probably made, I don’t know, 50 trades this morning from my hotel room. I love trading, but who you shouldn’t care what I think. What’s interesting about what I say is the mechanics that we that we drive people towards so that we optimize your returns. So, we optimize the things that you do so that you have better outcomes. That’s why I don’t talk about specific underlings, right? And and and I think that with that when you think about how you trade, I always feel like it’s an interesting message for people. You want to make money on every trade, of course, or you wouldn’t make it. But to you, it’s more of a bigger game in terms of the overall portfolio, right? Not just the one individual trade because one of the questions I love when people ask is they will say they’re buying a call in Apple and they buy it and they’re like, why would that person sell it to me? So, I always find it interesting that everyone’s worried about the person on the other side of the trade rather than themselves. Yeah. Yeah. Don’t ever worry about whoever’s selling you an option. When you’re buying an option, don’t worry about that person. They’re okay. Um, that firm is doing just fine. Don’t worry about it. You know, I I look at this business and I want people to focus on really the opportunity that’s in front of them. Like, listen, I’m doing this trade because everything looks exactly the way I want it. Okay, fine. Make the trade. Move on to the next trade. Don’t overthink it. Like, don’t you don’t know anything and the counterparty doesn’t know anything and you don’t know what the market’s going to do next. So, you made your trade for all the reasons you made it. That’s great. Move on to the next trade. And yeah, no one knows anything. I think uh the more the longer you trade, the more you realize that you certainly know nothing. But uh you know I I think you get used to the fact that there is no one who actually knows what’s going to happen in the markets overall. And so with that said I think you know one of the things just talking to so many of the nice people who are at this event uh I think people have a question about their own confidence. So what I mean by that is not in a bad way. They’re like how do I know when I should be trading a little bigger? You talked about sizing a position. I think it’s a really important message. How do they know when they should go from say three contracts to four or five contract? What is it that should give them that confidence? So first I just have to say one other thing that I about the last question because I forgot to say this which is really important. All my friends trade. So I don’t have any friends that don’t really trade. And the beautiful thing about that, which is a huge advantage for me, not because they know anything, but because I have the opportunity in life to do the opposite of what all my friends do. So when JJ looks at me and goes I go, “What are you doing?” He goes, “I’m I’m selling bonds here. I’ll buy them.” When he when when Steve comes out here in a few minutes and he goes, I’ll say to him, I’ll go, “What are you doing?” and he’ll be look all smiley and he’ll look at me and he’ll say I’m buying XYZ and I’ll short it. So I have the advantage of knowing what my friends are doing and knowing that they don’t know anything which is really a good and as I said earlier he thinks we’re all idiots. So no I don’t think you’re idiots. I just love the idea of um it goes back to a time earlier in my career. I was on the trading floor and there was a huge trader who I had met who I was really respected and he was amazing trader, probably the best trader in Chicago. And um I was walking off the floor with him once and we were going on the elevator to go up to our office. And I said to him, “Man, can’t believe that selloff. I bought the clothes. I think they’re going higher tomorrow.” And he looked at me and said, “Do me a favor. Don’t ever tell me what you think again.” And here I was thinking I’m some smart kid. And then and he’s like, “Don’t ever tell me what you think again, cuz I don’t even want I don’t care what you think.” I I think you scale when you prove concept. So, a lot of people will start in the self-directed space with a portion of their money and they really want to start, they really want to move more over, but they don’t yet have the confidence. So, what you do is you scale very small and you prove concept at each level. There’s no rush. Everybody in this room, you’re going to be doing this like J and I for the next 40 years. So there’s no rush. You start small and you incrementally increase and you prove concept at each level that you can handle the additional risk. Ideally, first you widen the strikes. Second, you add contracts. If it’s stocks you’re doing, you incrementally add shares. If it’s futures you’re doing, you start micros and you move your way up. That kind of thing. So you incrementally increase. I I know there’s one other question. I think uh the folks from Robin Hood actually had one more question. Our buddy Obie is gonna come out and ask this one. Uh oh.

So, a couple things I want to accomplish with this question. You mentioned you’re a premium seller. We know that. So, you don’t buy options. Uh and you’re a bit of a sports fan, especially a Chicago sports fan. I am a Chicago sports fan. There’s an a great debate going on between generations of who is the greatest basketball player of all time. So, two questions here. I believe on Taste You Trade, you once said the last call option you ever bought was your season tickets to the Chicago Bulls in 1984.

And you mentioned experience is what matters. Tell the audience about your experience with Michael Jordan, why he’s the best basketball player of all time. And we got proof. We got proof of this. Oh, no. That’s That’s Tom on the floor of the old Chicago stadium in the It’s like the 1991 NBA finals. I’m going to tell you a quick little story cuz this is kind of fun. So, we’re a bunch of cocky young traders. It’s 1984. I think it was 1984. Bulls draft Michael. The whole deal. You have to remember in the 70s and early 80s because JJ grew up in Chicago. I grew up in New York as a Knicks fan, but the Bulls were the worst team. 3,000 people used to go to this the old Chicago stadium to watch the games and nobody every seat was empty. 3,000 it held like 19 or 20,000 Bulls drafted Jordan and the Bulls ticket office decided we’re going to go and try to sell courtside seats. 1984 1985 we drafted this kid Jordan. We’re going to be good. We’re going to try to sell courtside seats. They never sold them before. They were $75 a ticket in 1984. 1985 I don’t remember exactly the year. So they hit they knocked on our door first and which just out of pure luck they came to our floor. They knocked on our door. There were a bunch of trading firms. They just happened to knock on our door. They sat down with us. They said, “Would you guys like to buy courtside seats? We drafted this kid. He’s going to be really good.” We’re like, “All right, we’ll take a shot. We’re we’re young. We’re like, we’ll take a shot. We can afford it.” We, four of us, we bought one ticket each and we bought the four courtside seats at center court at the Chicago Stadium 1984. One of my buddies leans over and he goes, “The Bulls suck. We don’t want the center court seats. Let’s take the four seats at the end of the bench and sit next to Jordan cuz he always sits at the last seat on the bench.” So I go, “Okay, we’ll do that.” So we took the four seats at the end of the bench. Those seats became very valuable over the course of the next 15 years and six championships and we got to talk to Michael every night. So that was that was the best long trade I ever made. Yes. And settler for everyone. Not only is he the best basketball player all time, probably the best athlete of all time. Why are you asking me this? Cuz I think there’s some people out think out there that think otherwise. I I think Michael’s the best basketball player. Yeah. All right. Thank you, Tom. You don’t want to hear my You don’t want to hear my story when I played basketball against Michael Jordan, do you? Can I tell one last story? This is This is where is yours? So, Michael had I wouldn’t He didn’t have a gambling problem, but he loved to gamble. I’m going way off topic here. Remember, it’s me. He didn’t have a gambling problem because he had a lot of money. So, well, he didn’t at the time. One night, Michael Jordan leans over to us and we’re sitting on the edge of the bench and he goes, “Someday I just want to make as much money as you idiots.” Talking to me and my four friends. We’re like, “We’d like to bet on your career as opposed to my friends, but whatever.” Anyway, couple years later, he or a year later, he didn’t have any friends in Chicago. So, he we’re not really friends, but we’re talking to him every night. He goes, “What are you guys doing tonight?” And it’s like a Thursday night. We’re watching a Bulls game. I go, “We’re going to go home, you know.” I go, “We’re going out. Where do you want to go?” And he goes, “Let’s go out and play cards.” So, we go to a buddy’s house and Michael Jordan shows up and we played cards and we became friends and that went on for a number of years. Well, one night, one night we’re playing cards and we have a basketball court at the place we’re playing. And so we decide it’s Michael and another person who played at North Carolina, one of his best friends, against four, let’s say, Wreck League Jewish players. Okay? And at 4:30 in the morning in the middle of a playoff series against the Philadelphia 76ers, we played four on two against Michael and he was in slippers and he had been drinking all night. And we’re thinking to ourselves, if one of us steps on his foot and hurts this guy, we’re going to be dead. We’re going to be Bartman like 20 years before Bartman. Anyway, we played basketball for about an hour. Surprisingly, he beat us. I was shocked. We lost a couple thousand dollars because we had to bet on the game to make it worthwhile and that memory has stayed with us forever and it was just a good time and that is why he is a legend folks. Thank you so much Tom Saznoff, JJ Kahan, our friends at SIBO. This was a blast. Thanks so much. Thank you everybody. All right, one more round of applause for JJ Kahan and Tom Sausnoff. Thank you. All right. Well, as they say, all good things must come to an end. And after 2 days of product launches, trading, markets, technology, innovation, and conversation, we are reaching the end of our journey. Space Center Houston has us on approach, and we’re ready to re-enter the atmosphere. And there’s obviously no two other people I’d rather have up here to help us officially land the ship. So, please welcome back to the Hood Summit main stage Robin Hood’s founder, chairman, and CEO, Vlad Tennv, and chief brokerage officer, Steve Cork.

We just challenged Tom and JJ to twoon two. Yeah, we’re going to bet. We might be playing out here if there’s a hoop out there anyhow. They told me I’m never touching the ball because Q here’s a ball hog. I am quite a ball hog. I will freely admit that. They used to call me the block. I did. Yeah. Yeah. I’m a I’m a uh I think we’ll play quite well together cuz I’m just a lock down defender. Okay, that works. Blocking shots. Rodman. If you defend and rebound, we’re going to get along great. Yeah, that was a great shot blocker. Um amazing. Well, thank you guys. Uh look at this crowd, man. At 8 in the morning, the crowd wasn’t quite as uh No, I think you I think everybody’s kind of come too now. Little too much fun at Space Center last night. Maybe they were up all night trading. Yes, you had alcohol. That’s true. That is true. I didn’t have any, but I’m glad you did. He’s from Wisconsin. Oh, nice. Well, uh Q, what what was your favorite part of the the day? Uh you know, I thought today was really good. There were a lot of sessions that I some that I was participating in but some that I was uh just able to sit and listen to at least components of and it was just really good. I mean, everybody was extremely engaged and um you know, I just think as we kind of talked about this morning, listening even listening to people talk to each other and exchange information and just talk about what they’re going to do from a strategy standpoint and sharing wisdom was really kind of cool. And you know, I’m hopeful that we say this every year, Vlad, right? Next year this is going to be twice as big. Right. Well, so I got to give Q your flowers here. So, HoodSummit’s really Q’s brainchild. I frankly didn’t think it was a great idea at first. I was like, why don’t we just go out there, launch some products, call it a day. But he’s like, “No, we’ve got to have these events, have the traders there, have educational content, and um have this Star Trek thing.” I was like, “No, Q. We don’t want to do that.” The Star Trek may not have been my idea. I mean, not that I not that I have an issue with it. I was like I was like Q, it’s too corny. We can’t do it. He’s like, “No, it’s got to be like a movie.” Um, but I think I think to Vlad’s point, like there are there are companies, firms, and others that do events to launch products, and there are companies, firms, and events that do educational. But there’s very rarely somebody who launches a product and then spends the next day teaching you how to use the product, which makes absolute sense, right? And then continues to educate so that you can use it suitably and be successful with it. I think that’s where you get the magic. And and by the way, it’s not just us. There’s a lot of industry participants and our partners and sponsors here that all we’re helping with this education because you know we when we’re all successful the industry is successful. Everybody’s successful and that’s really what we’re striving to do here. So I was just uh amazed at how unhappy people were today. People are very unsatisfied. It just keep coming to me asking for more stuff. Options on futures, naked options. It’s like it’s never enough. That was just Tom. Yeah. People want um people also want more hood summits. So I told them we’re going to do this every month and we’re taking the show on the road. I love that. Got to hit every major city in the USA. I love that. How about that?

That would be exceptional. Actually, you guys might have to uh increase your travel budget a little bit though, right? We got to get to work. Hopefully, we can get the sponsors to sponsor a hood summit every month in every city. So, Obie, how about you? You know, I won the main stage. You guys are great today. Give yourselves a round of applause. We had uh a lot of tough choices to make, but that’s our job as traders between the trading lab, the pod stage, the main stage. I hope we did uh justice for uh Hood Summit. I hope you guys enjoyed the panels and the speakers. For me guys, you know, in early part of my career, I was on the phones every day and I was talking to customers with, you know, questions about their account this and you you’d have a really good, you know, your finger was on the pulse of what was happening with customers. Over the years, I’ve I’ve gotten away from that. So having a an event like this allows me to really kind of hone back into what matters to you guys, what’s important, what products they’re looking for, what education they need. Uh and more importantly, it’s great to be around traders. Like this is feels like family and and Vlad, I think with the launch of social like this community is just going to exponentially grow and improve and whether it’s in person or on the phone. Um I can’t wait to see what’s next. Yeah. But before we before we completely wrap up, I think we want to thank a few people. Um to everybody who took the time to to speak, moderate, join panels, thanks for sharing your time, your expertise, and all your wisdom. And um we appreciate it. And to the sponsors and of course all the teams, the sponsors all here, we thank you this morning. We’ll thank you again uh for making this all possible. Um, and most importantly to our event team, the whole production crew, you know, everybody with the food, the drink, it it all showed pretty well. I mean, it was pretty amazing experience. I I think we should all give him a round of a hand. If if you guys if we could lift the curtain, there’s an entire village back here of people working hard, the producers, the event staff. Uh, and it was great. I I want to thank everyone that waited in those huge lines to take selfies with me or to have them have me sign their badges. Please don’t sell those badges on eBay for at least another 20 years. I think they’ll be worth something. Be worth more. Yeah. And Vlad, how about the hoodies? How about all the hoodies that put this together? Unbelievable. And uh it’s just we get to talk about these products and be here on stage, but there’s just an army of people and AI agents working very hard to to create all of this AI Vlad is is good. Yeah. Yes. Well, boys, I think uh it’s it’s about that time. Vlad, any uh parting words as we head to happy hour? I think you guys should know that Robin Hood works very very hard and we’re actually going to go and continue to work on all the things that we’ve heard from you today and and yesterday. And our goal is to make it so that you’re at a disadvantage keeping your money elsewhere, trading elsewhere, managing your finances. So, we just take the obligation to make this the best possible financial home for you extremely seriously. So, thank you for the trust. All right. Well, Glenn, and keep pushing us to get better, too, because actually I love I know Q loves the criticism. I love it a little bit less, but uh I send all of the feature requests to Q. And this is this is the way it works. Compliments, please send them here. any criticisms? I have very thin skin because they’re going to go that way anyway. But, uh, no, keep keep the feedback coming. And it’s just the the honest feedback for how we can serve you better that leads to 16 product launches every every couple months. Yep. Well, you want with that, I think you you got to you got to and I look forward to trading with you all on Saturday. That’ll be fun. And Sunday. All right. Well, folks, we are officially cleared to land. A few housekeeping notes with that. Happy hour officially open. We’ve got CNBC’s Fast Money Guy and Dan are doing the remote hit. We’ve got I think CME Group giving away some silver. That’s not bad. Make sure we check that out. Uh and also don’t forget NASDAQ selects their market site New York City trip winner if you’re in on that. Uh we’ve got hosted food and beverage and uh I think Vlad, are you spinning or do we have a a DJ? Do we have a I mean DJ Vlad? I was uh DJ DJ Vlad is a real guy. Uh uh so please don’t leave because the party’s just getting started. Grab a drink. Find somebody you didn’t get to meet. Keep the conversation going. Vlad Q. Everyone, thank you for spending two days with us making hood what it is. Thank you. Thank you. Give it up for Vlad Tennis.

Live long hoodies and prosper. Take us up. Live long of hoodies and prosper.

Captain’s log, stardate 09292026. We are responding to a distress call from the Zeta Reticuli system where local denizens have reported anomalous phenomena, disturbances to their communication lines and core trading infrastructure, which have made it exceedingly difficult to speculate on price movements and hedge their idiosyncratic risks. As part of our ongoing mission to promote free and fair access to capital markets throughout the observable universe, I have rerouted the starship Robinhood from an exploration of the nearby DeFi sector to investigate and, if necessary, intervene to shore up Zeta Reticuli’s legacy infrastructure and ensure unfettered access to the engines of wealth creation, in the name of a free, stable, and prosperous galaxy.

Gina? Eleanor? Anson? Status report number one. Order routing is operational, Captain. The trade routes are clear. That’s good to hear. Gina, set course for Zeta Reticuli, warp five. Course set for Zeta Reticuli, Captain. Engage.

Splendid. Let’s greet our passengers. Welcome aboard the Starship Robinhood. For many of you, this is not your first voyage with us, is it? We began our mission over 13 years ago. Who’s been traveling with us for more than five of those years?

Okay. And who here is at their first Hood Summit? Okay. A lot of trainees. Well, this is going to be a very exciting one. First things first, let me tell you a little bit about the ship. Our engineers have been busy making a lot of improvements. So, I’m going to start by reviewing those before we get to tonight’s big announcements. And they are big. So, why don’t we begin with our 24-hour market, which of course we’re very proud of. We built it to be the best in the galaxy, as well as one of the first with 24/5 operations, from 8:00 p.m. Sunday to 8:00 p.m. Friday Eastern time. But we asked ourselves, can we do even better than 24/5? Eleanor, what do you think? I think we can, Captain. All right. Let’s see. a look at the screen. What do all these headlines have in common? For one thing, they all moved the market. But more importantly, every one of these stories broke on the weekend, when the market was closed and no one could trade. By the time Monday’s open came around, it was already too late, and the move already had happened. Whatever edge existed, reacting first, was gone and no one could place an order. So, we’ve been working for several years fighting the fight. We’re working with exchanges and commissions to fix this. And I’m excited to announce that the battle is over. The rails are laid, and something never before available in the US is on its way. Coming soon, our 24/5 stock market will be upgraded to a 24/7 groundbreaking market.

Pretty good. Pretty big. Pretty good, right? Yes, weekend trading for native equities is here. This is a historical shift from working hours to living hours. So, how many of you have wanted to trade on a Saturday or a Sunday? I have. A lot of people. Saturday especially. Saturday, right? Because we want to give you access first. You should be able to trade the stocks you want when you want. You know, ever since my younger days as a cadet at the academy, I’ve dreamed of equity markets going truly 24/7. And I’m proud that the starship Robinhood is the first one to make this dream a reality. Well done, Eleanor.

Thank you, Captain. But, you know, we didn’t stop there. We know some of our passengers are early risers and would like to have more breakfast options. So, for the morning people out there who like to read the news and look for the market signals before the bell, we’ve also been working hard to get you to the table before everyone else. So, we’re also announcing extended options trading for our most traded symbols, including Nvidia, Tesla, SPY, QQQ. Good one.

Starting next month, trading will start at 7:30 a.m. and end at 4:15 p.m. That’s a 35%increase in our options hours previously available. Captain, what do you think about that? More than a third increase in your options trading hours. Just one more reason why you’d be at a disadvantage trading anywhere other than Robinhood? I wouldn’t want to trade anywhere else. And

that’s our goal. All right, let’s move on to operations. Daniella, what’s your update? Well, Captain, take a look at the view screen. You’ll see that while our passengers love the trade controls that we offer, they feel one order type is still missing. So, I’d like to announce, well, you can probably guess, we are finally launching OCOs.

Strong order type. And that’s that’s not the best part. We want to make up for lost time, so we designed what we believe is the best OCO experience available. So, let’s make this real for the day traders out there. Here’s my position. I bought Tesla earlier off of a breakout, and it’s up about 2%. If it stalls here, I don’t want to hold it through a pullback, but I also don’t want to baby sit the position all day. Instead, I can set my exit plan and get on with my day. I tap set TP sell, and on the editor, I can drag up the profit bar to my target, and on the other side, I’ll set this a bit more precisely to 5% to set my stop loss. So, I’m protected even if I’m not looking. Then, tap continue to see one review screen with both orders in one swipe. My OCO is live, and I can let the trade play out with my rules in place. If it pops, I take profit. If it drops, I’m covered. Either way, I’m not glued to the screen. Very clean. OCOs will be rolling out to equities across mobile and legend, including the ladder and our mobile advanced charts, with options OCOs coming early next year. Thank you, Daniella. Your diligence and hard work on this mission is noticed and appreciated. Actually, that’s not all I have for you, Captain. Currently, we offer up to two times buying power with margin, but what’s been missing until now is intraday margin. During market hours, you’ll get up to four times your buying power. We built intraday margin Good one.

Capital efficiency. We built intraday margin with risk safeguards at its core. To help you manage your leverage, you’ll get a dedicated risk management experience including proactive reminders leading up to market close and clear in-app controls the moment you tap into intraday margin. We’ll be rolling this out next month. You know, more buying power means more responsibility to help customers manage their risk. So, I like that you built in the safeguards right into the product. Love it. Okay, who hasn’t checked in yet? Gina, how are we doing on Legend? Well, Captain, we’ve been hard at work continuing to improve Legend, the experience for our most active traders, including an upcoming launch of P&L layouts, which will give users the ability to evaluate their past trading strategies in much greater detail. But, most excitingly, agentic trading is coming to Legend. So, So, it’s the strong navigator. With agentic accounts on Legend, you’ll get access to all the same data sets and features as our trading MCP that’s available for mobile, plus there will be a few more options specifically for our Legend users that will be rolling out in the coming weeks. So, starting with customizing your Legend workspace by chatting directly with your agent, creating the layout that works best to manage your specific strategies all within seconds. From there, you can move on to the next step of your workflow like leveraging your agent to do in-depth technical analysis on your chart. Ask your agent to help uncover patterns with custom drawings, and then you’ll be able to see that update in your chart in real time. And finally, you can leverage your agent to create scans for stocks that meet your specific criteria, as well as custom scripts indicators, all that you can view directly on your chart. So, starting today, all users will have access to their agent accounts on Legend. What that means, with 24/7 coming, soon you will have markets that don’t sleep alongside agents also working around the clock for you.

To get started, all you have to do is connect your favorite model to our trading MCP. But, in the vast reaches of space and time, we know there are an infinite number of devices used for trading. So, let’s move on from the MCP to Abhishek to share a very exciting update coming to the core Robinhood app. Tough act to follow. Tough one. Thanks, Gina. I’m looking forward to using this for my Legend setup. One other thing I’m looking forward to is the iPhone duo. I think pre-orders start in a few weeks. For those of you in the audience, how many of you are planning to buy one? That’s actually a surprising amount of you. I thought a much fewer hands were going to be raised. So, some people might have thought Apple made these phones for watching movies, games, or email. But, when I saw the phone for the first time, I only thought of one thing. Can you guess what that was? Trading. More screen space means more windows, better analysis, and faster execution. So, we redesigned and re-engineered Robinhood’s mobile interface with dual display built for the foldable phone. Let’s take a look. Here, you’ll see a Robinhood on the phone as you normally would. Not that many surprises. But, unfold your phone and you’ll have access to a whole new Robinhood experience, custom-designed for the iPhone Duo. With dual display, you can do four things. On the left side, you can navigate the app as you know and love, your accounts, your watch list, search, and more. You can view assets on the right display by tapping any asset, so you can easily switch between them without ever having to leave where you are in the app. Third, you can switch modes on any assets between the details, the ladder, the options chain, and advanced charts, and you can switch between the modes without having to switch assets. And my favorite part, you can use the whole screen. You can go full screen on specific modes like advanced charts, side-by-side options chain, and watch list. So, you might ask when this launches. Robinhood dual display launches for the iPhone Duo on October 23rd. That’s the same day the device ships from Apple. So now, how many of you are planning to get one?

It looks really good. I think Apple’s going to thank us for that one. So, of course, we didn’t just stop at the iPhone Duo. With Robinhood dual display, we were able to do a few more things that were very overdue. On the same day, dual display will launch for Android foldables like the Galaxy Z, Pixel folds, and also, I think you guys will like this, Robinhood will be launching natively for Android tablets and the iPad.

Love it. Love it. You’ve been using it on your iPad, right? It’s a great device when I’m relaxing in my captain’s quarters. So now, Robinhood is optimized for all screens. Well done.

Okay. Who else is left? Tommy, I bet you have some good stuff for us, don’t you? Sorry, Captain. I I hate to interrupt. There seems to be a large object coming towards us. It’s continuing to approach us and it’s unlike anything I’ve seen before. On screen.

Increase magnification factor 50. Ooh. Appears to be a ship of some sort. Number one, I haven’t come across anything quite like this in my 13 years in this industry. You don’t remember it from your days in the academy? Academy training hasn’t prepared me for anything like this. Gina, let’s hail them. No response, Captain. No response? The architecture of the ship is so interesting, too. Look at all that circuitry. Why don’t we have Cortex run a scan through the historical archives? See if we can identify the origins of this vessel. On it. It’s exceedingly bizarre. Captain, there’s something interfering with our communication lines. Our passengers are getting spammed with fake trades.

Ah, it must be our new friends. Captain, it’s getting worse. They’re sending fake screenshots and trying to get our traders to join their VIP signal group. On Discord? No, sir. Telegram. Oh, no. Can we ensure only verified packets are getting through, Anna? I can do better than that, Captain. We’ve been testing a new simple that will get us only real trades through. Can we switch it on immediately? What are we waiting for? On it, Captain. We need to hurry before we have a copy trade situation on our hands. Agreed, number one. We have a copy trade situation on our hands. I need support in the engine room and can’t hold off these bots much longer. Right away, Burkes. Assistance is on the way. Abhishek, head over to the engine room. Yes, Captain. Abhishek, please hurry. Anna, how soon can you activate Robinhood Social? I’m activating it now. In moments, Robinhood Social will be available for everyone, our passengers and those across the galaxy. Perfect. Hopefully, this will block the unverified trains. How are the communication lines looking now? They’re recovering. Okay. Good. Proceed. So, now Robinhood Social is out of beta and officially launched. For most of you,

some of you had early access, but for most of you, this is going to be new. Open up Robinhood, you’ll see new tab in the bottom corner of your screen. Just tap and sign up. You can post or not, but you’ll probably want to see the trade ideas out there. And I know that this is a ultimate platform cuz all the trades are real, and that’s been so helpful to our users that we’ve expanded that. That means anytime someone posts their P&L, those are real. Portfolio allocations will tell you what people are really investing in. And we’re adding position posts and long-form analysis. Imagine a Substack with verified components. But of course, the most important part of any platform is all of you, the traders like you who share their ideas and wins. And we’re adding market commentators with millions of followers elsewhere. They’re verified, of course, and we’re adding feeds from major companies, politicians, CEOs, and news. So, you can curate a timeline that is all signal. And now, the communication lines are safe. Well, not quite. What do you mean? We still have one more communication line we need to upgrade. Ah, the advanced one. I’ll switch that on from the comms bay. Well done, Anna. Go ahead. I’ll tell them how it works in the meantime. We’re bringing the same verified network Anna just showed you directly to Legend, making Legend the only pro trading platform with verified social signals built right into your workflow. Let me show you.

I’ve got my Legend layout set up with all of the widgets I would normally use, my chart, my chain, and my snapshot widget, but before I take a trade, I want to add one more thing. I’ll grab the new social widget from the menu and drop it into my layout, where immediately it’s synced up with all the other widgets in my setup. If you’ve used social on mobile before, this will probably look pretty familiar to you. It’s got the same verified traders, charts, that I would see on mobile. But naturally, this is Legend, so we wanted to let you take it one step further. If I find a post with an idea I like, I can click actually click into it. Now, you’ll see a highlighted trade card on the post. If I click this, I can broadcast this into my chart with a single click. The green bars show me where they bought, the red bars show me where they sold, so I can tell if they’ve exited or are still bullish on the symbol. Now, if I drill in, I can see the individual entries that’ll show me exactly the quantity and the price they paid. Now, this is my favorite part, and I like this thesis, so just with a single trade, I can be in right alongside them.

Now, that’s the power of bringing social to Legend. If I have an idea

Well done. I love it. All right. Uh let’s reach out to Abhishek. Abhishek, the communication lines appear to have fully recovered. How are things looking in the engine room? I’m here with Barks in the engine room, but now we’re dealing with a bit of a situation here. They now appear to be wash trading millions of Mention Markets in an attempt to distract our equities traders. Now, perhaps there are enemies and they’re not our friends. Maybe they are our friends. I bet they love Bitcoin, Roth IRA, Robinhood chain, tokenization, GTA 6, Rizzler. What is happening? What is What is happening? Anson, secure the teleprompters. On it. They’ve been hacked. I’m so sorry, Captain. I should have realized sooner. I think they’re trying to manipulate their own mention markets. Can we block the mention markets? I’ll do my best.

Captain, I’m calling the ship Oracle. He’s the only one with the predictive knowledge to really handle this situation. Good idea, Gina. I just hope he gets here soon enough. Me, too. Earning season is coming up and I bet they’ll likely be pitching mention markets as a proxy for trading company releases. We have to hurry. Greetings, fellow crew members. I see there’s some panic afoot. I’ve been studying the stars and I’ve come to share an important observation. Neptune is in retrograde. What that tells us is that sometimes the best way to solve a problem is indirectly rather than by brute force action. Interesting. More often times I prefer brute force action. I know that. Where are you going with this? We’re in the middle of an attack. Well, we need to give our passengers a better and compelling solution so they can resist the mention markets. So, I wanted to present something that I’ve been working on. As we all know, stock prices and earnings are not directly correlated. Earnings can go up while the stock still goes down and this can be very frustrating for all investors. The solution I want to show you will give our passengers the ability to invest in earnings directly.

I’m sure you’ve got something good for us. Let me show you how it works. I’ll start with our home screen. I’m sure many of you have already used our prediction markets. There have been over 50 billion contracts actually traded already so we decided to make them easier to find directly from our home screen with a new predict tab. Once you tap on it, you’ll see our all new prediction up with a brand new category, something not previously available on any other major platform. And that’s the ability to trade earnings directly without another vehicle. So, here’s our earnings category. Let’s see what earnings calls are coming up. There’s Netflix, Alphabet, Tesla, and a lot of other familiar names. Let’s dive into one of these. Any favorites?

Apple sounds good. So, let’s take a look at our Apple earnings contracts. We’ve got revenue in earnings per share, but since Abishek demoed the iPhone duo duo earlier, let’s take a look at the iPhone sales for this quarter. As I saw earlier, I’m sure some of you may have a strong opinion on how the new lineup will do. From here, you can make your decision, swipe up, and place your trade. It’s that easy. You can now trade a company’s earnings with binary KPI options. And of course, you’ll be able to trade these contracts for over 20 of our most popular symbols across over hundreds of different events. So, now when you have a strong opinion about earnings, but due to macro events, and stock price goes again against you, you can still trade your point of view directly with earnings predictions on Robinhood. We’re working to ship these in the next few weeks in time for Q3 earnings. In time for Q3 earnings. Love it. Just in time.

Oracle, this is exactly the missing link that we’ve needed between our equities and prediction markets, but uh Let Let me guess. It’s not enough. We still need more? Correct. And fortunately, I’ve been working on something for the earnings experience our passengers are going to absolutely love. Earning season is undoubtedly the most exciting time of the year to be an investor. Well, you’ve probably experienced how frustrating it can be to try and listen and trade what is often market-moving news at the same time. Today, that means bouncing between a few different apps. One to listen, another to see how investors are reacting, and a third just to execute your trades. So, we started thinking, why can’t earnings feel like a more immersive, connected experience? What if you could do all three of those things? Listen, see how the markets are reacting, and trade that news all in one place. Well, luckily, that’s exactly what we’ve built with our brand new earnings call player. Let me show you.

When a company has an earnings call, you’ll see it right at the top of the stock detail page. Just tap the card to open up the beautiful, full-screen player that has a nice full-screen transcript that follows along as you listen to the call. However, if reading’s more your style, we’ve got something for you. Just tap the read button to open up a more detailed version of the transcript, which includes speaker attribution. Now, I can tap anywhere on the transcript to be jumped to that point in the call exactly. But, we’ve made it really easy to move around the call as well. If what they’re talking about isn’t relevant to your strategy or your thesis, just use the scrubber to jump ahead to a different section. If you miss something super important, just double-tap the edges of the screen and jump back in smaller increments. Feeling impatient? Hold, swipe down to lock the player into 2x speed, so you can get all the information in half the time. But, we also wanted earnings to feel like an interactive experience. So, we built a few more features right into the player. First, we’ve implemented a live comment feed. Just tap the chat button, and you’ll be able to share your own opinions, as well as see how other listeners who are live on the call are reacting in real time. Nice. And second, because the player is built right into the Robinhood app, if I hear something on the call that changes my view of the company, I can simply tap the trade button where I can buy or sell shares without ever having to leave the player. Now, I know earning season can get quite busy. So, if you don’t want to sit on the call the entire time, you actually don’t have to. Just swipe down on the player to move it to picture-in-picture mode, which will allow you to continue moving throughout the app, researching, and trading just as you would normally. So, whether you want to watch, listen, trade the news, or just find the moments that matter the most to you, the best way to experience earnings calls is happening right here in the Robinhood app. This will start rolling out this upcoming earning season. And yeah, you can even watch our calls there. So, come say hi. Well done.

Just these little quality of life improvements make earnings on Robinhood much more delightful. Welcome back, number one. Looks like a successful launch. The mention market attack seems to be slowing down. Our traders are holding out for the real thing. Earnings markets. I’m glad Tommy and I could help with that. Mentions are too easy to manipulate, and we like to keep our passengers safe, don’t we? Thank you for everything, Oracle. You’ve really helped us get out of this quagmire. You can now return to your work on the Alcubierre drive. My mistake.

Hey, um Captain, do you think the attacks are really over? I don’t think they’re giving up that easily, Tommy. Captain, Yes, Gina. We have a report from Cortex. It’s on the enemy ship. It appears to be a Wrax mothership. A Wrax mothership? I remember reading about the Wrax in my course on ancient spacefaring civilizations back at the academy. A very greedy group. What else do we know about them? Well, you see, Captain, the Vrax weren’t always like that. In the beginning, they were just a small fringe movement preaching decentralization and sovereignty, but their message caught on. Eventually, they spread throughout all seven planets in the Trappist-1 star system, and they became very powerful. Ah, and we always know what happens to beings when they have too much power. Exactly, Captain. The same power soon corrupted them. They began looking for ways to close and control markets. So, during the great wealth transfer, they started restricting economic freedoms, attacking independent trading ships. They were seizing assets. They became the very evil that they once spoke against, and now they rule over a system where a small number of elites benefit, but the planets that are under their economic control, they don’t. So, our very presence and existence in their system is a threat. Their citizens would likely rebel if they knew open markets were available elsewhere. That is precisely correct, Captain. A civilization like this cannot be allowed to gain a foothold in Zeta Reticuli. We’re being hailed. We are being hailed. On screen.

Uh you’re muted. It’s a good-looking guy, though. I think you’re still muted.

The zoom never works on these things. Yeah. Hello there. Come on. I’m not muted. I was speaking at frequencies not audible to the human ear. I don’t think so. Your small brains cannot begin to comprehend the intellectual horsepower of the Vrax. We have let this democratization joke go on for far too long. Today, it ends. Surrender, or prepare for a hostile takeover. One thing I don’t understand is why are they always bald? And they’re always so violent. hear you, you know. You know, I pity you with your social networking and your OCOs. You know what we call OCOs on our planet? What do we call them again? Uh yes. Overly confused organisms. That’s what we call them. we only place one order and it is always the perfect order. While you’ve been busy fending off our market attacks, we have been preparing our photon missiles. Observe as they penetrate your meager defenses. I think he’s serious. Shields up. Red alert. Shields are up, Captain, but I am not sure how long we can withstand Gina, they’re hitting us hard. It may be time to fire up Helios and escape this sector. Bring up the engine room again, Tommy. Burkes. We might need Helios faster than we anticipated. Is it ready? It’s more than ready. Shall I switch it on, Captain? Daniella, set course for Sag A*Burkes, shall we try warp nine? Warp nine on your command. Make it so.

Wow. Burkes. The performance of Helios is astounding. We’ve completely left the Wraiths behind. Tell us more about this new engine. With pleasure, Captain. As you know, our job in engineering is to get our passengers to their destination as fast as possible, safely. Seconds matter in the markets. That’s why we’ve spent this past year rebuilding the engine that powers the most time sensitive parts of your journey. We call this new engine Helios and it has several major upgrades. First, smart render on legend ensures widgets update only what changed and optimizes when data is refreshed, prioritizing what’s visible on screen. Instant recall means Legend automatically remembers the answers to complex calculations, so the app never has to do the same work twice. Here’s what it looks like in action. On the left is Legend before Helios. On the right is with Helios. Notice the smooth, fast interactions. These enhancements work together to lower lag on Legend by a staggering amount to match your pace. From there, we brought predictive navigation to the Robinhood mobile apps. We now predict the next screen you’re going to navigate to and get its data ahead of time. When you’re looking at your watch lists, we get all the details for your positions. Same for your search results. When you’re looking at the options chain, we get the data for nearby expirations. This means you’re waiting almost a third less time while using the app. But, we wanted to see if we could go even faster. Love it. Accelerated launch cuts the time for you to open the app or heavyweight features like mobile advanced charts in half. Then, we rewrote the back end in record time with AI agents to enable swarm processing, so actions across the app are significantly faster, including getting your positions and updating your account. Last, our services now leverage IO optimized storage for lightning-fast operations. Take a look at what this means for you. On the left of the screen, you have the app from January, before Helios. On the right, you have the latest version that includes Helios. Notice how you teleport across the app, so you can get the latest information and make decisions faster than ever before. Just look at it zooming around the galaxy, Captain. With Helios, there’s less waiting and more doing. We’ve been shipping these features to you throughout the year, and we’re just getting started. Expect even faster performance from us in the future. Does that cover it, Captain? I think it more than covers it. I love it. You know, even all these little improvements in performance very very much matter. How are our friends doing?

Well, that was incredibly impressive, and we are now 42 parsecs away, Captain. 42 parsecs away. Let’s bring up the view screen again.

41, Captain. 41? Well, that’s a little disconcerting.

They’re getting closer.

38 parsecs. You can’t keep running from the Vrax. They will always find you. Radio security, we have an intruder on board. Who are you? And why are you here? My name is Q. From the Q continuum? No. I’m an entity from a world beyond your comprehension. What brings you here? I’ve been following your progress for many years, and I want to join your crew. I can also help you defeat the Vrax. What do you know of the Vrax? The Vrax are relentless. I know a lot about them. They will never stop attacking your trading systems. If you don’t increase your product velocity, and I mean quickly, you’ll be liquidated permanently. That doesn’t sound good at all. I don’t even get it. We’re not even levered. Oh, I can fix that. I brought something otherworldly for your many customers. Captain, 24 parsecs. 24 parsecs. We have an intruder. Yes, I’m an entity from a world beyond our comprehension. I think we met before. A futures launch? Of course. Then you know my only interest is in joining your team and spreading the best trading products throughout the universe. Are you prepared to receive a transmission? I have a QR code. You’re still using that tech? Uh who do you think invented it? Used to be called a Q code. Right. Okay. It’s validated. We’re good to go. Great. So since Grace and I were here 2 years ago launching traditional futures, how many of you were in attendance 2 years ago when we did that? Thank you. All right. Um there’s in been an explosion of a new class of futures called perps. How many of you have heard of those or even traded those? Well, they’ve become really popular and I’ve worked very hard to get these to you traveling through several regulatory dimensions so that Robinhood could be the first US brokerage to offer true perps with the shortest settlement window in the industry. So if you’ve been wanting to trade this product but frustrated by the limitations elsewhere, now is your time. For those of you who haven’t heard of perps, let me give you a quick download on on how they work and why they’re so popular. First and most importantly, as is implied in the name, um they are perpetual. So they never expire. They’re much like a Twinkie. There is no more perfect instrument to have eternal exposure or a hedge to an asset. Secondly, in TradFi, um as many of you know who use futures, it can be costly to continue to roll and you have exposure to delivery risk, settlement risk. So you could end up with a thousand barrels of oil or or a a rail car full of live hogs. Has that ever happened to you? Uh no, but I I have had a soybean but I like mayonnaise, so it worked out. Um Third, and I think one of the things that’s really cool is they trade continuously on nights, weekends, holidays, long or short, and you always know the reference price, which is really important. And finally, as Grace and I will demonstrate, uh they not only provide leverage, but you can customize that leverage all the way up to 10 to 1. So, they’re extremely capital efficient, and they are sourced through a very deep liquidity pool. So, Grace, have you accessed that data I sent? I got it right here. Great. Let’s pull it up and show them how these work. Awesome. So, I’m really excited to go through this. This will actually make Robinhood the first major platform to offer six asset classes: stocks, options, crypto, futures, prediction markets, and now perpetuals. True perps. True perps. Now, let’s see how they work together. So, Q, you may already be aware, Bitcoin has been the number one recurring investment on Robinhood for many years now. I do know that, Grace. I have infinite wisdom, and I know exactly what price you all bought it at. And I know you have some capital to preserve. So, uh now you have sizable gains to protect. How do we do that? Well, since you have infinite wisdom, maybe can you tell me and the audience what you think the price of Bitcoin’s going to be at the end of the year? I can tell you. I know that, but my parameters don’t permit it. Okay. Neither does my legal team. That’s what he always says. So, I’ve been sitting here on some Bitcoin, and I’ve been very nervous about the market volatility recently, and I also want to avoid a taxable event. Well, now you can use perps to very efficiently hedge that. All right, let’s take that for a spin. So, I can go to Bitcoin perps, and I’m going to go ahead and hedge my risk. Let me put in $10 and I could adjust my leverage all the way up to 10x. And you can see that controls almost a $100 short position. Very capital efficient. So, these are the most capital efficient crypto perps you’re going to find here in the US. You’re absolutely right. And perps is actually built with risk management in mind. You’ll see I can see my liquidation price here front and center. And if I wanted to, I can very easily add a stop loss as well. Yeah, I think what makes these very unique is even when the trade’s already on, um you can configure it. So, if I want to add more collateral to add protection while the trade’s already on, I’m able to do that, which is very unique. So, Keir, can you tell us how many perps are going to be available? Well, we’re going to start with the lucky eight on the crypto space, but there’ll be more to come. And what about fees? How does one basis point per trade until the end of the year sound? That sounds very, very competitive. Captain, what do you think? Can we work with that? I think I think we like it. You know, we’ve had these in Europe and on chain for a while. It’s great to have them for our US customers in America. Well done. Thanks.

Grace.

When can we go live with these? That’s the big question. I think I can get them for the live audience ready right now. Right now?

And for everyone else, perps will be coming out in the next few months. All right. Thanks, Grace. They may be trading them already. I love it. Excuse me, Captain. I just have to let you know, eight parsecs away. Eight parsecs? Now, what is your proposal for defeating the Wraiths? While you’ve been launching perps, which have been very cool, they’re closer. and they’re no doubt preparing another attack. I told you they’re relentless. I’m more afraid of seeing that pompous ogre of a man on my view screen again. But he was quite charming, actually. I don’t know about that. His physical appearance was not what was holding him back. You know what we need to do here, right? We have to beam onto that ship. Oh, I was afraid you’re going to say that. They’re hailing us again, Captain. On screen.

Uh Don’t you dare attempt to board our ship. The conditions are much too inhospitable for life forms such as yourselves. Is it just me or does he seem a little nervous, Q? He’s very defensive. Vrax Commander, this is your last warning. Actually, it was his first warning. First and last. Leave the Zeta Reticuli system for good or prepare to feel the full fury of our product velocity. Oh. That spooked him, huh? We better beam over there and see what he’s hiding. All right, let’s head to the transporter room. Abhishek, the bridge is yours. Please be safe, Captain. It’s very scary out there. Stay safe. Thank you. So, hey Abhishek.

Should we blast this ship? We can’t just blast the ship. Vlad’s on board. Abhishek, this could be our only chance to get promoted. I mean, that would have I heard that. Very funny, guys. Q and I have made it aboard the Vrax ship. There are no life forms here. It appears to be a remote-first ship with the Vrax all working from disparate home planets. Bizarre, isn’t it? That explains their slow reaction times. Do you think they’re crewing multiple ships at the same time? Yes, we believe so. And a large portion of their staff are serving in middle management and coordinator functions. That must be why their ship is so big. It’s all bloats. We developed a plan. Q is pulling the schematic for the Vrac ship. We believe we can sever the link with the remote workers. Meanwhile, can you come up with a way to neutralize the ship? And this time without me on it. Copy that. We’ll get to work. Captain, I was just testing Abhishek. Sure. Sure, you were. How about we deploy our upgraded AI agents onto the Vrac ship? They’re adept at operating in a sandbox environment. Yeah, that’d be that’d be a great test of the new system. Perfect. Let’s do it. So, in May of this year, we launched Agoric Trading to enable traders like you to connect your Robinhood accounts to your agents. And since then, over 150,000 of you have opened Agoric accounts, and now agents use Robinhood’s tools over 30 million times a day. How many of you here have used it?

Okay. So, about a quarter of you. That sounds about right. It’s complicated. We don’t really like it, either. It’s complicated. It requires using multiple devices and apps. And often times, the connections between these different apps are slow and brittle. So, fortunately for you all, this was just phase one of our vision. The next step was making it possible for all of you to use it directly from your Robinhood account without any other devices, apps, or windows.

We built a single product, a single interface that puts the power of a hedge fund inside the Robinhood app with frontier AI models, high-grade institutional data, and automated strategy execution 24/7. And it’s called Robinhood agents.

How many of you are excited about this?

So the team was very nervous about doing a live demo, but we’re going to do it live anyways and we’ll see if it works. So, instead of telling you about it, we’re going to show you the full power of what it can do. So, let’s say we wanted to build a trading strategy which did three things. First, it got technology stocks traded by congressmen and stocks trending on social media. And we used that as signal. Then, we wanted to filter those stocks for technical momentum like unusual bullish options volume or a golden crossover. And then, we wanted to buy one share of each of these stocks and then, we wanted to do it on repeat every single day. Let’s see how we would do this with Robinhood agents. So first, I need to create my agent. I can go to our new Robinhood agents page where I can create it in less than 60 seconds. I’ll go to add account, hit a Gentick, and here’s the onboarding flow. I’ll name my agent. Neptune is in retrograde, so we’ll go with Neptune. And then, it’ll ask me to sign a few agreements. I’ll sign my agreements. And then, it’s going to bring my agent online with its own dedicated account. And then, I’m going to set up a few settings. So, it asked me about trade approvals. Trade approvals are on by default, so my agent cannot trade without my explicit permission unless I turn it off. And second, we wanted to give you the ability to use the frontier AI models available. So, you can pick between GPT-6 Luna, GPT-6 Sol, or other models. And the team just upgraded the models last week. So, we’re living on the frontier here. Then, this part is absolutely gorgeous. Just watch.

Our design team cooked. Tommy over there cooked.

So, when Neptune is online, I can start using it. So, let’s switch over to an account that I’ve been using for a little while with some money in it. Like other accounts, it looks kind of familiar. I can see my performance, but a few things are different. I can see my agent’s activity log first and foremost. And then I can see my positions. And then I can ask my agent anything through the chat box. So, let’s have it do the strategy we were just talking about. So, the best part is that the agent will ask you questions when it’s not sure what to do. So, because this is a pretty complex strategy, while Neptune cooks, you might be wondering how it’s getting accurate access of congressional data, social media data, and unusual options data, cuz that’s data that brokerages usually don’t offer. So, one of the things we sweated over was making sure your agent has access to high-quality institutional-grade data to analyze and trade with. To tell you how we did this, I’ll hand it off to our ace pilot, Gina. Thank you, Abhishek. So, we study closely what hedge funds are doing, and one clear advantage they have is access to unique institutional-grade data. They also have teams of humans to understand that data and inform their trading strategy. Just to name a few examples, they acquire satellite data to understand weather patterns and to spy on data center build outs. They acquire company KPIs like mobile app downloads. They look at political data like government lobbying. And then they analyze all these data sets with their teams and that’s what they build the strategies around. This is data that no app offers in one place to everyday traders. Not to mention, it would take hours to analyze that. So, what did we do? We partnered exclusively with some of the top data providers in the world to bring these data sets directly into the Robinhood app for your agent to analyze and build trading strategies from. Let me introduce you to the world of agent apps. Woo!

So, directly from your Agent account, you’ll be able to subscribe to any of these partners. Unusual Whales to help you find your next options trade with unusual activity spotting, Nasdaq to see how retail and how Wall Street are trading, Quiver Quant to track congressional trading and corporate lobbying, and Token Terminal to track and analyze blockchain and crypto companies. That’s just to name a few. We also have Visual Crossing for weather tracking and Narratives to track emerging narratives from social media trending chatter. The way you’ll get access to these is through our all new apps nexus and you can subscribe directly with one swipe in the Robinhood app. So, no separate subscriptions off platform, no API hookup needed. And at launch, all partners are offering the first month free. So, you’ll be able to actually test drive, make sure you’re getting the edge that you expect before your subscription starts. Bringing these data sources together directly for your agent, all inside Robinhood, that’s what unlocks new strategies and new insights in minutes, not in weeks. And we’re already lining up our next wave of partners with more apps coming soon. We welcome you to apply today. Abhishek, how is Neptune doing? I’m really excited about agent apps. Actually, a lot of our app partners are in the audience today and will be at the conference tomorrow. So, let’s give them a big round of applause for making all of this possible for us.

And hopefully in a few years we have thousands of these. So, we’re very excited. So, let’s get back to the demo. So, now Neptune has finished finding our stocks. Let’s take a look at its response. As you can see here, it found five stocks and the most cool part is that I can actually see which of our agent apps it used. It used government tracking, viral stocks detector, and the options trader app. So, now let’s move on to the next part, which is just to buy these stocks. So, we’ll put in some orders and because it’s after market, we have to place 24-hour market orders. Actually, I forgot to turn off trade approvals. So, we’ll go ahead and turn off trade approvals. And then we’ll press trade. And then it’ll go through and place those trades. So, while Neptune is placing these trades, let’s take a look at what this looks like when I leave the agent interface. I can actually track the agent’s progress while the agent is running by being able to see the input field. Here I can see it’s thinking. You might be wondering also what are all the other things your agent can do. Oh, and And we go. We got some orders coming in. That’s pretty cool. You guys see that?

But right now, Robinhood agent supports equities, options, and crypto, and many other tools that you can access around the Robinhood app with your fingertips. So, finally, I want to move on to automating this. So, let’s say we wanted to do this every single day.

Let’s enter the prompt and then I’ll explain what’s happening. This was a prompt to run this trading strategy automatically at the same time every single day. So, now Neptune will create what we call an agent loop so that you can automate your strategy to run on any cadence you want. Loops enable you to run agents and your strategies autonomously. So, you can be at work, asleep, or living the rest of your life, whatever you want. It’s like having a team of hedge fund analysts working for you. And like I said before, because it wasn’t exactly sure what to do, it’s asking me some questions. So, let’s answer them. We’ll use uh the prior screen rules. And then it’s go through it’s going to go through and set up the loop. And the best part about agent loops is that it runs on our infrastructure. So, you don’t need to maintain anything. So, no more walking around with your laptop pried open. So, Gina, you’ve been using this for a while. I saw your agent’s name the buddy. What agent loop have you been making? Oh, buddy is so extremely powerful. So, I trade the wheel strategy personally, and loops allows me to actually set up my trading strategy, work without getting in trouble at work for trading all day long, and it will just run based on the criteria I’ve set up. It’s It’s been really great. Did you guys see the loop just got created? So, there I’ve got tech daily signal buys, and it’s asking me to launch it. So, check out this animation. And there we go. The loop is launched. So, now I can access my loop from my account page. I can inspect it. I can see what it’s going to do every single day. And I can edit it or delete it. And if you happen to be inside of your Robinhood app while your loop is actually running, you’ll be able to see it running actively next to your button next to your agent input. And it looks stunning. Yes, it absolutely does. But, there’s one more thing we want to talk about that’s extremely important to us and to you all as well. That’s AI privacy and safety. We’ve designed and architected Robinhood agents thoughtfully with safety in mind from day one. So, first, your funds and trades are safe. Agents can only place trades in your dedicated agentic account, and every account is defaulted to trade approvals on with only you able to turn that off. Second, your agent is operating in an isolated environment in our infrastructure. So, your financial data, it’s protected. It stays within Robinhood. And third, we have zero data retention agreements with the research labs. So, regardless of what models you’re using, your conversation with your agent stay private.

This has all been designed to give you a high-level trust and peace of mind around what really matters when using Robinhood agents. So, who’s excited to start trying this?

So, there’s one more thing I want to talk about. We’ve actually worked with OpenAI directly to make GPT-6 Luna free until the end of the year. So, you’ll be able to test it, test drive it, and play with it for free, and figure out what you like to do. For the remaining models that need a little bit more power, uh you’ll be charged directly per token based on the normal LAP token rate. So, that’s Robinhood agents putting the power of a hedge fund directly in the pocket of everyday traders like you. And hopefully, today gives you all a glimpse into the infinite possibilities of what you can create with it. So, let’s see how the Vrax handles that. The agentic systems are now completely upgraded, Captain. Are you ready for us to teleport you back? Affirmative, number one. Let’s get him over, Tommy.

Welcome back. Did you catch any of that demo? Actually, no. Q and I were busy, successfully, I might add, severing the communications link between the ship and the remote teleoperators. Would you mind quickly recapping it? I think we have to deal with the Vrax. I can catch you up on it later. using my my agent. It’s like having a a nice hedge fund in your pocket. Very What’s your hedge What’s your agent called? Vladbot. That’s fun. Uh but the most important thing you all should know, and you’re probably already wondering, is when does this thing roll out? Robinhood agents and agent apps are beginning to roll out today to passengers here at Hood Summit.

So, Today, did you say? So, I’m excited to see you all playing with it tomorrow. With loops coming very, very soon. Support for more asset classes, Robinhood legend, and more agent apps are also on the way. Impressive work, number one. But, we have an imminent threat still. What should we do about it? What do you guys think?

You want you think we You want to blast it out of the sky? Yeah? All right, Gina. What do you think? Should we blast Ready for action, Captain. All right, we’ll have to do the photon torpedoes. Blast.

Let’s not get complacent, team. We may have gotten the better of them this time, but they’ll no doubt be back. Because our mission to democratize finance is never complete. And that’s what makes it so fun. Captain. Yes? I have another coming incoming transmission. This time it appears to be from somebody’s cabin in Lake Tahoe. They don’t even have a ship. Lake Tahoe? Apparently. Nevada side or California? I’m not sure, Captain. Okay, bring it up.

You You think you’ve stopped us? We are only halting our attack because we want to. Your good looks won’t save you this time. be stronger and better. You have increased your options trading hours by 35%? We will increase hours by 36%. You have 24-hour market? Our will be open 25 hours. You have perks? We have super perks. Super perks? What’s so funny? Stop it. I’m not a cat. Did you do that? I love cats.

Well, Q, thank you for the help. I think you’ve really proven yourself. And uh I have something for you. This badge. This is the most prestigious and important badge in the galaxy. Very hard to get. How does Chief Brokerage Officer Starship Robinhood sound to you? Sounds pretty good. I will not let you down. So, let me uh let me get started right away and show you something that I’ve been cooking for, okay? For all of you. So, buckle up. I like to call this 1 2 3 of offers that we’re going to start with. First, for every Robinhood Gold member, every dollar deposited will get you an entry for a chance to win a gold bar.

It’s a good one. Second, a 2%match on IRA transfers. We all need to save for retirement, right? Finally, a match of up to 3%on eligible brokerage accounts. All of these efforts, all these offers end in the next few weeks. So, now’s the time to move those accounts. Thank you all. Some pretty strong offers. I’ve got to go get to work and put my badge on. He’s already making himself useful. I love that. Strong offers. Yeah, quite strong. I like it. Captain, Uh yes, Daniella. Something on your mind? What keeps us from becoming like the Wraiths? At one time, you were offered your own star system. Why did you relinquish it? I’m glad you asked. Well, you see, Daniella, when I was younger, I was very competitive and entirely focused on my career progression. Being the number one cadet at the academy. Being the youngest midshipman in Starfleet. Commissioning and creating what became the starship Robinhood. This is important for you guys. Here comes the Kepler-16 story again. Of course, this culminated in the opportunity to take ownership of Kepler-16, which was extremely difficult to pass up, as you might imagine. We can imagine. But instead, we empowered the citizens of Kepler-16 to own equity in their local industries. And the system became one of the greatest engines of wealth creation in the entire galaxy. You know, when I saw that impact, I made it my life mission to replicate this throughout the observable universe because ownership works best when it’s broadly distributed and available 24/7 for the benefit of a free, stable, and prosperous society. Hey, Captain. Yes. I’m getting another distress call. This time it’s from the DeFi sector. Our old friends. All right, bring it up. Captain, we need reinforcement. There are a lot more new assets that are waiting to be tokenized. I don’t think I can hold them any longer. He seems quite desperate, quite hungry. Gina, set course for the DeFi sector. Warp 12. Warp 12. On your command, Captain. Thank you for joining us on this journey. We’ll see you in the DeFi sector. Engage.