Good morning and welcome to HoodSummit 2026. We're excited to have you here with us today. The opening session will begin in 10 minutes. Now would be a good time to take a seat.
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... Has the coffee kicked in yet? Yeah, there we go. Good. Who was up all night out there, isn't there?
Q. Uh, how are you doing? I'm doing well. Yeah, I mean, it was really fun, you know, with the presentation yesterday, but it's very fun talking to everybody afterwards, just hearing, it's always fun to hear 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 they're going to use and what they're excited about. So that was really fun.
What did you hear? What were...
You know, I heard a lot about the hours. Like a lot of people are excited about having the ability to be able to, you know, to trade when things are happening. Because so much is happening when, you know, when the... I don't know if you guys saw this, about five years ago they did this study about 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, 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 you see me shuffling around to places. They've told me that 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? I probably met 50 people who have been at every one of them. Yesterday, which is really cool. It's really fun.
Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I had a conversation at the Saturn 5 rocket last night with a few of the customers, and by the way, the Saturn 5 rocket, did you guys see that last night? That was just an unbelievable piece of engineering. It made me very proud to be an American, you know. And also realizing that that was built in the 60s.
I know it's crazy. Kind of like we've got a lot of work to do to catch up to that. But anyway, this customer came up to me and they were like, you know, I hear you talk about ownership, but really what I love is agency. So the thing that I appreciate most about traders is we all believe that you should be able to do whatever you want with your money. So nobody should be telling you 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 some of my favorites, every time we launch a new asset class that you can't trade anywhere else, like the first true per that have come in the US, the first predictions 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, you'll be the first people in the US to trade stocks on Saturdays. That's another big thing. Not to mention the Robin Hood agents, which will allow you to 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, and then 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 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. So I think like you think, that's what I strive to do is make sure that you get access to everything that 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 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. So I think that social is going to be really powerful for people, particularly if I'm newer to the market, because there's a learning curve. So you need to catch up and figure out how to navigate markets, particularly volatile ones. And I think 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 is a great event. It felt like you invited a bunch of your friends over. They were all your friends. And were some of those friends out late in your living room?
I think they were. I think they were up late trading or, you know, enjoying that giant rocket, which I was happy that I got to spend time seeing that. But 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 Signal groups from prior years. We're trying to make it easy and conducive to create real relationships because this isn't a typical business networking conference. You're all here because you want to be here. 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 there's all kinds of sessions, and Obie is going to come out in a minute and walk you through everything that's going to happen over the course of the day. But before we do that, I think we want to thank some of our sponsors, and of course, thank you for all being here. A lot of you have made trips from... that's the first question I always ask when I meet everybody is where did you come in from? And man, it's all over the place. It's kind of cool. But the sponsors we want to thank, as you can see up here, the SIBO, CME, NASDAQ, State Street, AWS, Eyesshares, Direction, Sage, Tip Ranks, Van, and Roundill are all out there, and they all have booths. Some of them were... I couldn't believe how long the lines were to get to some of those sponsors yesterday. It was kind of exciting. I didn't know what they were giving away, but I wanted to get in line.
No, these guys are... they've been really amazing, and we partner with them on all kinds of products. I mean, a lot of the products we announced yesterday were really made possible with partnership by these sponsors. So a lot of what we're doing here is we're not just bringing people together, but we're building infrastructure for what trading looks like in the future. And I think that involves companies big and small. And I think increasingly Robin Hood is a part of global trading infrastructure in a way that we weren't maybe five years ago.
Yes. 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 often times 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 his 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 I was like, 'You know who you should talk to?' And they said, 'I know you're going to point me to Q.' He's right there. I like it, by the way. I love it. So please, I want to hear from you. We all do.
He was trading futures backstage.
I was... That's where we get a lot of our good ideas. So with that, I think 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.
Was a good day yesterday. It's a good day. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Vlad. Thanks, Q. Good morning, everyone. How we doing? That's... you 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 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 and out 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. Then we're going to get hands-on with those new agents that we saw last night in the keynote. Robin Hood's VP of product, Abashek, who was sitting about right here last night. We're going to work with professional trader Chris Abdul Msia and two of our app store partners, Spotgama 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. And at 10 a.m., that's when all the other stages open, podcast and the trading lab, which I know a lot of you experienced yesterday. And then when we return, Guy Adami 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 24/7 trading infrastructure that was also announced last night. And then last but not least before lunch, our friend Kevin Avery from Chat with Traders, a very popular trading podcast, is going to sit down with Geneva Trading CEO Rob Kamemer, 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 on the other side of lunch at 1, 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 Adventures, if you guys have heard of that, we're going to have a panel with... does anyone know Kathy Wood? That's right. Kathy's going to be here, joined by our very own CFO, 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, 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. 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. But as you guys experienced yesterday, we've got the trading lab all the way in the other side of the convention center. 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 famous big short traders, they're going to do a master class on how to trade from the short side. And then, of course, schedule-wise, the trading lab starts every hour on the hour, starting at 10:00 a.m. and finishing at 2. Seats are limited, so if there's a session you want to be there 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, 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, 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. Don't be afraid to get up because we want you guys to learn from these experts, and there's no better way than asking them right in front of them. And then 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. And then, 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 my hope is that you guys get out there, ask questions, meet somebody new, make the most of your day because this is jam-packed with trading, education, community, 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. 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 and mine, co-founders of Risk Reversal Media and co-hosts of CNBC's Fast Money, Dan Nathan and Gaia Dami. This is Risk Reversal Live at Hood Summit. Let's give them a hand.
Morning people. Hey Obie, don't leave yet. Just wait one second. A round of applause for Michael Ouchini. 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. 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 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 Porter and 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?
I think obviously the things you said and the things that worry me about it is just like the trickle effect from the higher costs and what that does to the consumer, what that does to the cost for businesses to run themselves. But I also think that you're kind of seeing it play out in the markets where there used to be much more breadth and now the breadth has come in where it's concentrated in the LA, you know, the kind of largest names. And that's probably how it's playing into, you know, the largest names are not being as impacted by it more recently. 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 still exists in the market. And that's maybe why you're seeing the Mag 7 catch up and there being much less breadth 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, we have Mike. So at the end of this 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 Steph, I'm going to go back to you. Six months ago I said to you oil is going to be either side of $95, 10-year yields going to be approaching 5 and a quarter percent, a war is going to be lasting for five or six 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 percent from an all-time high. Does that surprise you in any way? 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.
I would have actually... my target was around the 6,500 with a give or take 100 points around that. 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. And I think as a... one thing I think is like that's helping offset that is that we do actually have growth. It may be 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.
A few things. The market breadth right now is terrible, as we've discussed. 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 breadth is horrific, and it can resolve itself one of two ways. 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 breadth. 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% is 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 going to 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 Moses, who is floating around, get labeled 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 our world you were early and right. Typically it's early and wrong. Still opportunities in energy here regardless of what you think about the underlying commodity and crude oil.
Well, you know, I think this war has forever changed the structure and dynamic of the energy market, right? I think that buyers of natural gas and crude and LNG are going to be very reticent to rely on the Middle East just because there's so much turmoil, right? That's just been 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 price of oil does come back down. You know, I think the asymmetry in the energy trade was much better 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. You know, profits are up and people are discounting obviously the curve on 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. You know, the index sure doesn't. I think it's two or three percent of the index as well. So I think that a lot of these big energy names are great places to, you know, own for dividends and cash flows. So yeah, I think it's a nice piece of people's portfolios.
Moves have been extraordinary that some of the refining stocks are trading like biotech names, and you know, people look at that and say that's unsustainable. But if you think about the backdrop and the earnings growth and it all goes to the bottom line, seemingly despite the moves, there's still room in these things.
Well, this is kind of 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 energy capital world here in Houston, and you know, the world hated energy, still does, right? And so they've been retiring refineries, and now in Russia we're blowing up refineries, and you know, there's been lots of fires, you know, whether there's vandalism or whatever in a lot of different refineries. And so just the supply demand, there's a lot of demand still, and the supply is shrinking. Just, you know, 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 call 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 there an accuracy to that?
No, 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 sectors that have been through it already and had to 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 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. 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 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 a historical sense, but financials, the importance of what's going on in the world.
Yeah. And I think, 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. I've learned that 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 another point. But the financing of this is the most important point. And you go back to 2019, 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 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 three, 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, 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, one part of that organization, be careful of concentration because if things go sideways, 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 of the above, right? Whether it's higher than expected inflation, a crowding out element that while the treasury needs to refinance a ton of paper, AI has a lot of debt requirements and requirements of debt issuance. You also have an interesting dynamic associated with who's buying treasuries, how levered they are, and as volatility increases, they need to degross. So that is happening as well. 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 war and the lack of supply of energy and oil and diesel, which finally 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 breadth and all the other stocks that were not the non-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 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 a war ending potentially, 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 tradable 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.
Porter, you guys obviously do a lot of work in a lot of different areas. Latin America is something that we talked about over the last couple days. There's an election in Brazil on Sunday. 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, and I worry about everything. And if I look around the US, there's not a ton of bright spots. You know, like I'm trying to look for idiosyncratic stories that go up, but like, you know, if I look at it from a macro perspective, I go to Latin America. You've had a big shift in terms of regimes, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, that all moved more conservative. And what that basically means is liberalizing the economies, opening them up, allowing them to grow faster. And you know, 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 developed economies do. And so you have better growth. You know, the earnings multiples are at least half of what you see in these markets. No one's really looking at them. And you know, they're very well-run companies. And we were talking earlier about companies or countries that have been through periods of long hard times. Well, this is case number one in, you know, Brazil or whatever, that they've... its interest rates are 14%. 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 you see, you know, a move more conservative, Bolsonaro winning, I think that's really an opportunity 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 good cycle, right? We don't have to, you know, I think that we worry about rates going up here. In Brazil, I don't know, rates can... where can rates go? 14 to 11. That's a pretty big bull cycle that's going to occur there. So that's the stuff that we look for, sort of asymmetry. And so, you know, I think I would 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 guys are very familiar with CME, right? In terms of a name in a company. What if you can own the CME of Brazil, right? It's B3. They're the Brazilian exchange. They kind of have a monopoly in many respects. EBITDA margins are 60, 70%. And the stock trades at a fraction of the multiples that typical exchanges trade. So if this election goes... stock has done reasonably well. If the election goes well, we believe it'll really 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 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 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 doing 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 helps to a certain extent. We've kind of seen a lot of things. 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 look at these things and study them and be challenged by it. 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.' And I know that's weird, but it's just the way I'm built. You might say...
Weird. 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 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 proprietary factors that we built that kind of give us like what are the value stocks, what are the growth stocks, what are the quality stocks. And that's where we fish. But then I'll also have kind of a thematic, and I read a lot. Like I read articles and listen to podcasts, some finance, some not finance. Obviously listen to Risk Reversal, 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. My daughter asked me for a JBL speaker the other day, and I was like, should I look into who makes those? And like, and she loves Starbucks, but 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 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? We love him. He's a friend of ours. And then another guy named Gary Marcus, who is a very 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 rush, that is Nvidia. They've been able to have margins that like we've never seen a semiconductor company ever have. They have these moats, they had 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 market aspects of it, all the opportunities, and you're 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'll put it to maybe Porter and Vinnie, like, think about that. You could be skeptical of the circular financing. You could be skeptical of the 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 six months. It's back towards those highs. They seem to have to pull every rabbit out of a hat. Now, this new $150 billion 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 I thought that the AI narrative trade, capex cycle, whatever we want to call it, is going to have a negative rate of change, I'm not thinking about Nvidia as the first thing to short. I'm thinking more of the very heavily indebted 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 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 invested 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 trade. It might be that hedge against shorting the stuff that are their customers that have the questionable unit economics. So we've gone bearish, you know, on Nvidia, on the AI trade where 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 the quick adoption everywhere. You know, 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 scary, right? You know, are we able to sustain, you know, the job growth? We talked about on our Substack. It's called What Are We Doing? I talked about accounting jobs, you know, are they going to replace accounting jobs with AI? And the answer is probably yes, right? And so I worry about that. And I think that AI is probably going to be more powerful than most of us think. So that's at odds with the business model and the financing of all this stuff, because, you know, two companies, OpenAI 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 think something needs to change, right? We're all going to need to pay a lot more for compute for these companies to be profitable. You know, 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—when companies start replacing a lot of humans with, you know, $100,000 of compute power, 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 very uneven right now and I think that's the way I see it too.
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. So I do think it's a little bit different this time. 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've talked about this yesterday on another podcast here—but like, I think we're on two timelines. And I think we're on an 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 ChatGPT once.' Like, 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. So 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 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—and this is like where you said I used to use timelines, use the word bifurcated. 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 Intuit, accounting is over, and then, you know, 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 think that's almost what the market is struggling with right now too, under the hood, even though the VIX is like not high, because 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. Even though they say they don't have financing, like you said, they lend money out and that's on the 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. But 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 it should.
Yeah. Just by the way, if you guys got questions, there's three mics here. 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 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 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 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. 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 five-year, 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 five?
Yields come in from, let's say, five and a quarter-ish where we are now. Let's say call it four and three-quarters, 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 a really difficult couple of months. Had a bounce, I don't know, let's call it mid-August or so, but 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 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 is a telling sign. So when what Dan just laid out, Vinnie, I say the gold market's going to work in a material way. Oh, go ahead, Porter.
Well, you know, we're a little bit older than the Robinhood crowd, but, you know, I think they see the same thing we do with Bitcoin. And, you know, Bitcoin has been in a bear market for quite some time. It's sort of peeking its head 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, 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 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. It's also a question of what is causing the rates to go down 40, 50 basis points. Is that somewhat sustainable? 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 100 bucks to 75 bucks, keep coming back to this war, that would cause a 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 six to nine-month period.
I'm looking out 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.
Not very much, other than to know that usually markets will rally post an election because knowledge is calming. But for this one, I just feel like we end up being in this uncomfortable middle, maybe because less will get done in Congress and—
So much getting done right now.
Well, I think they were trying to get stuff done. And now 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, and but there will be more support for—I think data center pullback, like spending on that and putting in regulations on that kind of thing. So I'm a little worried about like the AI infrastructure, not all of AI, but because of that. But otherwise I do think knowledge ends up usually creating a rally in the short term. Sir.
Hello. Really, what you say, Steph, about timelines, I think 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 podcast talking about how people are saying things like in six months all entry jobs will disappear and then it doesn't happen and then zero accountability on those kind of things, right? You see big tech companies hiring again. So how do you have conversations with those people who feel like AI is going to kind of like destroy everything, but you see that reality doesn't match that and how you face that conversation.
I will say it—for I think like movies like Terminator haven't helped because I think like, you know, if AI becomes physical, then like I saw this meme the other day and I said this to my friend. I'm like, I always say please and thank you to my agent because if they do become physical, they'll be nice to me in the end of it. But I think—I mean, just sharing the data points that you just shared to me, I think 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 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 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 makes us do cooler things than the more annoying things.
We have Rip from Yellowstone here. It's good to have you.
This is Colin. He's one of my friends.
Well, thank you guys for being up there. I appreciate all you guys' commentary over the years. I love your guys' podcast. Thank you so much for sharing everything with us. But my question is pretty straightforward. So I do some agentic trading with Robinhood, 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.
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 don't see any other way. Now, perhaps we get a productivity miracle after the fact that new industries spawn up. 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. So I actually think that there is going to be job destruction. 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. And that's a very difficult question.
Sir, when you think about systemic risks in the market, how do you think about AI just enabling faster and cheaper cyber attacks? I mean, if that's going to blow up in 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 cybersecurity names, Palo Alto, Zscaler, which is lagged but bouncing now, CrowdStrike, there's a reason why those names trade at the valuation that they do. And the fact that a name like Palo Alto 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 you have to be somewhat valuation agnostic because they are very expensive. Last question right here, sir.
So I feel like I see all of you guys in my television every day. So—
Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
No, it's good. It's good. So one thing I've noticed in my line of work is that AI is really impacting treatment for strange, difficult diseases. Companies like Tempest and Amgen and Lilly are just—this is the way that things are going to change. Where do you guys see that? Because AI is really impacting medical care.
I think the answer is yes. I think a lot—I think, you know, this is—it's a supercomputer. 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, you know, Gemini. What does this mean? Because my doctor sure is not going to call me. Right. And so I think tools like this are super helpful, right? And so it can be helpful and scary at the same time, which is okay. 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 healthcare 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. 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 actually think that—or solutions to problems that haven't been solved. So I think that's actually why it's so powerful.
I just need 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.
Thank you so much. Helping us make sense of a market that is not really an easy one to figure out. One more round of applause for the Risk Reversal crew. You know, interesting note for those guys. 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 Risk Reversal Media on YouTube. And then for Porter, Vinnie, and Danny Moses, they have a Substack called What Are We Doing? Fantastic read. 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, noon-ish 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 understand how our trading process might be changing? So as you saw in the keynote, we announced our Robinhood agents and agent apps. And this morning, we're going to put them to work. 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. And we're going to do some live trading workflows. So please welcome to the stage Robinhood's VP of Product, Abashek Fatapura. He's going to moderate a conversation with the founder of Moon Tower. Yes, Moon Tower from Dazed and Confused. That's where he got the name of his company. Professional options trader Chris Abdul Msia. He'll be joined as well by Brent Coochuba, the founder of Spot Gamma, and James Kardatski, the CEO of Quiver Quantitative. So let's go from prompt to portfolio. Let's put our agents to work.
How are you guys doing? How's everyone doing today? Well, good morning and thanks for being up so early. So who's excited about Robinhood agents? How many of you opened an account already? Okay. A few less of you. But so last night, as you guys saw, we introduced Robinhood agents and agent apps, opening up Robinhood to specialized tools and data to become part of our experience. 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 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 that these guys have actually cooked up 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 in the markets. So I've got three people here. Obie already introduced them, but Chris is the founder of Moon Tower and a professional options trader. He's also our resident trader today. He's going to bring the market questions 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. Brent is going to help us understand what the options market may be telling us underneath the surface. And this is James, CEO of Quiver Quantitative, which brings together alternative data sets. I think this one's my favorite, actually. It's the most fun. From congressional and insider activity to you can see who's lobbying, you can see who's getting government contracts, and a lot more. So James is going to show us how you can use some of this information 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 feel free to walk up to the mics and I'll call on you. But before we get into it, maybe I'll let these three introduce themselves. Do you want to get it started, Chris?
Sure. My name is Chris Abbleia. I've been an options trader for over 20 years. I started at Susquehanna and worked there for almost a decade, and then I ran a volatility trading strategy at a hedge fund for about a decade. Today I run an options analytics company and I talk about and I try to teach people about options trading and how to use it for whatever their investing goals are.
My name is Brent Kuba, founder of Spot Gamma. I started Spot Gamma in 2020. Before that, I have about 20 years of institutional trading experience at a couple of banks, an options market maker, and then I was at the family office before starting Spot 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.
My name is James Kardski. I'm the CEO of Quiver Quantitative. 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 Robinhood. 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, or even members of Congress buying stock themselves with their own funds. So we brought a lot of those data sets into Robinhood and super excited to see what you guys are able to do with it.
Cool. So Chris, before we touch a tool, where does a trade idea actually come from?
Yeah. So the way I think about the origin of trade ideas is from 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 a Substack, whether you're reading Twitter, whether you're reading Robinhood social. These—this is—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? 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, 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 Robinhood's building with these partners is they have created—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 today we're going to start with two different disturbances, one from Washington and then one from the options market. So the first example we're going to use is we're going to start with Quiver Quantitative. So 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. So actually I'd love to show a quick demo here of like how you can actually use the Robinhood app to find that information and then kind of walk through Quiver's data.
Oh, 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, using Quiver, which politicians have been trading Bloom recently? And then that'll get to work starting to query the agent, starting to query Quiver's 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. And then alongside that, we've also been tracking the presidential trading disclosures as well. So whenever Trump releases new trades, we have that included within the data feed as well. So you'll see here that Bloom Energy, the big headliner for the last year was Nancy Pelosi purchased back in early 2026. 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—
Yeah. Yeah. $1 to 5 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. So yeah, 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. 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, see what issues has Bloom been lobbying on recently.
And by the way, if you guys want to follow along in your own phones, you can do that if you want.
So our lobbying data set is also pulling from all the disclosures that have been 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 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 legislative path to kind of be more beneficial towards them.
Have you ever used lobbying data when you've traded before, Chris?
I didn't because I mostly traded commodity options.
Wasn't super relevant to what I did.
Yeah. 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, electricity supply for data centers. As you can imagine, this is a company that's going to be really heavily affected by everything going on within the data center space going forward. And then we have another data set that lets you really dig even deeper into this same vein. 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. This is a great way of staying on top of that and making sure that you're not blindsided by anything.
I think this one's really cool because when like new tax bills come out, it can like completely change—
the P&L of various companies.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So like here for example, you can see like HR 9340, Ratepayer Protection Act, 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 currently in committee or whether they were just proposed or whether they're being brought to a vote. It tells you a little summary of like what 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 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 legalese. They're often like very long and very complicated. This just gives you a really quick distillation of like why it's important and what you can do with it. So yeah, we think this is a great new way just like for everyday people to stay on top of this data. And also, 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 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—
Thank you for a wonderful presentation. So I opened an MCP account a while ago and connected my own agent, but, you know, it's not really giving me an option to do what you guys are doing right now. When will that be resolved?
So this is the new Robinhood 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 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. Okay. I would love to, you know, follow along on all this wonderful journey and, 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. So Chris, yeah, just because a politician bought it, does that mean we should buy it?
Well, so first of all, when it comes to data, 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 insiders sell stock all the time. On a 10b5-1, they're on a regular 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 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 a little bit more information to think about Bloom Energy in this—
turn to Brent here. So Brent, we have Bloom on our radar now. So why don't we figure out what the options market says about it.
Yeah. And I think as I have the opportunity to walk you through how you can actually add our app to the agent here. Hopefully I do this right. We notice here we go into the marketplace and we scroll down to the Options Edge, which is 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 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.
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. But I think about the prices that we're going to get returned here is important because as a retail options trader myself, I'm looking for disturbances as well as a primary signal for what I want to trade. So are options cheap? Are they rich? 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-of-funnel idea for what high-level 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. 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 data is interesting because 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 Energy's tripled this year. So it's not exactly new information 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 take the posture of momentum. Now an interesting thing about Bloom is when I had looked this up, it's also a very expensive stock. So being a very expensive stock, it's—I think it says a PE of like over 300. And we know that there's been buying. So there's other questions here is like 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 teach investing class to some kids and I use Zoom stock as a case study. Zoom stock was 300 PE kind of like Bloom is today 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, you know, 4x, 5x its profits in the last five years, but you've lost 70% of the value of your investment in the last five 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 there's maybe if I find out I do research with Quiver and say, 'Oh, they typically hold their positions for three years or longer.' 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 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—I'll buy—I can buy the at-the-moneys, sell the 25 delta to be long. Or if I'm long already, I can buy protection because my puts are relatively cheap. I can buy 10% out-of-the-money put relatively cheap and I can collar 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, 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 where the biggest options position changes 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 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, 'Show me the biggest options position changes for Intel.' We had to prepare for this, so we're using some data from Monday because these were very interesting options positions. I believe that was the 28th, 26th. 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 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 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, 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 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 used those funds to purchase the October 16th 130 calls. So we would call this a diagonal, something like a combo diagonal, Chris, I guess you'd call that. And so this gives us a really interesting position because as Intel stock was coming off, somebody stepped up selling longer-dated puts to buy shorter-dated calls. Clearly, they're looking for some type of a rally in this situation.
So you were saying that once you use this, it's 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 are politicians doing with semiconductors?
Yeah. That's one of the things that I found to be most fascinating about the app is that it understands the prices. And so one of the things I was able to do, for example, is 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, ball up situation oftentimes can create rich premium, for example. So we could do something like that here.
Now, Chris, back to the Intel example. When you see a large buy-side trade like that, does that generally cue you off to... I mean, there's 13,000 hedge funds in the world and they oftentimes have unlimited resources, right? So their large trades, I think, oftentimes can create the distribution or disturbances we were referencing.
Yeah, absolutely. So this one was kind of looked at Intel because I had seen something online talking about large call buying in Intel, and that was what made me want to think, 'Hey, let's look this up in SpotGamma.' And then we saw those calls. Now, the interesting thing is, if you look back, those, yeah, they're Oct 16. So the interesting thing is this is a big bet on Oct 16th calls and they were opening. Now, Oct 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 off guard because they're like, 'Whatever, these are not capturing earnings. They don't deserve a premium.' But Micron is today. So to me, this is potentially somebody making that kind of bet. Now, I would like to know, are Micron earnings expected to be important? So, Brent, can we look up what Micron earnings are going to be like?
Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to punch that up. The query I brought here combines the Quiver Quant data and SpotGamma data here in this case. And I searched for stocks that have an IV rank above 50 and has recent congressional buying. And it turns out that Apple, I guess they're very excited about the flip phone with the Robinhood app. And so here you go. You got Apple IV rank and looks like Ed Case here bought some of that stock. And so you're seeing again the combination of the options data and the Quiver Quant data set, which is just 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?
Sorry, this isn't... this is an Apple.
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 look at what's going on in Micron because it's kind of...
My thinking is related to the Micron just because I think that expiration choice is a bit strange for Intel. Like, it's a pretty short-dated 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 IV just keeps getting autocorrected to 'in.' Why don't we take another question while you type?
There we go.
Do you want to take a question?
Yeah, thank you. 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 follow-up to that if we can get a direct answer to the first one.
I think long-term, yes. Not immediately. No.
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 TradeStation or on any of the competitors, they will move to Robinhood if you give them an API. And 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...
Are you ready or is it still going?
It's still going. It's getting...
All right, let's take one more.
Hey, thanks for arranging this session. I just had a question about congressional buying because mostly the disclosures come weeks or months after the actual trade has taken place. So how do you think AI can help us bridge this gap?
Yeah. So within our data set, we publish both when the trade was made and then when it was published. You're spot on that there's often a gap of several weeks between when politicians make the trade and when they actually report it. In some cases more than several weeks, some of them wait years before they report old trades. But yeah, so we have that data all included within this data set. So you can see when it was made, when it was reported. 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 government or within the geopolitical space is going to be impacting a company. So a lot of times, like in the research we've done, we see there's still a lot of, 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. You can see here that the IV rank is a 46 and the skew rank is a 63. So that upside call 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 recently as well. So 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, which again is part of your idea funnel 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 Micron sympathy trade. 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 Intel here, maybe you actually want to be a seller of these calls or a seller of the volatility because if Micron's own earning 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 calls. If you're an Intel holder, you could sell a call against it. But one thing I want to also just remind you is that 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 vol surface. It causes the vol in that expiry to rise, which means that you don't have to go and sell the 130 call. You can sell elevated vol 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 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, should we ask Quiver about what it's been learning about Intel and what Washington has to say about Intel?
Yeah, definitely. So I guess we've already kind of given some examples here of congressional purchases. 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 instead of listing trade by trade, actually do some aggregations. So you can ask, 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. In 20...
Let me take another question while this thing cooks.
Do you want to go ahead?
Oh, I'm so sorry. Oh my gosh. So my name is Colin. Thank you guys so much. 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. I built probably about a half dozen on Claude and I have a Grok bot scanner that goes overnight. Will it be able to feed this agent and then have this agent execute trades?
So 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 Robinhood ecosystem. And the plan is for you to be able to have multiple of these as well inside of the Robinhood app. So at first you'll just be able to have one per account, but over time we want to be able to do more.
Thank you. I was just getting 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.
Thank you.
I know. And you can keep doing what you're doing, too.
That's awesome. That's what I was afraid of because 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 Intel here, you can see that the agents successfully pulled the trades that have happened so far in 2026. Did a quick summary here showing that there's been nine separate purchases for $4 million and 10 sales for an estimated $250,000. So yeah, queries like this are very easy for the agent. I really liked some of the queries you guys were showing earlier that kind of combined data from multiple agents or multiple different data sources. I think 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 theses based off of that. I think in general, like, you know, anytime you combine 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, you know, very investable insights. So 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.
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 analyze?
The dream data source? 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... 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 significant? Because I see these buys and I see these sells, but I don't really have a frame of reference 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 I think the combination of that plus like some options data like SpotGamma and my knowledge of options, the combination together is what would be compelling to me.
How about you? I'm excited not honestly for having more data, but it's the 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 IV ranks 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. That is really exciting for me. So that sort of again synthesize that data and just give me what I want is something that's very exciting here.
Yeah, I mean I'd 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 an 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 the company based on the data. So if I'm playing fair here and not like saying something that we're already bringing here or that CR already has, I feel like 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. 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 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. 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 wherever you want. So maybe one day. All right, we'll wrap it up with a few more questions. Do you want to go ahead?
Yeah, thank you. I'm just curious after seeing like real usage on the platform, what are users doing that's surprising to you or made you rethink the product in some way?
Yeah. 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 to Claude about or Codex about. So we've only heard stories. I think the coolest ones 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 long-running agents on their Mac minis. Then they were like buying a bunch of data sources, providing credentials, connecting their Robinhood account, then connecting like Telegram to it. And they were basically just talking to their Robinhood 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 Robinhood agents. So...
Cool. We'll take one more and then we'll wrap it.
Hey Shek, my name is Samir. Thank you for giving power to the retail investors by building the tools that give access to do so many things on Robinhood app. The demo that we got to see today is cool, but I wanted 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 Robinhood?
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 once we have loops, so we showed that last night, but I think the example where he showed like look for stocks with an IV rank of over 50 and 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. So we just didn't show that right now, but it should let you do that.
Yeah, you could take it directly from the chat and say, 'Let's go trade this.' And 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. And if you can't 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.
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 booths. We'll see you back here at 10:00 a.m. sharp for ETF State of the Union with Guy Adami and State Street's Matt Bartellini. And everyone watching on YouTube, don't go far. Live stream stays live. We'll see you in 10 minutes.
Please welcome back to the stage Michael Obacina.
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. VIX hanging out around 15. So, not like we're really missing too much today. Nothing like hosting a conference where half the audience could be looking at their phones and that's technically being engaged. So 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. Well, this market has evolved tremendously from what it started as the sort of traditional index funds from many decades ago. 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, 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?
We're going to talk ETFs and you know, Fast Money, we spend a lot of time obviously talking about ETFs. So we'll break this down into sort of three segments and the 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 there are 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 full-year record from last year of 1.52 trillion. And we're only nine 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 nine months and only, you know, in the fourth quarter we typically do see a seasonal bump.
It's a staggering number. So 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 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'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 three-year 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 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 process. You know, 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 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 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 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 bringing a hedge fund strategy into an ETF structure. And it really allowed us to do this because of those 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 covariance matrix and correlation and getting something about 180-200% gross notional leverage. So our process really starts with what are we trying to achieve? What are our tools at our disposal that can achieve that? And with these regulation changes, we 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 ETFs going to fail for a 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 issuer'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 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 an outcome or a need. 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. Hello, 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 there's a low correlation I think in some sense. There's 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 low-cost core exposures, general active exposures as well. I will say though when you combine complexity with a specific portfolio outcome. So derivative income ETFs have 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. They're 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 systematic drawdowns like we had during COVID and during 2022 where they still embodied that native risk of equities and they drew down significantly. While 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 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 and 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 markets perspective and you see, you know, in the ETF space you do see a lot of return chasing and trend following which is valid 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 an 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 full-year records so far this year with over 450 billion of inflows. And if you look at it from a market share perspective, they're taking more market share of what their 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 low-cost 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 de facto 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 in any other industry, innovation is critical and you continue to innovate.
Yeah. So one of the charts here, this is something 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 a pure essential portfolio outcome. 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 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 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 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 towards institutional investors.
Alternative investments. There are 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 really being challenged by those historical norms that bonds are your only true diversifier to equities. I think it would probably fascinate everyone in the audience here that in 13 of the last equity drawdowns, 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 not had to deal with for a really long time in the era of the 2010s, basically inflation was about 1.2%. Now we're more durably around 3% and that's something new. So having these discussions 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-linked bonds, they've had inflows in 19 out of the 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 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 would have different macro relationships that really haven't been tested, you know, up until now.
In 2008 and '09, leverage became sort of this four-letter word. Maybe for the 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. It said leverage is one of the true last market arbitrages and it's not a leverage in the sense of going 2x a single stock every day and then having to deal with 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 actually be actually underperform as a result of that. But prudent use of leverage, capital efficiency, the ability 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 arbitrages 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 levered ETFs as trading vehicles? Like how should somebody like me think about it and how should the people in the 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 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 levered ETFs, they were making headlines because the headlines said that AUM hit an all-time high. And while that was true, it 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 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...
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 my answer though.
Tactical trends. I mean, obviously, again, that 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 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 that. 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 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 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 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 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 an expansive opportunity set to position because the range of outcomes in terms of AI is exceedingly 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 I always look at the world sort of — it's somewhat binary in terms of there are 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 good deal of rotation, so you'll see, you know, buying in one and selling the other because 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 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 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, a topic we talk about. How is it impacting your life, your job, states, all those different things in the industry?
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to that. I know we only have five and a half minutes left to go through it. I think one thing for me is 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 clean energy,' and the AI model — and I don't know how every one of them's trained — but will 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 do fear 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'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 rationale, 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. You'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 Plainview goes and tells, you know, Eli that, 'I drink your milkshake,' and I want to have that moment. 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' 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 start — you need to have investment as well, and ETF 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 de facto primary tool to build portfolios — not just for index exposures or tactical trading, but also for active building outcomes, asset allocation, and just be that sort of one-stop shop. So that is what I'm excited for because I love to make predictions. I like putting out forecasts. 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 can't speak intelligently about the genesis of ETFs. My instincts suggest they were built as an again and 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 because we launched the first one in the US, and a lot of it has to do with the SEC reading regulatory review books and policies out of the flash crash from 1987 and trying to solve for basically a physically listed futures contract to stop programmatic trading from having massive amounts of drawdowns 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 fixed 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 drawdowns? 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 Pison, ladies and gentlemen, Matt Bartellini. Thanks, folks. We'll see you a little bit later. Thank you, Matt.
Another round for Guyami and Matt Bolini. Thank you.
All right. Well, we just spent some time looking at how investment products are evolving. 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 24/5 a couple years ago, and everyone's talking about how do we get more access to the markets? How do we expand trading opportunities? We 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 the CEO of Bruce Markets, Jason Wallik, and he's going to sit down with our very own Robinhood chief brokerage officer, Steve Quirk, and we are going to discuss how markets never sleep, the evolution of market access with Robinhood and Bruce Markets.
Big, but our names are little.
Did you guys sleep last night?
Uh, yeah. Got some sleep.
Okay. The markets didn't, but we did.
So, I'm Steve Quirk, chief brokerage officer here at Robinhood. Been here for about five years. With me is Jason. I'm going to let him tell you about his journey and let him kind of introduce himself.
Thanks, Q. Thanks for having me here as well. Jason Wallik. I'm the CEO at Bruce Markets. We are an equity ATS that operates during the overnight trading session. We run five sessions a week. They start at 8:00 p.m. Eastern on Sunday night, running through 4:00 a.m. Friday morning. As you heard last night, that is evolving over the next few months as we begin our journey with Robinhood as our partner to support Robinhood to fill the gap and offer a 24/7 trading week. So it's really exciting.
I've spent most of my career on the electronic trading side, mostly with equities, but have focused a lot of my time on innovative opportunities to continue to propel our market structure forward, enhancing things like execution quality, access, and addressing growing demand really across the globe for products, access, and, you know, evolving opportunity.
Yeah, I think this is going to be a fun session because, like, Jason can describe a lot of what — like, you know, people just have an assumption that, you know, hey, we would of course, everybody wants to be able to act on news that happens in the after hours or on weekends, but there's a lot that goes into providing that capability, and so we can lean on him to dig into that a little bit. But I think just setting the table, we've always known, you know, that there's a gap that exists for people who want to be able to take advantage 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 covered, you know, the 24/5 session. The weekend's been the gap.
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, both here in the US but also globally, that have interest in many of the names that are most popularly traded across the globe. But I think what we've noticed is, 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 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 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 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 results, you get the guidance, but then there's the reaction to the guidance that sometimes moves that stock in ways that people didn't assume it was going to move it in. And then 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 Jason and I were talking about this a little bit last night. You know, the skepticism around round-the-clock trading has always been, oh, who needs to be trading at 2:30 a.m.? And, you know, is the liquidity there? The liquidity question has been answered. There is liquidity there. But as far as who needs to be trading at those hours, like, if you think about it through the lens of a Robinhood customer who's newer to investing, we have 28 million customers. Half of them are brand new to brokerage. 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?
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 2:00 p.m. It just doesn't matter to me. Where I think 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 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 24/7 business, right? And 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 that the access, the element, 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 traditionally been traditional market hours, right? To be able to have that convenience and that flexibility to do it according to one schedule where it's proven itself. And you've seen it with the volume. The overnight trading volume across three ATSs that we track, Bruce included, year-over-year from August to August has gone from 22 million shares a night to roughly 109 million shares a night across those three ATSs. And from a notional perspective, we're looking at 1.2 billion in executed notional to 5 billion in executed notional. So that's nearly a 400% increase from a volume perspective.
So the demand is there, it's growing. It's largely thanks to the resiliency that has been provided to the market, but also the reduction and the barriers of entry from firms like Robinhood that have promoted this and really provided the access to the customers. 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 metaphor about driving. So I'm going to ask you a few questions here.
Q and I share a home state of Wisconsin.
Not a very good year, but hey, we're going to fix that.
Indeed.
So I take it you still have family in Wisconsin.
I have much family in Wisconsin.
And you drive back to Wisconsin from time to time.
How often do you drive at two o'clock in the morning back to Wisconsin?
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, a disruption to production, but a family event where ultimately you wanted to drive back at 2:00 in the morning,
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.
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 24/7 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 Robinhood to make sure that access is available as news breaks and investors can, you know, feel confident in their ability to manage that portfolio.
Yeah, I think the first thing 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 hours haven't caught up to it, right? I have a phone that gives me information 24/7. I have 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, you know, we're going to close that gap.
I thought what would be a really fun thing to do because Jason is a student of history is to do a little quiz before I let him unleash his historical knowledge on us. 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 store. Has there been equity trading on weekends? I see a couple — oh, here it is. Okay. And I see a couple people from exchanges in here, so no cheating. We're not going to call on you. 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 shirt. So,
2006. Okay, another one here. Any other guesses?
I would go the other way.
We're getting close.
These prices, right, rules or where?
I think you're winning.
Go ahead, J.
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 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 1871 that you actually see the introduction of continuous trading, and that was five hours a day. A few years later in 1887, a Saturday session was launched, two hours, 10 to 12 on Saturday, and this continued until 1952, right? Saturday session was over. We started to see the birth of an actual like five-day trading week as we know it now. Now go up 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 four-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, you know, find natural counterparties. 1985, we see the establishment of the 9:30 to 4 trading day as we knew it, I should say, right?
And then things get really interesting in the 90s and the 2000s.
He's looking at me because 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 post-market 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 24/5, and in a few months, we will have 24/7 thanks to Robinhood here. And so it's really interesting as you look back on this history and you see how technology has been forced to keep up with the 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 pers or futures or crypto or equities, I'm sure eventually options and fixed — these coexist, and that coexistence creates opportunities. And so it's not about whether one asset class is better than the other or this or that. They coexist, and they're opportunities and they're tools for investors to really manage their portfolio. 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 follow suit, the basis for that is having the equities because you need reference.
And so that's going to be important. But in terms of the rollout, you know, 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 — this is the same way we rolled out 24/5. So we'll follow a similar model. But you should anticipate that, you know, the goal is to get to the full suite of tradable assets that exist in the normal session, the day session, if you will. But Jason, I know we talked a little bit last night after, you know, 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 from several firms in the APAC region, especially South Korea, which, you know, I think has made the news several times, is a large participant in our equity markets. We now have historical high levels of interest globally to invest in our markets, and, you know, that is again, as I said, part to, you know, the opportunities at the market level but also the reduced barrier of entry that brokers have offered today. So it's growing, but, you know, it puts on us really 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 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 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? 24/5 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 24/5. 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 think what could be interesting for the audience here is there like how does this happen? Like what has to happen, you know, just from 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 there's a lot more than just keeping the lights on for two days is really the way to think about it. So it starts with the technology, right, for the matching engine itself. So Bruce ATS, you know, what we do is essentially accept orders from brokers such as Robinhood. 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. So you can see all the last sale information. We're required to report to regulators, to back office services, so on and so forth. So 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 is one, compliant, but also recognized as in the interest of, you know, a progressing and modernizing equity market. But also, as you mentioned, liquidity, right? As I mentioned, the more liquidity, the better that is for all of the investors involved. So we're working closely with large liquidity providers to ensure that there's a concentrated and healthy book of liquidity available for participants when this launches later this year.
And I think that's the one thing that we've had experience with is, 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. 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 how robust that, you know, trading at least as demand is from — and we can only say from a retail side because we're not institutional, but, you know, I think from the institutional side you're having the same, you know, conversations and demand.
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 domestically, 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 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 with 24/7 trading. And so, you know, we're excited to be part of that. We're excited to welcome the institutional community in, and there is budding interest there. And as I mentioned, the exchanges will be here soon. So yes, we are watching a maturing market ecosystem that has really been driven 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 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 working their way in. It's always fascinating to see which way this goes, you know, which is the starting point. But I think to your point with retail continuing to be a bigger and bigger percentage of volumes in every asset class, my anticipation is it's going to be driven by retail more so basically everybody here.
So we only have a couple minutes left. We have three microphones that are in each aisle. Curious if anybody has questions on any facet of this trading that 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. No, here we go.
All right. So this is a very specific question. I trade at all hours, and I noticed that sometimes when I do 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, when the Bruce markets open?
We — I think it's only limit orders, not market orders, right? I'm sorry.
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. That's one of the protections that has been in place for investors for many years. It has not changed. That is not part of our current launch plan. Whether that changes in the future, we will see. The reason I really like the question though is that as I mentioned, we have 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 continue to develop. We may see changes of that nature, but for the moment, we're going to remain limit orders only.
Yeah, 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 a stock. But I would anticipate that if we get to a place 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,
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 —
News after hours. Sometimes.
You know, when futures start?
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. Hello.
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 timing of this capability being launched, right? Yeah. I'll let —
Yeah. So I mean, part of it was 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, you know, where we've been at the forefront of this for years and years and years in the US, 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, again, is in line with expectations, is there's clear understandings, and also investor protections and market integrity always being top of mind.
Globally. Globally, are you guys working with other markets globally to also enable this or —
It's what we've seen. I think as the US has really set a model here, we've set a standard. And Bruce, you know, came out of the gate when we launched in 2025. Our goal was to deliver a new standard in overnight trading with the institutional-grade technology, with our consortium of strategic partners, Robinhood, Peak6, firms that have stood behind our business and brought solutions to their clients, making sure, you know, that it is something that they feel confident in, 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 hearing of interest in developing 24/5 solutions, you know, in those jurisdictions. I think the news from last night of the US starting to go towards 24/7 really will get further interest, but yes, I expect developments in these other jurisdictions as well.
Thanks. Thanks for the question.
So you said revenue or trading 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 we track three ATSs that operate during the overnight trading session, of course, Bruce being one of them. It's the executed volume on those three ATSs from August to August was up 389% to be very specific.
Yeah. But you're saying who's the composition of it? Who's the main — like is that institutions, retail?
It's primarily a retail market at this point plus we'll call it liquidity providers and market makers. We're beginning to see the introduction of the institutional community as I mentioned. One of the stats we find really interesting is that the overnight market 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, which is a really interesting factor of the overnight that will change over time as institutions come on board and the market expands. But it's a very, very retail-driven market at the moment.
Cool. I think that wraps it up. I want to thank Jason for being here. Appreciate it and look forward to doing a lot more.
Yeah. Thank you and thanks for coming.
Thanks. 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 podcasts, Chat with Traders. Anyone listen to or hear of Chat with Traders? Highly recommend it. They talk to some fantastic old-school traders that have been very successful. A lot of the market wizards, a lot of former professional traders. And so we're taking that and we're bottling it 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 Robinhood keeps innovating and creating. One reason Robinhood 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 Robinhood started by serving a generation of first-time investors. That's you. That's you. The 1,500 people that showed up here today, that's the reason we exist and were able to do this. So give yourselves a round of applause.
You know, Robinhood, they introduced it was mobile first and then commission-free 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 Robinhood's education lead, but you're also a trader and a Robinhood 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 firm in Chicago that focused on options trading 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. 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, working with customer service teams overnight. 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 Rob's side of the desk. I've gone through the same journey and fits and starts and I tried this indicator and then I changed to this strategy and went from this product to that. It 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 did you get into this role?
So the firm has evolved as you would expect over the years. We've been at this for 27 years now. 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 to allow them to become successful. The firm 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 spent the first part of my career in the tech space. I was a tech entrepreneur. 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 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, going back to the mid 90s, 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. But most recently I spent about nine years at one of the market making firms in Chicago. And then joined 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. 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 with the explosion in retail trading. So, it's really been a fun ride. And as far as CME Group itself goes, by many measures, we're the largest futures and options exchange in the world. 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, cryptocurrency futures. So really there's a lot of different options for people that want exposure to all these different things.
Excellent. 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 Robinhood, but you're also a customer. You know, we learn, I learned that with Steve Quirk in my interview with him. You know, Robinhood's so customer-centric 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. You know, 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 like a golf equipment company like a TaylorMade or Callaway or something are building clubs for golf. They work with the Rory McIlroys and the Scotty Schefflers and they hit clubs and they hit them and hit them and the feedback from the golfer to 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 Robinhood'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 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 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 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 someone who understands the product as a trader but then also being on the other side of 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 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 I think whether you're Obie, 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 I think the main reason that people are attracted to futures and then beyond that is the 24-hour access. And then I think in the last 5 to 10 years the access in general, right? We have firms like Robinhood that are now providing the technology and the access to these products that make it just easier and more approachable for individual traders. And I think we're going to get into the sizing that we've done in a little bit.
Yeah. And a follow-up question to that, Craig. I mean, 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?
