All right. Wealthies, welcome back. If you're new here, this is All the Wealth, Wealth More's wealth building channel, and I'm McCall Jean Les White, the host and founder. And today, we are here for a special episode about empowering women to invest and take agency over their money. And I couldn't be more excited than to have our special guest, Jenny Just, with us. Jenny is a fintech powerhouse. If you think about the apps that have made it possible for women and many other people to invest, Jenny is the woman behind it. She and G7 co-founded Peak 6. She is a self-made billionaire, having grown that brand to a fintech powerhouse with brands like Peak 6 Capital, Apex Fintech Solutions, Zogo, Team Focus Insurance Group, and many other brands. But Jenny didn't just stop there. Jenny believes in helping women succeed. In 2020, she started Poker Power, which I have had the pleasure of attending a few times, and I got to tell you guys, it's amazing. It's about helping women think about strategy, decision-making, and risk-taking. Jenny most recently was named a CNBC Changemaker. Welcome to All the Wealth, Jenny.
When I share your background, I imagine some of our Wealthies are probably like, she was born on Wall Street. She came out like this. It is so impressive. But we know that that isn't always the case. So, tell us about young Jenny. Tell us about how you grew up and how money was introduced to you.
That's right. I'd be happy to. And I definitely did not grow up thinking about Wall Street. So, I grew up in Wisconsin, and I was a tomboy. I had four brothers, so probably not unexpected. I was sort of a sports nut. I played a little bit of sports, too. And then I went to the University of Michigan, where obviously many great sports teams, including the most recent national champions. And I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was a good artist, actually. So, I thought and I was good at math. So, my grandpa had told me, you should go into architecture. It's a good blend of the two of them. And so, that's where I originally started. And I took my first physics class, and I thought, I don't like this. So, I stopped that and pivoted. I ended up going to the business school only because I didn't really know what else I wanted to do. At the time at Michigan, it was a two-year program, so it was good timing with my change of plans. And when I left school, the only thing I wanted to do was go to the city of Chicago. So, that was the big city for me growing up in Wisconsin, and so I interviewed at a bank, I interviewed at a trading firm called O'Connor & Associates, and I interviewed at a big advertising firm in Chicago. And I ended up, it's funny because I don't think I got offers from the other two. I was thinking about this the other day, but I actually wanted to work at O'Connor, even though I had no idea what options were. I didn't have any idea about trading. I'd seen it in the movies like Trading Places, but I interviewed in an office, so I thought I was going to work in an office, and they kind of were early Google-like kind of culture. So, it was casual, and they also served food, and they had Häagen-Dazs and beer in the fridge. That's how I made my decision. So, I was a young whippersnapper going through all the things. But I really didn't know anything about the markets. And my last piece of that is my first day, they took me down to the trading floor, which I did not know I was going to, which is, you know, for your audience who's too young to remember, it's crazy. Thousands of people, almost all men, and screaming and yelling, and they put you in a trading coat, and they sat me on the stoop on the floor, because there's like steps that go up and out to the side of these pits, and they left me there all day. They never came back and got me. It was a busy day. Drexel Burnham had declared bankruptcy. It was a really big time in Wall Street. So, it was wild, and I didn't have lunch, I didn't go to the bathroom, and that was my introduction.
Is that where you caught the Wall Street bug? Because I always feel like there's that magic moment in the middle of all that chaos, and you're like, this is pretty cool.
So, I would say initially, I mean, first of all, it was definitely a lot, but back to my interest in sports, like it's like a sporting event every day. People are in tennis shoes. They are moving. They are like super high, super low, right? And to this day, probably still one of the best working years of my career was being down on that trading floor. So, for sure, I don't know if I caught the Wall Street bug so much as I caught the being part of this sporting entertainment thing called trading.
Yeah. You don't just go into regular asset management. We go all the way to the right of the curve. Just for our audience, because we sort of break these things down. There are folks who are asset managers who are either building portfolios for long-term investing, and then there is options trading, which is like going straight into the deep end. You are what is called like a market maker. You are moving the markets in dramatic ways. How did you get into options trading, which clearly translates to poker power, because that's how risk-taking.
Right. That is true, and something I didn't know about poker till much later. So, O'Connor & Associates, one of the infamous firms today, they were eventually bought, and it was rolled up into UBS at Susquehanna SIG, which people might know today. They were the two big, really early, great options trading firms. So, I was super lucky and what they were, but they just, that's what you're going to learn. Everybody who goes in, you might learn in equities, you might learn it in interest rates, you might learn it in currencies. But for me, fortunately, I got to learn it in equities. So, when I'm thinking about an option, it's I'm not buying the stock or selling the stock, but I have the right in the future to buy or sell the stock. So, those are the instruments we are buying and selling all day long, and making markets. So, people who want to overwrite, for example, where they buy the stock and they sell the upside, so they get a little bit boost on their return, we would be the other side of that trade.
We often talk to our Wealthies about interest rates and two-year and 10-year and how that's the market projecting where they think interest rates will go, projecting what will happen with inflation. And in many ways, option trading is a projection. Where do you think this stock will go? And people who follow the markets, they look at the options to say what is the rest of the market thinking. And when you're a big firm that does a lot, people really pay attention to which side of the bet you're taking.
Yes. Yeah, and the interesting thing as a market maker, we take both sides. So, we are buying and selling all day long, not to just scalp the middle. But there are people who do that. We think there's sort of a difference. There's like really fast firms. A Jane Street would be an example who might be out there, and they are more like DoorDash. They're just transporting the goods. We're more like the grocery store. We're inventorying the goods. So, if people are selling things, we might be buying them. If people are buying things, we might be selling them, but we are doing that in combination all day long, and we tend to hold the inventory where some one of those DoorDash type of market participants would be in and out in seconds, or certainly not overnight. They are literally days and weeks into some of our positions. So, yeah. And making decisions to hold the inventory based on how much we think things are going to move, not necessarily direction. So, something called volatility arbitrage. In today's market, obviously a lot of volatility, so there's a lot of movement. It's a lot of opportunity for us to be in the middle of that movement. In lots of names, you know, we might have 3 to 4,000 names across our portfolio at any given time. Most of the big firms you would see out there, if they have any inventory, sort of in the big names, and it maybe a couple hundred names.
I hope you guys are just kind of completely enthralled as I am. We don't often get to talk to women who are doing this, right? We're often seeing the men do it. And I just love Jenny's story and what she does and how she normalizes women being on Wall Street. She's not just doing this for her own portfolio. She's doing this, as she mentioned, like 4,000 different positions. You are making the market. You are telling the market where you expect things to go. But when you started this, right, still in a very male-dominated space, what were some of your first observations? How did you feel as likely the only woman in the room?
So, because I was the only woman in my household, besides my mom, of course, but I was used to being around a lot. I told you about my first day at work. My second day at work, there was a gentleman who was on our team who came up and he said, 'Don't worry, I'll protect you.' And I was like, 'From what?' Like, what was going to happen? I didn't know. Just this idea of being there was not so surprising to me. I think though what really struck me and bothered me as time went on is that first of all, it's really interesting. It's really fun. Like, women are not just missing out on those two things, but also the monetary opportunities when you're in money are so big. So, why aren't more women here doing this? And I also felt as eventually I became a mother that this is possible as a mother as well. It wasn't... And how could, you know, what's the mix and match? What's the way to do it? In what areas? But there's so many different ways that I thought it was just a big miss. It was also very early on for me, a really big miss that I couldn't get more women to see it. Like, we had tried multiple times to try and recruit women. Like, something simple, we had an all-women's trading event. There were more men there than there were women at it. So, like, we had multiple efforts over time to try and bring women because that was, you know, we have many companies today, but at its core our proprietary options trading firm is 28 and almost 29 years old now, and it's sort of funded everything else we did. So, I have really responsibility to go, 'Gosh, this thing is having real success. There's zero reason why women cannot be involved in this, and what a great opportunity for them. How am I going to make it happen?' And eventually, we did. We figured out a model. We had many fails, and we eventually started this thing called the Women's Trading Experience, which you come in in the summer and you have this, you know, 8-to-10 week boot camp, basically. And the interesting thing about it is I thought it was because the way we programmed every single day, every hour of every single day, like, we cannot fail. Like, this has to be the best internship. If you're smart, you're curious, you're hard working, I can teach you this. This is possible. But I have to get you interested. I have to get you in the door. And I thought that's what we were doing. But the interesting thing is we were actually teaching poker back then. And this is before I even played poker. It was more that was happening because there are many options traders who are poker players. And our teacher is a very good poker player. So, he brought it into the program because I was like, 'This has to be the best.' And since I didn't know the game, I didn't really care. Great, let's do it. Today, you know, the program is 9 years old. We have almost 30% female traders, which is wildly unheard of on Wall Street. Obviously, the big banks have, you know, sort of half and half men and women, but in capital allocation positions, it's wildly unheard of. Like, you might get a percent at other trading firms. Maybe 2%. But so, to be anywhere around 30 is.
I love the fact that you have really centered women as part of this journey. I'm a big believer in each one teach one. You know, if you ride that elevator to the top, you better send it back down and bring some other women up. But you took it even further with Apex Fintech Solutions. And Wealthy, we are part of Apex. Your accounts are with Apex as our custodian clearing. But it is for me just how Apex has democratized and made platforms like Wealth More and so many others. We could not be here without that deliberate effort. And I've heard your passion for democratizing these markets. And I can't thank you enough for doing it.
We're so happy Wealth More is there. It is a platform to give opportunity for, just a quick analogy, if someone thinks about retail stores and they want to start, how do they quickly start? They often start on Shopify. It's very similar for a fintech like a Wealth More. There are a lot of things that have to happen in order to be able to deliver an amazing fintech product to the end consumer. And a lot of those things are really the guts and the plumbing of the financial ecosystem, and that is something that the biggest firms do, you know, the Charles Schwabs and the Fidelitys and the TDs and obviously the big banks. But all the other firms that are out there, there are hundreds and hundreds of them, how do they get their start? And then how do they grow? Apex Fintech Solutions is almost 65, 68% of the market today in getting those people started. So, Robinhood, when they got their start, Wealthfront, Betterment, they all started on our platform.
Robinhood was with us for about 6 years. I always say when GameStop happened, that did not happen on our watch. So, and that would not have happened that way. You know, there's so many amazing things they have done, but at the same time, right, they were a little over their skis on that one. But the opportunity is set for new ways to deliver to all the different types of clients and customers out there, that's the platform allows for that to happen. So, you can focus on the customer, and we can focus on sort of after the trade is made, right? When the money exchanges, when the securities exchange, that's our job. That's roughly a commodity today as, you know, just having rebuilt a major part of that system. Nobody, I think we think it's probably been over 50 years since someone has built a real-time ledger into the financial ecosystem. So, it's even that the opportunity today is really at the fingertips of those entrepreneurs like yourself who want to change, you know, the destiny of their customers and what they can do in fintech. And so, talking to them and creating those storylines and approaches, that's where all the special sauce happens, right? Even in the day of AI, how do you spark a different way of thinking about money for your end consumer? And give them hope and motivate them to change their own destiny.
You got it. I mean, we often have Matt, who's our chief portfolio strategist on the podcast. And we recently were sharing the performance of our portfolios from last year. And that was a big part of my passion for building Wealth More is that, hey, you know, rich people have people that build portfolios for them. They don't always have to go out here and pick individual stocks. But the 100 million Americans who don't have a wealth advisor are often left to do that. And it was so important for me to feel like we could create that. And Apex gave us that opportunity.
Yeah, I love that. Half these portfolios, we could deliver on that peace of mind. And it still sort of warms my heart when people say, 'I love having an advisor. I love the peace of mind of not having to do that.' And we would not be able to do that if not for having partners like you and Apex to make that possible.
Right, we appreciate that, and we are grateful for those entrepreneurs who join us, for sure. And that's part of the reason why I wanted you to come on because, you know, sometimes like people are enjoying a product, but they don't know who the hidden figures behind it are. I wanted to make sure we brought those hidden figures front and center so that when you were out here sort of gushing over, 'Hey, I can do this. I can do that.' There's a whole army that makes sure the trades go through, the statements go through, the tax forms, like all of that fun stuff. You have a powerhouse team behind you to bring that together. We often do episodes encouraging women to invest. But we still have work to do. There is still that barrier where when we do get women investing, they are really good investors. The data is there. Women are good investors. They are deliberate. They do their homework. My favorite is we are not emotional despite how they love to pin that one on us.
There you go again. Yeah. It's just a matter of getting us there. It's like we just have, just like you had to bring the women into trading for them to see it, and then they could take action. It's like we still have work to do to just get women there. Like, what would be your advice to women to just like get them over that hump? Because we know once they get here, they're doing it.
That's right. Yeah, I think the biggest thing is certainly the hardest thing is the initial hump. We're not sort of, you know, it's not in our society or culture that we are naturally going to start to do those things. And however, you know, if you think about young boys or young men, how they are starting and thinking, right? And we'll talk about poker, but playing poker would be a great example. How do they get their feet wet? They do fantasy sports. They're all kinds of things that they are doing as they are growing up. And the women are not doing that. And so, it's really hard now when it's more real, you know, I'm an adult, and I have bills and things to do, and deciding between the two when I don't have comfort around it is not an unexpected hurdle if I haven't been doing it my whole life. If I didn't start with, you know, a dollar and $5 and $10, like, all of a sudden to think about it in these other much larger numbers is really hard. And so, I think the most important thing we can do, for sure, as parents, is getting our kids started younger, super young, right? I mean, there are amazing financial apps for young families out there today. And many of them are on Apex. So, that parent who goes, 'I wish I had started sooner,' can definitely start sooner with their child. I'm talking like you are talking numbers when the child is three and four. They are watching you transact in dollars by the phone usually, but having those communications super early. But when they are five and six and seven, like that is part of their lives, as far as I'm concerned. But for the person who is still waiting, unfortunately, the only thing you have, the most important thing you have is time and practice to get going. It's not about taking a thousand dollars. It's literally about taking it fifty dollars, a hundred dollars. The beauty of today with fractional shares, Apex was one of the first to bring fractional share trading to the world, is starting with those companies that you know, that you have seen before. It's not about picking individual stocks. But if you don't start to buy or sell something so that you can then have a conversation with an advisor, it's really hard to make that leap because you don't even know the questions to ask. And now all of a sudden, it doesn't feel good to give something to an advisor in a big amount. You might give a small amount. But think if you had that knowledge. So, getting, it's like brushing your teeth. Every single day, I have to decide, you know, there's so many amazing places like this podcast where you can go get a little bit more information. You can take one step forward. And all these baby steps in each of these different places, starting having conversations with your friends, start listening in as many circles as you can. There's so many interesting women circles that are doing this today. And then taking action. The action has to happen. You have to make the first action. It just doesn't have to be a huge action. In the past, it was huge. And you had such big fees. Today, you don't have massive fees to pay. And so, you can take action with small amounts of money. You have to do it. If you don't take the risk with a small amount of money, you're never going to go to the next level of money. And that's when the brilliance of the money starts to work for you, especially with smart people like at Wealth More. Like how do you get to that next level? How do you let the systems and the money work for you? When you know nothing, you have nothing invested, time goes by, and your money needs time to grow.
Yeah. You know, we didn't set out to have a podcast at all. Guys, like I can't tell you.
Right. You were thinking of the tech and the interaction with the customer, for sure. Yeah.
But we saw this void where people just needed to have these conversations for someone to tell them, 'It's okay to get started.' You know, how to get started. And normalizing things like just look at the S&P. Just look at these four or five indices. Like they're literally on your phone.
They are on, yeah, they're embedded. Unless you remove Apple, like Apple puts it there for you. Right there.
