The Pomp Podcast - Former Citadel Trader is Now Betting on Retail | Neil McDonald

Episode Date: April 16, 2026

Neil McDonald is the CEO of Moomoo US and a former executive at Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and Citadel. In this conversation, we break down how retail investing has evolved—from access and information to powerful tools and AI that are leveling the playing field with Wall Street. We also discuss crypto, tokenized stocks, and what the future of investing looks like. =====================Uphold is the easiest way to buy and sell crypto unlike any other platform allowing you to trade in just one step between any supported asset. Check them out at https://www.uphold.com/pomp/ This video includes a paid sponsorship with Uphold. I’m compensated by Uphold for promoting its products and services and may receive commissions from referrals. Terms apply. Not available in all jurisdictions. Digital assets are risky and may result in the total loss of your capital.=====================Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates the buying and selling of your preferred crypto strategies. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com and start your automated trading strategy for free. No catch. No hidden fees. Just smarter trading.=====================0:00 - Intro1:05 - Why Moomoo is growing so fast4:38 - How trading tools changed everything & why most traders fail 9:28 - AI & the future of trading12:31 - Stocks vs crypto on the platform14:12 - Tokenized stocks explained18:33 - Options trading & retail behavior22:30 - Career lessons from working on Wall Street 24:35 - Building a fintech in a regulated world26:30 - How retail investors are evolving28:07 - Risk management on Wall Street vs retail30:20 - Biggest challenges ahead 

If I've got $10,000 of NVIDIA, I can't do anything with it, right? I can pledge it for a margin loan, great. But I can't pledge it for a home loan, I can't take cash out against it. If the stock loan gets tight, I get no yield. If I hold the blockchain native token, I can enter into a smart contract, either on Figure or another platform, earn yield, take cash against it. I can use it as a home loan. You know, it's got utility to me.

What's going on, guys? Today, we've got a great conversation with Neil MacDonald. He's the CEO of MooMoo US, and MooMoo is taking over the United States. These guys are on fire. And he's here to explain to us exactly what's happening, why so many retail traders now have sophisticated tools. What are they doing on the platform? How is he thinking about tokenized stocks, crypto, and various other new technologies? And then we even get into what he's doing himself on the platform. Neil's very interesting because he used to work at a bunch of very large financial

institutions. He was a big dog there. He ran some of the teams. He's going to explain to us what was going on there, how the cultures worked. But now he's the CEO of a retail trading platform, and he's trying to bring a lot of those types of tools or those types of approaches to the retail trader. That's you, that's me, and a lot of people who are listening. Here's my conversation with Neil McDonald. All right, Neil, I thought a good place to start the conversation. Moomoo is taking over the world. I think that people in the United States a couple of years ago, they had never heard of this thing before. They had heard of all the other retail brokerage platforms that you guys burst on the scene. You're taking over the subway. You got a Mets

partnership, all this stuff that is marketing. But I looked into the numbers. You guys are massive. Talk a little bit as to why is Moomoo being so successful on a global stage behind this whole retail trader movement? I think we kind of caught the... It's good timing, right? So the rise of the retail trade, everyone talks about. So we've got like...

Moomoo is a global firm. So we started in Hong Kong. We came to the US about 2019, 20. But the big push in the US has been really the past couple of years with the subway, with the Mets and just the name recognition. We're going old school.

We're opening a store back to the old E-Trade days with a coffee shop in it in Midtown on 33rd and Broadway. just to be more visible and have something people can touch and trust and everything else. So I got a call two years ago from, Moomoo was not on my radar. It was kind of, I knew all these I've got every other platform. No, you did the marathon. You went through pretty much every major amazing finance company. You worked there and ran a very big division there, right? Morgan

Stanley, JP Morgan. I mean, you just ran the gamut. Yeah. So I was always, I ran options Trading Desk and Quant Trading Desk at Citadel. I did all that kind of... So I was also on the other side of the retail trade. I was always the guy happy to take retail. I would pay more to people like E-Trade and TD and those guys. There's four things that retail traders have lacked. First was information. The information asymmetry. When I started in late 80s, I was at Goleman's. And when Procter & Gamble had their earnings, for example, that some guy would dial it in from Cincinnati to the sales guys. They'd go and speak to institutions.

The stock would move. All the information would be digested into the stock price. And then by the time I got it the next day as a retail guy in a Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times in the UK, all the alpha's gone, right? So there was that huge informational asymmetry. That got solved by the internet. And then the second thing was access.

So people like E-Trade, Robinhood, really gave cheap, fast access to data, to the markets themselves, and then the rise of free trading. So Robinhood was revolutionary back in 2013, 14, and that's when FUTU Moomoo started in Hong Kong around the same time. So I'm saying it was information they lacked, so they're always going to be wrong. If you do your Series 7 today, and this is in 2026, they still have a question and a section on a thing called the odd lot theory and it's a real thing and that is and this obviously before you could slice and dice orders block trades were institutions small trades were retail

that's just how it was before you slice trades and did small algo stuff as an institution and so when the volume divided by the number of trades hits a certain level so it's more retail participation when that gets high it's a sell signal and when it gets low it's a buy signal right so they're always wrong. So we solved, the internet solved, and the street.com or Yahoo Finance, that's democratized information. All of a sudden, I know when the Fed changes rates, I know when an earnings report comes out, I can watch the news, I can watch CNBC, I can listen to podcasts. So we all have the same information, but then do you have the access? And now everyone has the access and commission-free trading. So it's cheap and it's accessible. So the next step, what they

didn't have is the tools right so you've got the access you've got the information how do i actually use the access and information to make money so the tools wise uh if you look on our platform it's it's bonkers it really is it's you have on our desktop and our phone what i had at citadel running a quant trading desk you've got back testing um it's funny it's new year so every new year for the past maybe 10 15 years i bought the udemy teach yourself python yes right i've done two lessons and given up um on our platform you don't need that anymore it's uh no code algo building so just block to block to block just if then if then if then but here's here's the crazy thing i can build an algo and then i can back test it on 20 years worth of data for free wow and it'll

give me every entry and exit point i did every trade and how your pnl looks over time for whatever time period you choose and then if you like it you click and you run the algo that's pretty cool But then again, it's great having great tools, but you have to teach people how to use them. Now, as the retail tools increased in efficacy, did the big bad Wall Street firms, the citadels of the world, et cetera, their tools obviously have increased as well. So do you think that they still have an advantage, but maybe it's a little bit more of an even playing field? It's much more even. Their advantage is still maybe in speed. So we're pretty quick, but we don't have our bare metal servers three centimeters

away from where the matching engine is, because we don't need super, super microseconds or speed, but certainly the tools are at a part of where it was five years ago. I mean, that's pretty crazy, right? And then with agentic AI and everything else, it really has leveled it to the point. Now, when you look at you guys versus many of the other retail trading platforms, what do you think the big differences are? Why have you guys had so much success? Well, so the four things that we lack, we've got to go back to that for a second. So it's It's information access tools.

And then it's really risk discipline, right? Human beings are generally terrible traders on your own. So when I sat at Gomes or J.P. Morgan, I was on a big trading floor with 500 smart people trading somebody else's money. That's an easier thing to do than to be sat at home with your own money trading to try and build a financial future for yourself.

It's tough. You know, human beings are emotional, emotional beings. FOMO, risk aversion, all the heuristics from the Chicago school, all that's, you know, Tannerman and Tversky stuff. It's tough to trade because even when I trade on my own, so when I've had to leave a company and have a three or six month gardening leave, I'm trading my own money. Terrible, awful.

Because I chase stuff and I panic out. and because it's tough so what we have is this 29 million people distributed uh crowdsourced risk management kind of um desk of people so you'll see people when our biggest influx of cash was uh liberation day last year really just came and they bought the dip and i was on the nvidia chat and it's every second someone's saying something but this is someone in tokyo in hong kong in singapore and australia in canada or the u.s and it was like what do i do here and they're like, no, it gets below 100, we're all buying. And it's like having a trading floor of people to speak to.

So before I trade, I say, what do you think? And I'll send my trades out, I'll send my portfolio out, I'll send my algos out, and people will take the time to run them themselves and change parameters and say, hey, here's an extra 400 basis points if you change this. Interesting. And so this social component is something that most of these other platforms do not have.

Explain a little bit more as to how this works. So it's a bit like Wikipedia against Encarta, right? Some things are organic and can't be replaced and some things you can't just throw money at. So we started this back in 2013 just to make it like a chat room for people to share ideas. One of the main tenets in the firm is to make investing easier, but not alone.

And that's super important. I know, as I said, I'm a terrible trader when I'm actually on my own and not talking to other people, not bouncing ideas off people. I'll panic I'll do all the all the trader stuff

the traders do same things I do so this this community aspect is really really important it's I'm on there

every single day I have thousands of people follow me I follow thousands of people and I have people I really trust

and I go what are we doing here what are we thinking is this important I'm thinking about buying these calls and I'll get I'm waiting

until this level before I buy them you know what we think or you know I'm saying where's my exit point here So we're in trading options.

I'm like, where's my exit point? And they go, we think it's here. So it's like being on the trading floor, but this is people around the world, yeah. Now, do you think at some point you'll also be asking the AI? Like right now you're talking to humans. Do you think that AI will also be fast enough,

good enough, et cetera? I think so, yeah. It's interesting, right? Because you start to mix AI and humans. Because we have AI on the platform. It does some fun stuff, some of the LLM stuff we've got. Like for example, if you're a technical trader,

like double tops or head and shoulders. You just pick one of 26 strategies, you click on it. And in a second, it finds every stock in the universe that has the setup and shows where it's drawn. So that's great for entry and exit points. So explain this a little more, because I think this is like a very fascinating way to think about retail investing is information and education has drastically increased. Now you've got somebody at home home who says, hey, I like double tops. Okay. I look, I spend hours a day trying to find stocks that are in this specific formation. Now they can basically say to the system, go find me every double top in the US listed public stock market. You just click it and it just goes shumph and

it's instant. And then what? It's just another click or two to be able to just buy. And then you just click on it and it'll say, what do you want to do here? I mean, It's, you couldn't do that as a human being. Yeah. I mean, you're basically automating what is hours and hours of time, but also, frankly, prone to mistakes. Yeah. Right?

I mean, you know, I'm very fascinated. Well, human beings are really good at like seeing patterns that aren't there. That's what I mean, right? Yeah. You want to buy, you'll find something to tell you that it's right to buy. Well, you know, they say technical analysis is just astrology for men. Yeah. Right?

You know, just draw the lines everywhere. But I kind of think of it like with doctors, right? Now AI is doing more and more reading of x-rays and there's still a doctor involved, but the x-ray AI system is able to pick up things that the doctor may miss, or maybe the doctor is just tired or been a long day or whatever. To me, that's where AI becomes really, really interesting is it's augmenting the human, which sounds like kind of what you guys are doing, where you're basically saying that human has an idea.

It tells the system to go find a bunch of stuff. And then the human is the oversight and double checking and saying, yes, confirm, I want to do this. And they always get the, do you want to trade? Yes or no. There's always a confirmation path to any kind of trade that's kind of suggested or whatever. But it's tough because it's, you know, I came here, I was on the subway, I was still on my phone.

I was on Twitter and stuff. I was reading some of your stuff. We're just bombarding information more so now than at any time in history, just bombarded with opinions, views, information, data. So what AI does on our platform anyway, just cuts through that. It tries to make signals to give you actionable things to do.

It will suggest to you, here's the summary from the filings. You can even ask it, the earnings report, what was different in this earnings announcement than the last one? And I can't do that. I'm not going to go through every announcement, listen to the earnings call for the last three or four quarters. That's just too much work. But you can do that with AI.

So it just cuts down your research time. You guys have all of the traditional assets. You also have crypto on the platform. We have crypto as well, yeah. Talk a little bit as to what do you see users actually doing on the platform? Are they mostly equities? Are there more crypto traders? Are they international, domestic? Just like, what are some of the patterns? Yeah. So our guys are generally the stock guys. Our clients tend to be like buy and hold and longer term. We have more of those than kind of the in and out active day traders.

and so for crypto we find it's people who want to make it five ten percent of their portfolio so they buy it through fiat they don't have to have a wallet it's in their accounts they look at their account and even though it's it's you know in digital form in their daily statements on the phone it just looks like a stock and they buy it with fiat we do the conversions we do all the packing stuff and we actually have funny of the talk about like digital stuff and tokenization So, the big deal happened in February, the first SEC blockchain native thing with Mike Cagney at FIGR. So, we were the-

I'm an investor at FIGR and a big fan of Mike Cagney, so that was fun to see. I was talking to him yesterday. So, there was a tight deadline for the S1. It ran out on, I think, Feb 16th. They only got the okay on the Thursday before, and we were the only broker with the technical ability to make that happen. So on our platform, you buy it with stock. It's a US dollar asset on our platform.

On the back end, we convert to YLTS, and then we get it minted on open platform on figure. So the only place you can buy it outside of figure ATS is through Moomin. Interesting. So we did that, and we think there's going to be many more of those. I was going to say, do you think that over the next

five or 10 years, what percentage of the stocks that people are buying on your platform will be tokenized versions versus the traditional electronic QC? I think Mike Clagney would say 100%. Yeah, that's the same way that you're 100%. We're just hoping maybe with things like OpenAI and the big IPOs coming,

that those guys are fairly technically advanced and they would make some portion of those blockchain native. Available, yeah. So, I mean, we took down a third of the IPO. Our clients, so I actually asked our client, why did you buy it? They wanted to buy the first ever SEC registered tokenized security on on the platform and then also you can earn yield right there's no you know

if i've got ten thousand dollars in video i can't do anything with it right i can pledge it for a margin loan great but i can't pledge it for a home loan i can't take cash out against it uh if the stock loan gets tight i get no yield but if i own the if i hold the um the blockchain native token i can enter into a smart contract either on figure or another platform earn yield um i can take that and take cash against it. I can use it as a home loan. You know, it's got utility to me that just a stock in a stock portfolio

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I absolutely love these guys. ArchPublic is an agentic trading platform that automates the buying and selling of your preferred crypto strategies. Using sophisticated algorithms like the Intelligence, Arbitrage, and Oracle protocols, ArchPublic executes advanced automated crypto strategies, fully customized to your goals. Is your aim to accumulate Bitcoin during market dips, generate profits from Ethereum volatility, or sell Solana or XRP in layers as it reclaims all-time highs? If so, ArchPublic is built for you. Are you worried about doing it alone? no problem arch public provides everyone yes everyone with hands-on dedicated support from

their concierge team to help implement the strategy that you choose as a preferred trading partner of coinbase kraken robin hood and gemini arch public offers a proven track record of security and performance so that you can trade with confidence sign up today at archpublic.com and start your automated trading strategy for free no catch no hidden fees just smarter trading your crypto your exchange your profits arch public go to archpublic.com and tell them i sent you yeah it's fascinating to see um on one hand you've got crypto assets that are trying to get into the regulated system yeah on the other hand you've got things like a hyper liquid or something right that's trying to basically create uh the like crypto native decentralized you know version

and both are working yeah i think that's the part like to me that's the biggest thing is it's not Either or, it's both, it seems like. One of the biggest traded contracts on hyperliquid was oil. So people like permissionless. There'll be a certain sector of the investor base and the client base who always want to do permissionless stuff. And then there's people who want to trade on a platform that's secure, that's guaranteed, and they're used to using the tools for stocks. So we didn't rush into crypto. We took our time.

So we wanted to try and bring some rigor, discipline, transparency to the process and just make trading crypto just like trading stocks. What about with the options? It seems like retail investors have really flocked to options trading. Zero-day options now are the most popular option. There's potential pitfalls with so many people trading options, but it does feel like this is a huge part of the market. Our option product is probably the strongest product we have.

And that's kind of one of our advantages over some of our competition is some of the tools we have. So I've been trading options for 35 plus years. You know, people say AI and tools will take your job. All my knowledge is worth zero right now. All that experience is worth nothing. We have a thing called option strategy builder where you say I'm very bullish, bullish, neutral, bearish, very bearish.

You can set a slider for your risk tolerance, for the tenor you want to go out, and it will just build you the strategy. and show you all the payoffs, all in image format. And then you can just slide the strike, slide whether you want to take more risk or less risk, and it will build a strategy and you can click trade it straight through the interface.

So it's almost obfuscating away some of the technical components of it and you're more so the user interface is making it much easier to interact with. Because you can just see your payoffs. And then for zero DTEs, as you know, Gamma goes to infinity at five to four. And so one thing we have,

we have a trading stop on zero DTEs. So I use that. I never enter into a zero DTE, but a trading stop, especially because you want to catch that wizzoo, right? You want to go, it's 10 cents. It's not, it's $1.50. But then it's $1.50 and it's 10 cents again.

So I use our trading stops. So I know if it goes up and it's down by 10, I'm out. Yeah. How important is it that you're trading on the platform as well? I make all the mistakes. So I'm like, this is what your normal average trader will do. So I use it.

Everything we do is, we have this system called Andon. I think it came from Toyota. But every change we make is driven by clients. So people make suggestions. I'll make suggestions. That goes, when it's a certain level, goes straight to our product guys. And then they start. So it's not like I'm saying, this would be a great feature.

It's when people ask for the features. Yeah. But you as the leader of the business, you are like touching the problem, right? It feels like that would be pretty important. Yeah. So I make suggestions. I'm like, we can do this better. Here's what I'd like to see. And then it goes to a group of people, we discuss and then, yeah. But we actually turn out product really quickly. We've got 4,000 people globally, 3,000 of them are in product development, and yeah, product and dev. You've made a huge push into these IPO allocations and really advocated for retail investors to get bigger and bigger portions.

What have you seen there in that effort? Yeah. I mean, we've had most success with people like Mike Cagney, Mike Belcher, because they're disruptive people by nature. And so they made their money by looking at a legacy ecosystem saying, that doesn't make sense. I can do that better, cheaper, faster. So they look at the... you know um you go to an investment bank and you have to pay them to tell you your price should be this so they can send it to their institutional um clients and there's a conflict of interest there or people can see that as a conflict of interest so we went directly to these guys or we went through uh some of the banks you said listen um we can show you all the data retail

is not the idea the narrative that retails a flipper is not the case so we have all the data if i take figure or bullish for example we've been net buyers of the stock every week since the ipo interesting so we have more people who hold the stock now than actually we got allocation for yeah i'm a great great for those businesses right i mean i mean we got a huge massive demand bitco it was a 200 million dollar deal i know it's down uh from its its price but we're like almost 700 million dollars of um demand wow um you've been friends with uh jordy visser for a long time And Jordy's a star of this show. We might have to change it to Pomp and Jordy Show.

Oh, Jordy and Pomp maybe. Yeah, that's what I was actually like. At this point, why do I even have my name in it? This is a Jordy Show. Talk a little bit about the early days of Morgan Stanley and your career and kind of what you learned there. And then also I think Citadel is a pretty interesting place that most people with your pedigree and experience, they don't kind of flip over on the other side of the table. And I think it's very fascinating. you worked at some of these places that are very well respected for a long time for the culture

they built, the quality of the people, the tools they built. So talk a little bit about that. Yeah. What I remember about Goldman's, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Stanley, I think culture was the main thing. There was a culture of excellence, of being humble, never thinking you're right all the time, collaboration. So I remember when I joined Goldman's, there was maybe 4,000 people globally, but it was still a partnership. And it felt like you were part of something and that was really very important to me and i've been looking to work in places that have had that kind of uh it doesn't feel too corporate obviously the large banks but you know within groups of people you're working with very smart people who are all trying

to get to the same point so uh mumu is is exactly like that it feels like a startup it feels exciting so when i've been at the banks i've always done the more cutting edge stuff so with jordy when i was at morgan stanley uh we were index option traders together i was doing europe He was doing the S&P. And then when the ISC was formed in 1999, the first electronic options exchange, I co-led that group. So I got into the automated market making, and then that led to the quant algo trading at Citadel and at JP Morgan. I built globally the electronic market making business. So the tools to trade have always been something I've been interested in. And then that was natural to come to someone like Moomoo that feels like a startup,

um a bunch of super smart people all working really hard uh a lack of egos it's it's the favorite place i would say it's it's my favorite place to have worked in all of my career yeah wow and when you think about uh this business i think one of the things that's really interesting is you've got a lot of fronts that you've got to kind of manage right you've got the internal team and the culture and things that every business has to deal with you're building technology so there's all the product and dev work that you got to do. But you're building it in a dynamic environment where 10 years ago, crypto wasn't a thing really for a lot of these platforms. Now it's tokenization, prediction market. I mean, it's just every day there's something new.

And then you've also got to deal with regulation on top of that. And so talk about how do you... What does your normal day look like? How do you handle so much complexity? I think that's a good point. So we're a fintech company, but we're a broker-dealer, right? So you can't be like a fintech that just throws things against the wall and breaks things. because you can't because if you break one thing and people can't trade, you're out of business, right?

And then, you know, we're regulated by FINRA, registered with SEC. So, you know, a large part of our US offers is compliance, right? So it's protecting the customer, AML stuff.

So we're super tight on that stuff. It's a useful discipline to work within a highly regulated environment. It protects our clients. It protects us. And so we're trying to bring that kind of, as I said,

rigor, compliance, transparency discipline trying to bring that to new new classes it's the first time in history i've never known i don't know what next year will look like it's super exciting it's exciting but it's also you got to try to figure it out it's like what how do you try to figure it out yeah so uh not rushing it not rushing it to the next so we think long and hard we think why us why this why now and so they have those three questions have to be out have to be answered is it the right thing for our clients is it the right timing for us are we the right people to do this can we deliver something different. And so when you look at these new technologies that are coming out,

one of the other things I think is really interesting is who the quote unquote retail investor or this, I call them independent investor is, has really changed. It used to be somebody with five bucks. These people are wealthy now. These people are wealthy. Talk a little bit as to who that user is. Yeah. I mean, it's that 25 to 42. Some of the money's come down from their parents. There's that whole waterfall from the boomers, but they're smart. I mean, they're not your average, they're not the retail investor of even 10 years ago. Again, it's about educating yourself. So you can have all the best tools in the world, but if you don't teach people how to use them, it makes no sense. So our investors say,

our average AUM is much higher than our US competition. They tend to be buy and hold. They're not going crazy on zero DTEs. They have the tools and we do have some active traders on the platform. But generally, I'm always amazed by their fortitude. And that's part of being in the community stuff. But we have people who've bought NVIDIA Jan 23 at about 20 bucks. And all they've done is buy dips all the way down. And then when it's a bit extended, they'll sell credit spreads. When it's coming off again, they'll sell put spreads. They're pretty sophisticated. They're sophisticated. They don't panic. I kind of make the joke that my wife's not going to fire me for my 401k if I have a bad quarter. But if you're in

a pod at Millennium or you're an over-leveraged hedge fund, you have a bad quarter, you're out. You're down 5%, you've lost. So our clients will take drawdowns and see it as opportunity. Talk a little bit more about like, take the pods, right? And whether Citadel or anywhere else or Millennium. I don't think people quite understand the risk limits and how kind of unemotional the decision-making there is. So talk just a little bit.

It's completely automated. So if you're a PM and you're running a strategy, you have to show your sharps above 2.6, I think it is for say Millennium. I don't want to quote Izzy here, but 2.6 is 10, you know, you have to show a track record and then they'll give you money.

Absolutely. And if you do well, you get paid. The downside is they start to gate you down two and a half, three, and down five, you're out. And they just stop you out and you wipe down. Yeah. So like, let's say you're, I don't know, made $100 million. Once you're down 5%, it's over.

That's over. Yeah. And it's really a culture of- I mean, if you're up 100, I think they scale it. But if you're down five below average zero, then you're definitely out. Yeah. And so it's interesting because they're doing this across, in some cases, hundreds of pods.

and it really just becomes this like automated big risk mitigation you know it's great i mean it's uh it's you know they're getting paid on the picks and shovels and other people are taking the risk so it's a great business model yeah it's pretty uh it's pretty interesting assuming that you've got really tight risk limits and that you can liquidate down five well that's the other thing you get into these correlations and you know um i always uh i yearn for the old school like cowboy risk takers they're they're not working any pod shops right because these guys might go down 20% and make it all back in a single trade. But I do think that the rise of the pod shops mirrors the rise of the sophisticated investor where everyone is becoming much more

informed and understand some of the pitfalls of financial markets together. And Twitter X has been a huge part of that, but it does feel like the pod shops have really hit their stride and become super sophisticated. Retail has as well. Again, it's not saying a retail investor is like pod shop but um there just feels like overall the market is getting smarter yeah i mean again it's an education process we've got 2 000 videos and stuff on the platform trying to take people from you know trading 101 just to using algos to using uh back testing environments to using the tools the gap between the guy at millennium citadel and the sophisticated retail trader has never been narrower and ai is making that really really tight interesting what do you like lay awake at

night over what what are the challenges um other than the mets not being good well the mess being seven and eleven just kidding they've got to play one more game in in l.a as well as a yankees fan i can you know give a little they're gonna be they're gonna be seven and twelve they're gonna be seven and twelve by this evening i won't be watching the late game tonight um uh regulation where that's going the clarity act i really care about regulators are having to move quicker than i think it makes them comfortable the world is changing so quickly we've got lots of initiatives with the ai stuff and with our tools um and it's just can can we keep up can we keep giving our guys the tools that they need so you know we we most of our money goes in r d and product

development and we're just hoping that you know we keep telling the engineers like super ai pilled and they're all just like running wild with all the models and everything so we have some like that and we have a whole section then we go remember we've got to run a broker dealer so we need the safe boring infrastructure and size x stuff all the stuff you need and then we've got the more fun stuff which is the ai um and the people coding the fun stuff but a lot of it is just making sure we're up all the time like for for figure for the we make markers 24 5 in the we make markers we give access 24 5 to figure d to the token so that was a big step for us and then so we have to be up all the time so my worry is uh at some point something happens and we go down do

Do you sleep? I do sleep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I sleep a lot more as CEO of Mooma than I ever slept at Citadel, J.P. Morgan. Why? Because I'm not running risk. I'm running risk.

I care about my clients and reputational risk and make sure the platform's up. Yeah, yeah, but not like a book. Not like a book, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's interesting though, that actually there you felt much more kind of pressure on the risk side of the book versus the-

Yeah, I mean, especially because there's so much more information at weekends now. So if I was running a huge global options book and then something happens on a Saturday. We got a guy at the White House. He likes to do stuff on Friday, Saturday, Sunday. He suspiciously waits till the market closes on Friday and starts firing off information.

I would never be not running slides. Yeah. But back then, you mentioned Monte Carlo before. We used to run those overnight on bare metal servers. Right? And the fact on our platform you can click and just run a whole back test is bonkers. It's crazy.

It's crazy. yeah it's democratization right at its finest and then you can share them with people yeah so you see

you see in our chat every day to take Nvidia people just putting their trades up and their wins their losses and there's a feeling

of being part of something you know you're in a big trading venue yeah rather than just being in your bedroom or in the kitchen

or yeah I love it I love it alright well thank you for taking the time to do this if you guys want

the best trading experience go to Moomoo go check them out and we'll do this again in the future Anthony thank you