The Pomp Podcast - World’s Greatest Trader: How To Win In Chaos | Tom Sosnoff

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

Tom Sosnoff is a veteran trader and entrepreneur, the founder of LossDog, and the builder of multiple billion-dollar companies. In this conversation, we discuss why volatility creates opportunity, how he thinks about active investing across asset classes, and why he believes crypto deserves a place in every portfolio. We also talk about options trading, oil and commodity volatility, the rise of self-directed investors, prediction markets, AI’s role in portfolio construction and financial advice, and how Tom is thinking about building the next generation of investing tools.=====================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.=====================Simple Mining makes Bitcoin mining simple and accessible for everyone. We offer a premium white glove hosting service, helping you maximize the profitability of Bitcoin mining. For more information on Simple Mining or to get started mining Bitcoin, visit https://www.simplemining.io/pomp=====================0:00 - Why traders stay long crypto in volatile markets0:52 - The real problem with today’s economy & the future of investing5:26 - Rise of the self-directed investor8:55 - How to trade extreme market volatility11:08 - Why everyone should own bitcoin12:09 - Selling volatility & options strategies20:25 - Navigating chaos in today’s macro environment22:19 - Trader mindset vs entrepreneur mindset24:29 - Building an AI investing platform26:38 - Why options trading is exploding28:30 - Thoughts around Prediction Markets 32:46 - How AI will disrupt financial advisors34:40 - Tom’s $1M crypto giveaway

Why should we be long crypto? It's going down. And I'm like, that's the dumbest reason because it's going down. Like, the reason you should be long crypto is because it trades at three to four times the volatility of the S&Ps. So when it turns around, you're going to make four times as much. And the basis is lower right now. That's why everybody should have crypto in their portfolio. It doesn't matter how much, a couple percent, whatever. What's going on, guys?

Today we've got a great episode with Tom Sosnoff. He's one of the greatest traders in the world. He is the founder of Lost Dog. He also sold two other companies for a billion dollars. and then he'll tell you he scalped two exchanges for 350 million bucks. Great story in this episode. In this conversation, we talk about what's going on with retail traders, how to think about volatility in the market, how to change your portfolio based on what volatility is doing. And it gives you some alpha, some of his trading strategies and how he thinks about

investing on a day-to-day basis. Tom's amazing. He's given away a million bucks at the end of the episode. Literally, he's going to give away a million dollars and he's going to tell you how you can go and get it. So make sure you listen to the end. That's it. Here's Tom Sosnoff. All right, Tom, a great place to start the conversation is you've done this a couple times now. You've started multiple companies. You're one of the greatest traders in the world. We literally have a YouTube thumbnail that says greatest trader. It did really well. Super viral video.

It did really well. Well, people want to know what's the greatest trader in the world, I have to say. You're starting a new company. So everyone immediately opens their ears, right? And says, hey, what is going on here? But I think that you have some very unique thoughts and very passionate about this idea that there's a lot of people who are kind of being left behind by the US economy and this new company is going to try to attack this in kind of a unique way. So explain what you think the problem is with so many people being left behind in a K-shaped economy? Yeah. I don't know that it's as much of being left behind as it's just there's this crazy imbalance.

You know, like CEOs make a shit ton of money, a lot of money. And the average worker, in some cases, the ratio might be 400 to 1 or 800 to 1. But the average worker over their lifetime is underpaid. And when I say worker, I mean anybody between, let's say, 50,000 and 300,000. and you could be underpaid by a million dollars of your lifetime. You could be underpaid by 5 million just because you don't know really what you're worth. And so part of the technology that we're building is a really cool AI platform that essentially helps you, helps to tell you what you're worth. That's it. I mean, it's very straightforward. It's not, it's not, there's not that much complexity to it. And, and that's that we're also on the same platform. We're also

helping individuals to optimize their investment portfolio. So like, for example, improve your basis, show you where your outlier risk is. And one of the coolest things we're building is like this agentic AI for portfolio creation, but not like the traditional one, like stocks or something like that. Like we're doing it so you can do it with crypto, so you can do it. Like imagine you just type in, build me a $10,000 crypto portfolio. I want four liquid underlyings. And in one second, you get back like four underlyings, the most liquid in a vol adjusted notional breakdown. So you have $4,000 of Bitcoin, $3,000 of ETH, $2,000 Solana, whatever it is. And you push one button, you're filled. Like that's the next generation. That's what we're building.

100%. I call a, everyone's talking about a gentic commerce. Yeah. It's a gentic investing, but there's, I think to me, three steps. There is, let me use these tools to learn. And then I go and I make my own decisions. Then there is what you're talking about, which is let me have it actually create a portfolio. And then me as the human, I get final press.

And then the final step, which was probably a couple of years away is just like, let me give it to the machine and the machine basically will go and figure all this out. And there's no human in the loop because I gave it some parameters at the top. I don't think that we're there yet. I don't think people trust that yet. We're not there, but I think there's a step in between those last two. And this step in between creating a portfolio and then just not having any hands off it is there is the one piece that everybody – one of the things that holds people back, which

is I want this AI tool to monitor this stuff 24-7. So I don't care what happens. I know there's nothing I can do if something blows up on a Saturday night or something like that, or something goes crazy on a Sunday night or Friday night, but I'd like to at least know. And I'd like to at least know where my boundaries are, where the unquantifiable risk is, that is for sure coming and it's coming like tomorrow. And so when you do that risk analysis, how much of this is specific to the market versus specific to your portfolio, right? Because it's one thing to say-

It should be 100% specific to your portfolio. Okay, explain more. because I don't like, like if you told me, you know, listen, you can obviously program for, I wouldn't say you can program for opportunity. So like, if you're like a noise freak, I'm a noise freak. Like, so I don't care. Like, if you said to me, what are you going to trade tomorrow? My answer is going to be whatever is in play. Like, right. Cause, cause like, I don't care what I trade. So like, if you said you're trading Nvidia tomorrow or you're trading, you know or you're trading soybeans or i'm trading crude oil great whatever it is whatever

is in play like whatever's whatever is the most noise the most fun so i think you can you can train something to say hey wake me up when when you know or ping me when something interesting is happening but i also think like just having a peace of mind knowing that somebody's watching it's kind of cool or knowing that your technology is watching that makes sense and then what about I call this group of people an independent investor, right? So they get all of their information online. They want to control their portfolio. They don't want a financial advisor, anybody kind of meddling in what they're doing. They want to live and die with their decisions, but they're also chasing a degree of financial independence, which they've been convinced the

W-2 is not going to get them whatever they want. And so what do you see them doing that maybe the institutions or other investors aren't doing as much of? Well, there's no question. And I think the reason people like to think of themselves as independent investors, and they should, I like to use the term active, but independent, whatever, is because risk-free rates, let's say they're 4%, right? I mean, if you're happy with that, go for it. That's fine. Cool. But most people are thinking to themselves, well, what's the risk reward of doing something different? And the risk reward is some multiple 4%. And so if you're thinking like three times, four times, five times that, then yeah, of course, that's the excitement of it. That's the interesting piece.

And so I think that that's the objective, is some multiple of risk-free rates. If you were that person, and let's say that you've made a little bit of money, you've done okay to well, but you don't have enough money to stop working, et cetera, what would you do right now? You know all the tools out there, you know how markets work, you know all this stuff. Put yourself in their shoes, what do you start to do? So, I'm like a junkie. I know. So, it's hard.

You know, that's a tough question for me because I don't really – it's hard for me to distinguish. Like, you know, to really understand risk is – Be rational. I know. I'd be a little bit of everything. Okay. Which means what? I believe everybody should have part inactive, part passive, part active, and part in almost every asset class.

that's liquid enough. I don't think if you have just a little bit of money, you can afford illiquid assets. Let's say you've got somewhere between 10 and 100 grand, somewhere in that range where you're not worried about, hey, I might not have money for rent next month, but also you're not like, hey, I don't check the bill when it comes type mentality. I mean, you're talking to somebody that believes that in order for you to get, if you have between 10 and 100, in order for you to get to the number that you ultimately want, in order for you to build wealth, there's a lot more to it than what are you going to do? I could easily sit here and say, you know what? You should be about 25% or 30% in passive. You should be 25% or 30% in active. And you should keep some

cash on the sideline. To me, that's kind of a stupid answer. I think that you should find a way to get involved in the financial market so you can learn as much as you can in a short period of time as you can so that you can grow your 100,000 into a million or 5 million or whatever it is. And the only way you can do that is by learning how to take kind of measured risk, quantified risk and probabilistic risk. And you cannot do that by just getting some portfolio breakdown. I don't think it's possible. And what happens if you had a million to $5 million? Does it change at all? It doesn't change at all. Same thing regardless of the amount of money you have.

Yeah, sure. Why would it change? Well, I don't know. You tell me. Let's talk about trading. Obviously, you spent a very large portion of your career trading very successfully. What are the areas that maybe are the risky today? Let's talk about oil maybe as an example. Oil has been incredibly volatile over the last couple of weeks. And so on one hand, a bunch of traders are like, hey, I like volatility. Let me go trade that. On the other hand, if you're a bad trader and you run into the oil market and it's a 77 goes to 120 back to 77 within a 72-hour period, that's pretty hard to navigate. And so it does feel like there's a blessing and a curse to volatility. You're talking to somebody that's had a

very hard time navigating that move myself like everybody else has. I mean, right now I'm just short a ton of premium in there because I think that is the play. Explain. I'm just short a ton of options, puts and calls. And there's so much call skew in oil that the calls trade for double or triple the puts. So I think that you can sell, for example, a call that's $50 out of the money, $50. And you can sell the equivalent put that's $20 out of the money and you get the same exact price for two and a half times the distance. But that premium is so rich. It's the richest premium in all the markets right now. So for me, that's what I've been doing. But I think that this market, as long as you don't get tied down, because remember, we've already been, this 2026 has

been crazy because the meme stock of 2026 has not been a stock. It's been basically silver, gold, and crude oil. It's been three commodities. And so if you're not used to touching all the bases and trading everything, you just missed out on some incredible moves. I mean, the silver move makes oil look like a kid. The silver move was insane. Does that make an argument that – I used to say that we went from 60-40 to then we were going to have the crazy uncle portfolio was going to do really well. And it was land, guns, gold, and Bitcoin, right? Now, are you saying maybe it's like a buffet trade where you actually want to have a little bit of everything, even if, you know, hey, oil is going to go sideways for two

years, but when it moves, because we're in the volatility generation, it's going to fly. Yeah. People always say to me, they're like, why should we be long crypto? It's going down. And I'm like, because you don't know what's going to happen. That's the dumbest reason because it's going down. The reason you should be long crypto is because it trades at three to four times the volatility of the S&Ps. So when it turns around, you're going to make four times as much and the basis is lower right now. That's why everybody should have crypto in their portfolio. It doesn't matter how much, a couple of percent, whatever. So maybe then it's like, go look for the most volatile assets, wait for a big drawdown and buy them because of the volatility.

Not the worst strategy, but not exactly my approach, but not the worst strategy. I mean, we call that price extreme and I don't really have an issue with price extreme. But remember, Price by definition is not mean reverting, whereas volatility is. So I've always been a volatility trader because volatility is mean reverting. Explain the difference between price extreme and then the volatility. So stock goes up, it doesn't mean it has to come down. Correct. Okay.

Volatility goes up, it has to come down. Okay. Volatility is a math equation. Yep. Price is not. Okay. So give me an example right now of what you're looking at from a volatility standpoint. So crude oil-

Very volatile. Very volatile. the implied volatility rank in crude oil, which means implied volatility measured against itself. It's just a way to rank implied volatility. It went from like 20 to 130. Is that a lot? 130. It's fenced in at 100. In other words, 130 is over the fence. It's off the charts. It's off the charts. So that's going to go lower. And it's dropped into the 90s already and hopefully it'll go to the 70s and 60s.

So if you think that volatility is going to drop, which it probably will, what do you do? Do you short oil? Do you short volatility? You short volatility. You sell options. Got it. There's only one way to sell volatility, and that's to sell options. You can also think that based on sometimes where volatility is trading, you can think that, oh my God, this underlying has capitulated. Like the night, the Sunday night that oil went to like 119 or whatever it was, volatility peaked at that same exact moment. But sometimes if you go back to 2009 when we bottomed, volatility peaked in December of 2008

and the market didn't bottom until March of 2009. That was really costly to volatility traders like me. That cost us some money. Why? Because we started to get long in December of 2008 when volatility peaked and the market didn't actually bottom for three more months. So when you, let's say you go into the oil market and you're going to go and you're going to sell these options. How do you think about what options to sell? I try to go far enough out of the money where it takes a minimum of a full one standard deviation move. So I just use the math. And so for me, I start at one standard deviation. Two standard deviations is too cheap, the options, but one standard deviation for me is where I like to be.

Got it. So for oil, I'm assuming you put a trade on. So what- Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm sure- In spite to 130? do you- No. Well, actually, I can tell you right now my oil position. My oil position is I'm short a lot of premium. My average strangle, so strangles you sell puts and calls, I'm short the 140 call and the 65 put. And oil's trading today, let's say around 94, 95. I haven't looked at it since I got in your office, but around 94-ish. Yeah. So you're doing pretty well. Today. I'm not up money on the oil position, but I'm going to be.

Okay. And then when do you know, okay, the oil trade is over, the oil game is over? When volatility goes down. Got it. And then you basically just look for- And just cover. But what is the level? Is it 60, 50, 20? Is there a math equation? Is it a gut feel? No, no. It's just based on volatility. I couldn't care less about the price. No, no. I'm saying volatility. From a volatility- Oh, from a volatility, it can be a gut feel. It's anywhere between,

let's just say 30 and 50 in that range. Got it. So basically you go from whatever, 20 spikes to 130. You're looking for it to break down below 50 and then you're like, okay, most of the juice here is gone. Most of the juice is gone. Got it. Okay. So then let's say- And that's when everybody else gets in and they start thinking, oh, well now it's calmed down. Yeah. See fear, as a trader, fear is like your buddy. Fear is like, that's the only friend you got

because fear is what messes everybody else up, but it creates all the opportunity for you. So let's say you're a genius, which you are, and you end up closing out the trade, made a bunch of money in oil. Then you say, okay, now I got cash. Walk me through the process. How do you find the next? You just look for whatever the most volatile spike's been? Oh my God. I mean, we're talking about like, it's like a bus. I mean, after the silver move this year, I never thought that gold was going to give you this kind of crazy move a month later. I mean, it doesn't ever stop. That's the great thing about these markets. And as we get more and more products and everything. I mean, nothing ever stops. And so when you're going through this,

is it always shorting the volatility? Always. I never buy volatility. So volatility is a weird instrument. You're like a, what do they call it? Whack-a-mole. I'm a one-trick pony. So yeah, but when volatility spikes and you just like whack it down. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So volatility is a weird animal. It goes up about 20% of the time. Okay. It goes down. It goes down. I'm sorry, I take that back. It goes up about 10% of the time. It goes down about 20% of the time. It stays in what they call a lull state, just does nothing 70% of the time. So you have to take advantage of your opportunity when you get it. Okay. So how do you know when it is near peaking? You don't. You don't. Got it. So like if oil spikes, volatility spikes, all of a sudden

it goes from 20 to 50. If you start shorting and it goes to 130, that's not a good day. Well, sure. So I'll give you the perfect example. When oil started to run on this whole you know, conflict in Iran, it went, you know, the first time it traded 80, I'm thinking, okay, you know, I think we're here. But I backed off a little bit, waited until it got to 85. The next day, next night, you know, next day it was up $10. It was like 81, 82, something like that. Next day it closed at 91. And that was before it opened that night at, you know, $10 higher, went to 119. So I was off by $35 thinking that I picked the top. But you don't get closed out or anything because you've got some time to it.

I got some time and I have some money. You know, money gives you – money buys you time. The one thing about the world of finance is if you have a little bit of money, it gives you a little bit of – you don't get scared. The only time genius fails is when you get too big. So if you keep your position size relative to the capital you have, you'll never get forced out of a position. if you let your brain start, you know, thinking that you know something, you're freaking dead. It doesn't matter who you are, Nobel Prize winner, whatever, you're dead. Today's episode is brought to you by ArchPublic. I absolutely love these guys. ArchPublic is an

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And if you want to resize or upgrade your fleet, there's a marketplace to resell equipment instead of being stuck. To help people think it through whether mining actually makes sense right now, they put together a short resource called the 2026 Bitcoin Mining Blueprint. It walks through the five mistakes investors make when allocating to mining, and they also explain how to avoid them before deploying capital. If it sounds interesting to you, you can get it for free at simplemining.io slash pomp. That's simplemining.io slash pomp. Go check it out today and see if you should get into the mining game. Right now, the market is very confused, I think. There's a deflationary macro environment. We've got deportation tariffs, AI, robotics, et cetera. At the same time,

We've got this massive inflationary pressure from oil spiking, gas is up, trufflation's measurement has gone from 0.8 to 1.5%. Sure, bonds are at 114 this morning. I mean, just chaos in the market. Yeah. What do you do to make sure that you don't get sucked into the fear, the chaos, the kind of emotional decision-making? I don't have a – so I don't actually have a macro view and I don't have – so one

of the sicknesses of being like a full-time trader is that you can't see past lunch so so i only know like i don't have like lots of people out there worrying about all this stuff yesterday i was doing a podcast and somebody asked me about stagflation and i go stagflation like you know i'm looking at what's going to happen tomorrow in the opening you know where are we opening tomorrow um i don't have that view i i can't think that way because then it will mess you up like you'll start thinking i can't do this trade because what happens if this happens i mean like you know the bond market's a perfect example i've been nibbling from the long side because you know we're down under 114 i kind of like getting long here so i've been selling you know kind of a shitload of

puts at you know around the 114 113 level buying some bonds here because i'm thinking to myself I don't know how much lower bonds can go here because I can't imagine we're going to raise rates. But if they go any lower, you're sure not lowering rates. But that's the way I think. So I have a very narrow focus. I try to pay attention to what the tape's saying, not what the macro story is. It's fascinating because as a trader, you're trying to think what's going to happen before lunch. As an entrepreneur, or you got to think what's going to happen over the next four or five years, right? Yeah. I'm able to separate the two because as an entrepreneur, I'm all in on whatever I'm doing.

Like I don't even, I couldn't care less. I mean, I care what happens to the world, of course, but, but I don't think about things like, you know, a year out or two years out to think about, you know, what about the next generation that's going to take over this company, you know, all this other stuff. As a trader, I think about, you know, 15 minutes from now, you know, an hour, two hours lunchtime to close today. Yeah. And as you're building this company, you've now built what, $2 billion companies, $3 billion? $2 billion companies. And I've also scalped two exchanges for 350 million. Yeah. You scalped them. I'll tell you a story. I don't think I told you this last time. So I built this exchange. Did I

ever tell you this? No. So I built this exchange called the small exchange because I thought we needed a micro futures product. And we did. And I was bugging the CME for years to create one, and they never did. So it forced me to build an exchange. Then as soon as I built the small exchange, they copied me and launched the micro futures, which are now huge. So we couldn't compete with them. So we happened to have owned another exchange from a previous deal. And I sold both those exchanges to crypto.com for a quarter billion dollars. This is years ago. They didn't need the small exchange as it turned out. So they sold it back to me for 10 million. That's a good deal. That's a good deal. Well, and then I started to build this new exchange

with the liquidity pool design. I designed it a little after like Uniswap type thing, but it was for US futures instead of crypto. And it was a really neat concept. I couldn't find anybody to clear it. So we turned it around and sold the exchange to Kraken for 100. so um so we scalped them nicely so so those are good trades but um what was the question again so when you think about when you think about building this company what are you going to do differently oh i don't know like you don't know yet no i mean it's no i don't know i mean i mean i'm not you know i'm i think i'm waiting to find out who we're gonna ultimately like kind of partner with. And I know it's going to be somebody really good because we're in talks right now with

two really good firms. And so I know it's going to be a fun venture going forward. And I don't know what it's going to become. We're really in our infancy. When you start building technology, especially today, you know what's the funniest thing about building AI technology is that I have an AI team and I have a software team, like traditional, and they hate each other. The software team has zero interest in the AI team. The AI team can't stay on the software team because the software team's like, the last thing we want to do is check AI's work. We need to get hired to check their code. And the AI team's like, oh man, the software team sucks. They're too slow. They can't do anything. And it's like the dynamics, everybody thinks,

oh, you don't need software developers anymore because you got AI. Yes, you do. Yeah, of course. And not only do you need them, somebody's got to check all the work that AI does and nobody wants to do it. And it's like, I'm learning all this stuff. And I'm learning, you know, like we talked about agentic AI. I'm actually also really fascinated by quantum proof, by quantum proof encryption, because I'm thinking, you know, like what's the one thing that freaks everybody out. It's like security now, you know? And I'm thinking like, that's a whole different level of encryption that we could really build into our middleware.

And I'm trying to like find a team or an investment or like, I'm really working hard at, like I haven't, I haven't solved, I haven't put together the people I need to. I've just got one person and I want more. But cause I kind of feel like that's going to be a big thing. I know there's quantum proof crypto, but I haven't traded any of it yet. I don't know if you have. But it's interesting to me. Let's put it that way. Yeah. When you think about these individual investors, you're an options trader for the most part. Well, I'm an everything trader now. I don't like to say just options. But how many of them are trading options versus not, you think? Is it pretty pervasive in the retail space? Yeah. I mean, if you talk about the retail firms,

Robinhood, Tasty, IB, Thinkorswim, Schwab, 70% of their business, 65% of their business is options. Options and futures are now like 85% of the industry. Nobody trades stocks anymore because stocks are really expensive. I mean, somebody can buy, what are you going to buy? 100 shares of stock, cost you $50,000. Average account size, 50,000. You trade options for a couple of hundred. um yeah what about um zero day options those obviously have become very popular yeah i mean why do you think that that is happening just because that's what people wanted the most explosive everything has the time frame for everything it's compressed it's compressed and the world's become like this speculative playground people love it i mean

like for so many years we shut down speculation because we're like it was so good for you you You know, nobody realized all the unintended consequences of speculation, which is really positive for wealth creation, for the economy, all this kind of stuff. And everybody was always like, speculation's bad. Well, it turns out, and a lot of this is the meme stock 2021 stuff, but it turns out speculation is actually really good and everybody likes it. And the zero days, perfect example, you know, all this crazy participation in options and futures, event-based trading, everything else, crypto.

So people like speculation. What's wrong with that? Nothing. Nothing. I mean, listen, Robinhood built a nice business around it. What about prediction markets? I'm mixed. Yeah, me too.

I'm mixed for a couple of reasons. First, I think there's a day of reckoning coming with the sports side of it because the states, there's going to be a battle. There's going to be an exchange battle. There's going to be a states battle. But my real issue with prediction markets, it's kind of multifold. but besides the fact that they're binary, so they're not strategic, right? And I like strategic finance, is that they're expensive. So if you trade $100,000 of stocks, like let's say Apple's

250 bucks, you do 400 shares of Apple, that's $100,000. Your give up to theoretical commissions, there's no commission. So your give up theoreticals, $4, $8, less than $10. You trade $100,000 worth of a future, less than $10. Everything's less than $10. Stocks, options, futures. You trade $100,000 worth of event-based stuff, prediction markets, $2,000. And what, you think it'll just come down over time as price pressure or what? I don't know. I mean, it should, but I don't know. I mean, it's really what, two major players, maybe a third that kind of competes in there as well? Yeah. I mean, you'll have, you know, in a short period of time, I mean, you'll have draft kings in there. They're already getting an exchange. You'll have the CBOEs launching theirs, the

Merck's launching theirs. So it has to come down. You've got Kraken going to launch theirs and crypto.com launching theirs. And then you've got obviously PolyMarkets and Kalshi. But there's going to be 10 of these, 20 of these exchanges. Why not? And then the brokerage firms. And my other issue with it is if you want a brokerage firm, the last thing you're going to do is give your customers to CalSheet or give your customers to PolyMarket. You work too hard for those customers. I don't like the fact that these exchanges take customers direct, so they effectively compete with the brokerage firms. Like a brokerage firm would never, if an exchange, the CME took customers direct,

we wouldn't route them business. If Citadel took customers direct, we wouldn't give them any business. Everybody has their kind of lane. I don't like the fact that these guys are conflicted. Do you think that changes it over time? I think it does. Which way? Does it resolve? Well, I think they become exchanges. Yeah.

So they basically – they say, hey, we're going to compete head on. Yeah. I mean, they're going to say, listen, we're a facilitator. Yeah. They have no reason to take customers. Interesting. See what happens. The reason I don't like it as much is I don't know if we want people betting on like how long the press conference is going to be or what color someone's tie is going to be or whatever, right?

Or if you're an investor in it and you're betting on yourself like Giannis or whatever, that kind of stuff. But I – well, I also think they're all small-time crooks. Like it's a small-time crook business. Really? Yeah. Like in what way? In that these bets are all for like – it's like the whole sports gambling market is tiny relative to what they trade in an hour on one of the listed exchanges, what they trade in a year on the sports exchanges. They're all kind of –

Just small. Yeah, they're just small. Do you think it gets big over time or no? Maybe. They're not strategic though. So, I mean, everybody's just going to lose all their money over time. You know, it's a negative edge. It's not as bad as a casino or it's not as bad as a straight, you know, sports betting is right now.

But it's going, you know, it's all going to come. It's all going to contract. What about these people using the AI agents to go in? They're doing a lot on the prediction markets, but do you think they'll do it in stocks too? No. I think it's really hard. I mean, I've never seen it work. Yeah.

I mean, it's basically, you know, if you think of high-frequency trading hedge funds, they're very good at it. But, like, they're pretty smart. They've got a lot of technology. They've got a lot of, you know, all that kind of stuff. But the average person, you know, on one hand, you can make an argument, oh, superhuman intelligence is going to be better and smarter than all the hedge funds put together, but whatever. On the other hand, though, it's hard, right? Like if it was so easy, people would already be doing it. The best high frequency.

I am friends with people that run some of the best high frequency firms in the world. I mean, they're just, you know, they're amazing. And they're not using AI for that reason, for that purpose at all. That's why I know it's not. But they're using AI as a monitoring tool, and they're using it for a lot of other things, but they're not using it for trading. I think the thing people are missing the most with AI is I think the industry that's going to have the biggest impact in finance is the RIA space. Oh, explain that. So right now you've got this massive RIA space.

We talk about the active trading market. What is it? Maybe a trillion dollars? maybe, probably less. You talk about the money managed space, what is it? 50 trillion? It's 30 trillion with just like five firms. So what are you going to need an advisor for? Right now, your advisor is a one trick pony. They know what their firm tells them. That's all the research they have. That's what they do. Now they're going to have access to everything. That's going to create contraction and fees. What an advisor is going to become

is your is your empathetic buddy like your advice can become your hand holder like you want to go out to dinner he'll take you out to dinner she'll take you out to dinner you want somebody to call up to make sure that everything's cool you can call them they're gonna hold your hand they're gonna you know they're they're gonna be there as your friend but you're gonna pay them instead of 65 basis points you're gonna pay them 20 basis points they're gonna be smarter they're gonna to have access to way more information. So the fees are going to come crashing down. Your advisor is actually going to be significantly better. And they're just going to be like this, you know, this friend. And I think it's going to upend that business a lot. It's going to make the business

better, but it's also going to push a lot more people to understanding that the self-directed side is also kind of cool. I agree. I think that the self-directed thing is additive. It is not extractive from the R&D business. Could not agree more. Could not agree more. It's like these people weren't going to go work with financial advisors anyways. They're just now expanding the pie. Could not agree more. Yeah. Interesting. All right. You're giving away a million bucks. Yeah. You want it? Sure. Yeah, I'll take it. I don't know if I can get it, but explain that what people have to get. You can get some of it. You can get a little tiny bit.

All right. How do people get a piece, get their hand in a cookie jar? Lostdog.com. Just sign up. Lostog.com. And then how do you- L-O-S-S-D-O-G. Yeah. How do you determine who gets the money? It is based on a, whoever signs up first gets more money.

So it gets all spread out over all the people that sign up. Every person gets something. Every person gets something. Okay. For the first million people? No, the first 50,000. 50,000. Okay.

Every person gets something. And the more referrals you make, you get more. Or you get moved up in the line. Got it. So like you get like a ticket number for the number that you signed up. So if you're the 31,172nd person, that's your slot. That's your slot. But if you make referrals and you can jump people.

You can jump people. Interesting. Yeah. We're using a third party software for that, which is kind of cool. I mean, it's not the first time it's been done that way, but it's a nice way to incent people to give referrals. And yeah, I mean, we're giving away a million dollars and it's in, it's, you get, you get Bitcoin, ETH, Solana and Stellar.

You get a pick or you get all four? We were going to let you pick, but then it got to be too confusing. So you get to equal amount of each of all four. Okay. And then how much does the number one person get? I think the top is like $50. It goes 50, 40, 30, 20, 10. So you get to a million.

And then you just go from there. That's right. $50,000. That's serious. $50. Oh, $50. Oh, because you had to go all the way down. I could go all the way down.

Yeah. But a million bucks. That's a million dollars. That's a big number. It's real. Yeah. Well, it's a good way to think about it. Like if I went to go out and market for this company, you know, I'd probably spend a million dollars marketing, right?

So to seed it. And so this way I'm like, okay, I'll do it. Just give it to people. I'll just give it to people. Yeah. It's like you're like the Mr. Beast of finance. Speaking of him, I just read that he's going into finance. Did you read this?

He bought Step. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think about that? i you know like i miss that like i don't i've never really followed him yeah me i'm just too i don't watch the content but i think very highly of them oh i don't do you know him uh yeah okay yeah i don't know him so i mean like i have nothing to say i always tell everyone one story about him he called me he called me one time yeah and uh randomly yeah afternoon middle of the week

and uh he goes uh yo pomp teach me something five minutes okay we just uh we started talking whatever we navigated a bunch of weird topics he goes all right i gotta go thanks bye smart guy very very smart what's his real name uh jimmy jimmy donaldson yeah um he uh the reason why step is interesting i talked to uh i think cj is the uh founder of that yeah and um it's focused on helping like kind of teens yeah start to build first bank account first you build credit all that kind of stuff so it makes sense for uh you know jimmy's audience yeah i mean listen i'm i'm sure he'll be successful. I just don't know enough about him. Different business. Yeah, different business.

Lostog.com. Yeah. L-O-S-S-D-O-G.com. Giving away a million bucks. Yeah. That's better than any ad ticket. Could be worse. Yeah, it could be worse. A lot of people, you've got to sign up for something and pay them money, right? Oh, plus they give away the platform's free.

Oh, okay. So free platform plus you get some money. Yeah, the platform's totally free. Hey, don't say I didn't do anything for you guys on this podcast. You know, free money. Lostog.com. Thank you for coming again. Do it again in the future. Thanks so much, man.