By coinnews 
0:05 spk_0
Welcome to Trader Talk, where we dish out the latest Wall Street buzz to keep your portfolio sizzling. I’m Kenny Polcari, and today I’m not coming to you from the New York Stock Exchange, but I’m coming to you live from the Yahoo Finance offices here at on Broadway in New York City. I’m still bringing you decades of market insight and energy. Now let’s jump into my big take for the week.Let’s settle this once and for all. Buying shares and buying options are not the same game. One builds a portfolio, the other tests your psychology. If you’re treating options like a shortcut to wealth, you’re not trading, you’re gambling. Sharesyou ownership, they give you time, they let you be wrong for a little while and still be right over the long term. You get dividends, you ride the cycles, you compound and most importantly, you get to breathe options?They’re the opposite. They’re a bet on speed, direction, and precision with a ticking clock tied to every move. You’re not betting on a business, you’re betting on market behavior and if your timing’s off by a week.Doesn’t matter how great your idea was, you lose. That doesn’t mean options are bad. If used correctly, they’re very powerful. They hedge, they leverage, they give you flexibility, but too many retail traders use them to skip the hard part conviction, patience and risk management. So here’s the truth, if you can’t win with shares, you have no business trading.Options learn the long game first learn to hold learn to sit through volatility without panicking because until you can do that you’re not using options you’re being used by them. Bottom line shares are how you build the future options are how you test what you’ve learned if you mix them up, the market will make sure you learn the difference.Joining us today is Brandon Krieg, co-CEO and co-founder of Stash, the pioneering fintech company that he co-founded in 2015 with the belief that all Americans deserve the advice, tools, and opportunity to invest in themselves, starting with just $5. Most recently, Brandon led the launch of Stash Works as well as Stash’s AI Money Coach. Brandon also serves as CEO of Stash Capital, the company’sbroker dealer. Prior to stash, he co-founded Edge Trade, one of the first and largest agency trade execution and software firms later acquired by Knight Capital and served as head of electronic execution at Macquarie Securities Group. I am thrilled to have him join us. Please welcome Brandon Creek. Brandon, it is a pleasure to have you. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation because you and I have so much to talk about and so much in common.
2:56 spk_1
Yeah, so I mean, so many years of overlap.What you used to do and years of my life, yeah, yeah, your old life. I like to, I have my old life and my new life.
3:04 spk_0
Iknow I call it my prior life and my new life, right? I mean, I spent 40 years on the New York, uh, which was great, but that was my prior life, right? Um, and so tell us just a little bit, you know, I, I introduced you, but tell us a little bit about how you founded Edge trade and how that whole thing happened and now where you are now.
3:22 spk_1
Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s just been incredible since 1998 when I moved to New York andI got very lucky. I met these two incredible guys that were, uh, running and started the company Edge Trade, which was called Precision Edge before that and it was a trading firm and joined them and really started taking technology.To find ways to make trading more efficient.
3:41 spk_0
So wait a minute, wherewere you before,
3:43 spk_1
uh, in this business? No, I have no business being in this business. yeah,
3:48 spk_0
somewhere when you moved, you, you had no experience.
3:50 spk_1
No, I knew software and I knew about technology, but the ability to marry technology with trading for me was like, wow, this is like the most beautiful recipe, and it was very early, as you know, like
4:01 spk_0
I hated you guys. Can I just tell you guys remember the New York Stock Exchange, I hated that whole idea. It was.
4:06 spk_1
It was wild. I mean, but at the time, the markets were so fragmented, trading was all over the place and we were able to like just assemble an amazing group of people and we started building algorithms that would trade in the market, and we would give those algorithms to hedge funds and different mutual funds trading desks that would use these to be better at trading. And this business just took off and it got really big and eventually it became part of Night Capital and they acquired it.And I spent 5 years there, just, it was amazing because going from a, you know, a business that was relatively small to being in a business that was trading about 25% of the US stock market volume every day was like, wow, this is what like this is what size and scale look like. And I’d stayed there for 5 years andUh, took some time off. My wife did not like that. She’s like, push me, push me back to work. Yeah. It was not good. And, uh, I went to Macquarie, which was an amazing, uh, business.
5:04 spk_0
Wereyou there when Amy B was at Macquarie?
5:06 spk_1
Uh, I don’t, I don’t,
5:08 spk_0
she would have been.Like the chief financial officer,
5:09 spk_1
I don’t know. I was way, way below that level, but I, I was focused on building a new type of electronic trading business, which is where I met my co-founder at Stash, Eddie. He was at Macquarie for 10 years. He’s an Aussie, and we were running, uh, building out this this new group.To trade in 58 countries at the same time electronically and then the idea of stash popped up and we had to do it, which was basically that every American deserves advice and we wanted to build effectively the private bank for the middle class.
5:39 spk_0
OK, so, so then let’s talk about that. So, so then was born Stash, right? Now it’s interesting that, that the, the listeners should know this. There’s another company out there called Stash.Wealth, which is not you, right, because it’s, it’s a, it’s a, it’s another fintech but I think they’re down in the Carolinas or something.
5:56 spk_1
Ithink it’s like advisor yeah, yeah,
5:58 spk_0
yeah, yeah, but it, but it’s, it’s funny because it’s got that same name stash. Yours is just stash stash.com. OK, so let’s talk about who your demographic is, how you appeal to them, how you get them involved, how you draw them in. Is it, is it, would you equate it to an early Robin Hood type of a type of a, uh, an organization?
6:17 spk_1
Yeah, so Robin Hood started before us and my co-founder Eddie and I, we had a lot of, a lot of time to think about this. What do we want to be?When we were starting the company and we had to dream and say like when we grew up, what do we want to be? And I didn’t want to be a day trading app because I’ve done this long enough, as you know, most people that day trade or take active trading, especially doing it from a phone where you don’t have the compute that I used to have, you’re likely going to lose money, maybe not on the single trade, but over time you will. And so I wanted to build something where you could actually build long-term wealth, right? And to do that.You need to do it where either I’ll do it for you through a managed account, you do it yourself through advice, or and there’s some new stuff that we have now that we could talk about around banking and investing as you spend while you bank, but ideally it was around getting advice. So what I wanted to do was have people buy ETFs or have them buy investments they want and be there to give them guidance and advice.
7:14 spk_0
They could buy individual stocks as well.
7:16 spk_1
They can, yes, and they, they can and they still can. And so
7:18 spk_0
what’sthe advice you give them the advice before.Or after, if I, if I say it was me, I came in, I opened up an account and now I want to get started. I don’t put $1000 into the account to get it started, for instance. Um, do I have to, how do I get, how am I getting advice? Do I have to sign up for something? Do I, is there a query on the, on the page and I just type something in? Yeah,
7:37 spk_1
I, I mean, like any good financial advisor, when you on board the stash, we ask you a lot of questions, right? We don’t ask them because the regulator says we have to we ask it because we have to. We actually use that information.So what we do first is we kind of calculate a risk profile.
7:52 spk_0
I was waiting for you to say that.
7:53 spk_1
How old are you? What’s the we ask you direct questions. Do you have to? Do you want to rent a home? Any advisers should ask that. They all probably do. We actually use that information to say, OK, now we understand what type of customer this is. Now we use fractional shares, so you can start.With $5. So I, I don’t think the share price should matter for you to be able to buy a company or an ETF. So
8:13 spk_0
youcan, so what he means by that is you can buy $5 worth of
8:16 spk_1
Apple. That’s right, $5 of Amazon. It doesn’t matter. We use, uh, fractional share
8:21 spk_0
fractional share
8:21 spk_1
of it. And so once you start, you decide what you want to do. So right now if you’re on board today.It will ask you, do you want us to do it for you? If you want stash to do it for you with $5 at a time, you could have us manage the money through you for you through something we call Smart portfolio, which is a portfolio that we manage. It’s diversified globally. It’s automated. We ask you to turn on something called AutoStash because investing once isn’t that good. Investing every week or every 2 weeks or every month for 2030 years is really, really good. 10%. And so we ask you to do that.And we will rebalance the portfolio as it drifts and we’ll do that once a quarter. At a minimum we do it once a year.
9:04 spk_0
So wait, let me ask a question. If you ask me to, to, to sign up, what was that you called it
9:09 spk_1
smart portfolio smart,
9:10 spk_0
yeah, but then do you go intoMy bank account and just take the money every week so I don’t have to send it to you. You just pull it from my bank account. So it’s like I have to do basically nothing.
9:21 spk_1
You’re doing
9:21 spk_0
it
9:21 spk_1
all. That’s right. And the way, the way I think about it for our customers is we want to actually help you create a really positive habit.We all have all these negative habits, 100%, putting money away and paying yourself first. There is nothing better that people can do than that if you treat yourself like a bill, and they don’t,
9:37 spk_0
you know, a lot of, I, I agree with you 100%. And that’s the thing that a lot of people don’t understand. Treat yourself like the first bill, like the, like the utility bill, like the phone bill. Make the first check out to you.
9:49 spk_1
That’s right.And I, and I look at, you know, people on customers that use AutoStash on stash, whether I invest through smart or you do it yourself. They’re like 9 times ahead of the average American who doesn’t stash just by turning on AutoStash.
10:04 spk_0
Hold that thought one minute. We’re gonna just take a break. We’ll be right back.All right, so let’s just pick up from, from what you just said about the auto stash about, about, about really forcing people, well, yeah, I kind of you are forcing because you’re automating the process for them, right? You’re taking it out of their hands and helping them grow their way, making it easy, making it easy, right? I don’t, it’s not a negative, it’s a positive, of course.
10:31 spk_1
I mean, for look, when I think about myself, right.When I was 23 years old, I started investing and putting money away every week. I don’t come for money. I’m self-made. I’m really proud of that. I put money away every week. I did it through the dot-com crash. I did the Great Recession. I mean, what, what am I missing? Multiple wars, multiple presidents, multiple, everything, everything, everything crazy bad and crazy good. I kept investing through all of it.And what I want Stash customers to do is do the same thing. Do the same thing, you know, right now with the tariffs, with the interest rate decision today, with whatever happens tomorrow or the crazy thing that will happen at some point next week, just keep investing through it. That’s why AutoStash is so awesome, right?
11:10 spk_0
So what’s really great about that is that it doesn’t, while the person themselves can get emotional feeling about the market, it’s crashing it.It’s not crashing. It says tariffs. What AutoStash essentially does is it takes that emotion out of it for them and you just keep investing, right? That’s which is exactly the message that people need to hear. Yeah,
11:30 spk_1
I, I, I always say this to people on, on stashes I’ve been doing this for 25 years and I don’t have a crystal ball, but I can make a promise. The market will go up, down, and be flat. That, that I can promise you something will happen. What will happen, I don’t know, which is why a dollar cost averaging andAnd you say this all the time to your listeners like just being consistent and thinking about long-term growth is, is, it’s time tested. There’s no guarantees in any of this stuff, but consistently paying yourself is, is really important.
12:01 spk_0
But buildinga portfolio that has high quality names in it adds to that ability to to generate wealth. If somebody’s gonna, you know, a lot of people, they.You know, and I, they want a day trade. They wanted the, the, the latest name, the latest, you know, uh, name that’s gonna make them rich overnight, right? Um, and that’s where they go off track. It’s fine to have a mad money account if that’s what you want to do. But you need to have a long-term wealth account. You need to have a long term account that’s gonna generate long-term wealth for you, for your family, for your children, your grandchildren, um, and you, and the earlier you start, the better off you’re gonna be. So, tell me who your demographic is.
12:38 spk_1
Our demographic literally is America.There are nurses and teachers and uh plumbers and name it. They’re America. So our one of our top customer uh demographics is US military. Uh, there, it’s just everybody. It’s, it’s the people that unfortunately,Uh, the wealth managers don’t want to serve, so they, they’re not gonna sit there and sit down and go, All right, you have $500. Let me spend an hour with you giving you a wealth plan. Let me talk about your budget. Let me help you think about how to put money away for your kids and retirement. Those are the customers Iwant.
13:11 spk_0
OK, so if I come to you, I’m one of those customers. Is it who’s talking to me? Is it AI talking to me or is it actually a live human being that’s talking to me? Yeah, so
13:19 spk_1
it’snot a live human being, and this has changed now. Technology is incredible with AI. It’s like.Literally, I’m, I’m one of the, I, I helped contribute to with the engineers on the AI side. There are days I like almost fall off my chair with like, I can’t believe it just did that, right? It’s amazing. The way it historically has always been was we have a lot of different experiences built into the stash app that will show you your diversification score. It will give you, uh, recommendations around ETFs to balance out because to your point just now, like if you really, really want to buy Tesla, you really, really want to buy IBM. It doesn’t matter.Go ahead. You should do that. I want you to do that. I, I want people to invest in things they believe in, things they care about. That’s not for me to decide for you. That’s on you. Around that though, I don’t want to see you concentrate your position in one stock in one sector, yeah, or one stock, right? Those are things that you don’t need AI to do. You could do that through experiences in the stash shop and, you know, I think we do that really well. AI though.Has been incredible because I can’t go out. If look, if I go out and hire 500 human advisors, I have to pay them. I, I have to raise the prices. It doesn’t work. But what does work is we’ve spent the last year and a half training in AI model and built out an AI ecosystem and stash that’s really good at talking to you. It’s not gonna tell you what stock is gonna go up or down, but it will tell you about what sector you can think about
14:41 spk_0
and how to balance out the risk in a portfolio that you might be overweight technology, you need to add some.Consumer staples, you need to add some healthcare or you, you know, you might want to look at it with an ETF or particularly if you like a name, I’m sure you can query a name. If I like Kellogg, I will put it up, what about Kellogg or what about Procter and Gamble Johnson and Johnson.
15:00 spk_1
I mean, we, we, we could do that. I mean, we do that now. We bias to ETFs though. It’s like I would say if you like love uh farming, right, let’s look at a farming ETF, correct. And then around that, let’s look at, are you, do you have enough international exposure? Do you have enough bond exposure? Things that are time tested.To give you exposure to all asset classes because look, we’re in this environment now with the tariffs and interest rates and the only way that I know over my career to handle this is to have a really robust diversified portfolio
15:30 spk_0
100%. And you know, look, I went from the institutional trading side, transactional side of the business for 40 years, and now I moved to the high net.an ultra high net worth management side, right? So the chief market strategist at, at a, at a $2 billion RIA down in South Florida. But we do essentially the same thing at a, at a, for a client that has significantly more assets, which isn’t necessarily good or bad. It’s just that’s the demographic that I’m in, right? But everybody has to start somewhere. And so the sooner you start, particularly the younger you start, because time is on your side.
16:03 spk_1
And I, you know, that’s exactly right. If I look at Stash’s user base now.We have about 1. just over 1.3 million monthly active users who have, uh, accumulated over $4 billion of assets on stash, and I’m really, really proud of every single one of them because whether you start with $5 or $1000 or you have a million dollars, I actually don’t care. What I want you to do is start. That’s what I 100%.
16:28 spk_0
Where do you custody the money?
16:29 spk_1
Uh, Apex clearing is where the money sits.
16:32 spk_0
Does it, does it sit in my individual name or is it in an omnibus account under
16:37 spk_1
your
16:37 spk_0
name?
16:37 spk_1
No, we don’t do omnibus. It’s literally in my name.
16:40 spk_0
So theaccount is in my name. Just like if I go to Schwab, I go to Fidelity, it’s in my name. That’s right,
16:44 spk_1
your name, but you get your statements and I can,
16:47 spk_0
I can sign in and see what it is every day. No one else has access to it other than the automatic investment program. That’s,
16:53 spk_1
that’s correct. We’re both uh RAA and we’re also a broker dealer, a broker
16:56 spk_0
deal, right? OK. So, so let me ask you a question about the recent, the recent angst.That we’ve seen in the market really since the beginning of the year, um, more, more recently since Liberation Day. Uh, tell me the reaction in from your demographic. Were people panicking? Were they saying get me out, get me out, get me out, or were they in fact saying, here’s more money?
17:18 spk_1
So we’ve seen some of the biggest inflow days on stash, uh, in history over the last few weeks.However, and I think this is really important, there are always going to be people who look at the headlines and panic, and I through the AI I see a lot of it because we see the conversations. You see the questions, yeah, and look, we, we represent our bases in America. There are some people going, I love what’s happening right now. I love what Trump is doing. There are some people saying.This, that, this, OK. The advice is going to be the same. And that’s right. I, I think that people have a right to pay attention right now. They should be paying, but just like we’ve seen over the last 100 years for me, 25 years for you, what, 35, 40 years, 40, I heard you say 40, but I lowered it to 35, um.It’s gonna be, you have to just take the long game.
18:09 spk_0
100% you have to take the long game. I think that’s the part for me when I talk to investors, especially younger investors, convincing them that.Start now at 25, 26, 20, even if it’s $100 100 dollars a month, might be $20 a week, whatever it is, do something to get yourself started because you’ll be amazed at howit grows.
18:33 spk_1
I agree. I mean, our, our average customer on stash is in their upper 20s, early 30s.And I, I always ask myself why I wonder why they’re not like super young, and I think what I’ve figured out now after 10 years, and we’ve asked a lot of people this is people are kind of getting their their, this is, I don’t know if I could say the S dropping S bomb, but they’re getting their shit together. They’re getting married. They’re having families, they’re getting promoted at work and they have expenses, orYou know, someone in the family died and they’re starting to really think about their futures. I don’t know of a single person in my life that has day traded a stock in and out 1000 times a day and has sorted out their financial future. I, I, that’s in the movies. I’ve not met anyone who’s 100%. If I could do that,
19:16 spk_0
tell me. I’m with you. Listen, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation and as usual we run out of time. I want to come back the next time you’re right here in New York. It’s easy to get back together.I’d love to get back on and continue this conversation, especially as we move into the second half of the year and we kind of see how this all played out and where the market is and kind of what the economics are in the country and how people are really feeling. But I think what you’re doing is great. I think stash wealth for individual investors and for a young demographic that’s just getting started or for, uh, uh, someone who’s never, someone might be older who’s never done it. You have to start somewhere and stash is a great place to do it.
19:49 spk_1
Thanks forhaving me. This is great always
19:51 spk_0
a
19:51 spk_1
pleasure.
19:51 spk_0
Thank you for joining.Let’s wrap things up with 3 essential market tips to keep in mind. No matter which way the wind is blowing. If there’s no volume, it’s just noise. You see, a stock is moving, but the volume’s dead. Walk away. That’s not real interest. It’s a ghost move. Pros wait for the volume to confirm what the price is telling you. Volume is commitment. No volume, no conviction.You want to trade with the crowd? Not against the echo. Once you exit, what it does next is none of your business. This one’s hard, but it separates traders from gamblers. You close out a position, maybe you locked in a profit or maybe you cut a loss. Either way, once you’re out you’re out. Don’t chase it, don’t stalk it, don’t rewrite history in your head. What it does next is none of your concern. You made a decision, respect it, learn from it and move on.Next, respect the macro trade the micro big picture keeps you grounded. Fed policy, inflation, geopolitical headlines, but that’s not where you make your trades you trade the chart in front of you, the set up, the risk reward. Don’t get paralyzed by the noise. That’s how you stay sharp in any environment.So you know, at the end of every episode, I feature a classic recipe, and today I’m gonna give you chicken piccata. Now here’s a short history. Piccata is an Italian term that refers to a style of cooking where the meat is sliced, then dredged in flour, sauteed and served in a sauce made of lemon, butter, wine, and capers. Uh, in Italy, the traditional dish is made with veal and is especially popular in the northern regions like Lombardy.Chicken piccata, as we know it in the US, is a classic Italian American adaptation born out of practicality. When Italian immigrants came to America in the early 20th century, veal was much more expensive and much harder to find, so they turned the chicken, which was much more affordable and more available. The method stayed the same though, lightly floured and pan fried meat in a vibrant lemon caper sauce, but the protein changed.Popularity in Italian American restaurants, uh, it gained all kinds of popularity in Italian American restaurants throughout the mid-twentieth century and has since become a loved staple, appreciated for its bright flavor and simple elegance. You can scan the QR code on the screen for my full recipe.That’s a wrap for today’s trader talk, but the conversation will keep going on Apple Podcast, on Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. If you have any questions or topics you want covered, email me at tradedertalk@yahoo Inc.com. I’m listening. Until the next time, stay sharp, stay disciplined and stay in touch. Take good care.
22:51 spk_2
This content was not intended to be financial advice and should not be used as a substitute for professional financial services.