Trading edge will come from differentiation, not just better models

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 15:15

   I think the edge will be always moving. There's not going to be like, oh, everything's still and the edge is right here, the alpha is right there. People are always building new products. Even us, you look at Robinhood Chain, which is our new blockchain that we rolled out, optimized for real world assets. I mean, as soon as that went live, it surprised us with just a huge amount of developer activity, DEX volume.

2. 15:45

   A lot of the traders from other chains immediately started bridging over because there were all these new assets they could trade. The stock tokens, but also, you know, some of the memes and other assets. All of that was just a... a new ecosystem so i think you'll see new ecosystems continue to form new asset classes you know a lot of the agentic trading interest has been in prediction markets too where you not only have your typical financial assets but you can trade on real world events you could trade on fed decisions sports um crypto has become very popular so you'll you'll see new asset classes coming in. And I think the advantage that Robinhood has is we're one of the few, if not the only, where you could do all of these things in one place with one easily shared balance and uniform KYC, simple money movement. So for your agent, they can just have access to all these

3. 16:45

   things. And then you can have strategies that incorporate multiple assets. And I think that's where it's going to start to get really interesting because that type of complexity, that type of strategy is going to be very, very difficult for a human unassisted to be able to put together. So you don't worry about a world where everybody has the same kind of super powerful AI that can trade for them. And then there's effectively no edge. The edge in anything is built by differentiation. If you're doing the same thing as everyone else, kind of definitionally, you have no edge. So you'll have to figure out how to be different. And I think that's been always true for trading. It's not as simple as like my AI is better than yours. There's a lot of like product stuff around it. I mean, if you have a better AI than other people, I think that would

4. 17:29

   be one form of edge. But yeah, I don't think very many people will be training their own AIs. But I mean, connecting it to unique pieces of data, we'll have a proliferation of apps in the agent app store, which now we have a relatively small number, but it's going to be open and we're going to be, we're going to be adding a lot more. Things in some degree to some degree do get centralized because we have these models that are now looking at everything, but also the amount of things we can give them and the context and the tools are increasing as well. And I want to ask about the agent marketplace, but on the model side quickly, are you guys doing a lot of post training, fine tuning on the big, you know, OpenAI anthropic models? Are you, Robinhood's not going make its own model for this right yeah current currently we're not doing any fine tuning but

5. 18:21

   we have done that internally uh for for certain models we've also pre-trained some specialized models really for for ourselves yeah with this one we wanted to start with you know the models that our customers would already know and give them some choice for for what to deploy but yeah that doesn't mean that, I mean, you can tell already this product has evolved. So it's going to look