In this week’s podcast we connect with Jannick Malling, co-founder and co-CEO of Public.com, to understand how the company is revolutionizing multi-asset investing with AI-powered insights and fractional shares. With 81% of millennials planning to fire their parents’ financial advisor, $70-90 trillion is due to change hands in the coming decade, can AI fill the gap better than traditional advisory models?
🤖 From Community to AI: how Public.com pivoted from social investing to AI-first insights with their Alpha tool, delivering personalized research that proactively delivers earnings summaries, explains stock movements in real-time, and answers investment questions with institutional-quality data
🧠 Helping the TikTok Generation Think Deeper – the challenge of moving young investors from bite-sized content consumption to critical thinking, using AI as a bridge to more informed decision-making
📱 The Agentic AI Revolution in Investing – explore the future of proactive AI that reaches out with market updates, company alerts, and personalized insights – moving beyond reactive chatbots to truly intelligent investment companions
⚖️ Time Horizons and Risk Management – Essential lessons on when to take equity risk vs. when to play it safe, plus common mistakes both young and older investors make with their time horizons
🌟 Buy What You Like vs. Buy What You Know – How the new generation invests in companies they believe in, not just ones they understand, driving the rise of thematic investing and story-driven stocks like Tesla and Palantir $TSLA $PLTR
Public Disclosure:
Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing, member FINRA/SIPC. Investing involves risk. Not an investment recommendation.
Sources:
Public – public.com
Alpha – betterwatchlist.com
Segments:
00:00 Introduction
04:44 What is Public.com? Multi-Asset Platform Overview
09:53 How Public’s AI Research Assistant “Alpha” Works
15:29 The Pivot from Community to AI-First Insights
16:45 Understanding the TikTok Generation’s Investment Habits
25:56 The Importance of Deep vs. Bite-Sized Learning
33:00 The Future of Personalized AI Financial Content
34:41 Finding Balance Between AI and Human Community
40:40 Portfolio Management and Emotional Discipline
46:34 Learning from Mistakes: Generational Investment Errors
51:45 The Power of Data-Driven Product Development
53:12 Where to Try Public’s AI Tools Globally
WSW – Video – E84 – Public.com – No Ads
[00:00:00] Jannick: you wanna get people’s attention If you do that with bite-sized content, if that is how they buy their first stock, great.
And so I think it starts with.
Curiosity, and social media and these like bite-sized clips are the superior way to do that. And we can debate whether that’s good or not, but that’s just the factual truth of the matter. Right. And I think what’s so important about AI is that AI is the tool in a world where people don’t read. They don’t go deep. So to say AI is the tool that can change the course of that, that’s why the AI tool with the engagement rates that we’re seeing. It’s so powerful,
[00:00:42] Luke: just buy it and forget about it.
Like, just try and ignore this for the next five years. It’s gonna take that long for the thesis to play out. Stop asking me should I sell it.
[00:00:50] Krys: One of the reasons Luke and I. Decided to make this podcast is because between of us, we have whatever, 40 years combined. And that means we’ve made all the mistakes I’ve made most of them
[00:01:03] Jannick: That’s really actually, people say time horizon and let’s just distill it down. It’s all about when do you need the money, right?
None of that matters. The only thing that matters is. buy and hold, and whenever you’ve got money, like trying to basically time the load too aggressively. I’ve made these mistakes myself,
[00:01:23] Krys: So we just finished recording with the co CEO of public.com, a trading platform or investing platform rather. And I, uh, came away from this conversation really optimistic and inspired. There was something about Yannick that felt, uh, sort of aligned with the good guys. Uh, in this murky jungle of investing, Luke.
And one of the things he said at the end of our conversation was, you know, he wants to be thought of as the guy, uh, backing smart money as opposed to dumb money, which might involve, you know, uh, intermingling more educational efforts on top of, you know, all the power that the technology unlocks. So I came away very impressed.
What were, what were your thoughts about the conversation?
[00:02:08] Luke: Yeah, I feel like we actually ended up having a completely different conversation to the one I expected. Because, um, we came in and we are like old guys. I’ve got plenty of gray hair here. And uh, and we came in thinking, okay, let’s understand like how new and younger investors like the TikTok generation are investing.
And we ended up actually having a much deeper conversation about public dot com’s transition from. A community of investors to like AI first and AI driven insights. And I was quite excited about the idea that they’re creating, um, like proactive ai, agentic ai that can be your, like, investing buddy. Not even like someone to bounce ideas off of, but the idea that.
Like someone, my AI will kind of reach out to me in the morning and tell me, Hey, this is what’s happening in the market. You know, you own these things, be aware of this. Like this just changed with this stock. Here’s a company you might be interested in. So really interesting conversation about the trajectory that Yannick sees.
And he’s clearly like a real technologist. He understands this stuff deeply.
[00:03:16] Krys: Right. And he seemed well-balanced to me between, you know, all AI and nothing but AI and you know, the old paper abacus model where you’re doing everything by hand. And one of the things that really resonated with me is that in between, I. If you learn to use AI well, and the AI gets to know you, you get all that information so you become smarter, and then you take the next step and you bring that information to your.
Club, your investment club, in this case, wall Street Wildlife, on our patreon.com page where you say, oh, I did this and this and my, I, I said this. Let’s talk about this. Do you trust this? Do you not trust this, anyone buying this? And, you know, and to me that process feels much more integrated and, and where things are going.
So really good to hear that from him.
[00:04:01] Luke: Yeah. So, um, this, this is a really good conversation with a super smart, influential guy in the industry. So, uh, let’s roll the interview Christophe, and then hopefully our listeners get a ton of value out of this too.
Welcome to the latest episode of Wall Street Wildlife with Christophe and Luke. And today our special guest, Yannick Malling, co-founder and co, CEO at public, also public.com, the investing platform built for those who take investing. Seriously, and we take investing seriously here on this podcast. Public has built the technology that makes constructing a multi-asset portfolio fast, secure, and frictionless.
So we are keen to learn all about that from Yannick in our conversation today.
[00:04:44] Krys: most importantly though, we’re, we’re all animals. And investing is a jungle with all kinds of scary creatures. I’m a monkey. I throw bananas. I. Badger is a badger who has these steely claws and, you know, tries to discipline me. Yannick, what kind of animal are
you?
[00:05:01] Jannick: um, does it have to be above or below water?
[00:05:05] Krys: Uh,
we have dolphins too, in the jungle. Weirdly, I,
[00:05:09] Jannick: I.
I would say dolphin, you know, uh, great, great communicator, um, sort of friendly and um, always ready to help. I guess.
[00:05:21] Luke: Awesome. They are super friendly, fun animals and
also.
[00:05:23] Jannick: Either that or Siberian tiger, but I feel
like the dolphin would be better.
It.
[00:05:28] Luke: Well, dolphins are pretty cool animals, and you seem like a, uh, a cool, handsome Danish guy joining us on the poll today. If you are on the podcast, not on the YouTube, do join us, uh, to seek to check out our furry faces live.
So why don’t we, why don’t we set the stage for the conversation and before we get into the detail of the chat we wanna have today, which is. What titled Helping the TikTok Generation Invest Better? ’cause we are old guys and we’re interested in kind of what tools and capabilities are out there to help the next generation probably, well actually you’re a young guy.
Yannick your generation, uh, adopt the right investing behaviors. But before we do, let’s set the stage a little bit. So when you tell our viewers about
public, what is public really.
[00:06:14] Jannick: Yeah, I mean, um,
public is a multi-asset investing platform. So what that means is we have built a platform where you can, I think, easier than probably anywhere else on the planet, build a diversified portfolio across stocks, treasuries, corporate bonds, crypto options, um, ETFs, et cetera. And so what we always set out to do.
Is make the public markets really work for people. I think a lot of people always saw the markets as this like testosterone pumped kind of thing where uh, you take a lot of risk and more than often than not, it doesn’t pay off. And that can be how your experiences in the markets, but for most people, that’s actually not the case.
The markets is also the greatest wealth compounder of all time. It is the single greatest wealth creation engine. That we’ve ever built as a, as a species, if you will. And so, uh, we always thought, why aren’t everyone taking advantage of this? But when you double click on the term, take advantage of it, you start to realize that, um, you need a few things.
In order for that to happen, you need to be able to build a diversified portfolio. You need to be able to, at least if you’re younger, get started with a little bit less money. And, and ideally you don’t just sort of buy once, but you buy multiple times and you rebalance your portfolio over time. Um, and that was all really hard to do actually back in 2018.
And so, uh, what we started with was we invented this concept of fractional shares. In the US where you could in real time go and, uh, buy, um, any stock with any amount of money. So instead of the interface sort of being, you know, apples or Google’s trading at $3,000 or whatever it was at the time, and you buy, you know, for free six or $9,000, you could buy 400.
You can buy for 5,000, you can buy it for 2000 and really control the diversification inside your portfolio. Which is, uh, so, so key to build sort of a sustainable, kinda lasting, um, portfolio that, that can stand the test of time. We did that in fractional shares. We then had a crypto, we then did it with US treasury bonds.
This was obviously back when yields kind of spiked to like five point a half percent. Um, and then with corporate bonds as well, where in the corporate bond market, you can get upwards of, you know, seven, eight, 9%. Um, yield. Um, and so really what you have today is this incredibly powerful platform with a few different asset classes that have all been fractionalized, so to say.
So you can put any amount of money to work, you can dollar cost average, you can rebalance it however you wish. Um, and then on top of that, we’ve built this context and research layer, um, with ai. Um, we have a research assistant called Alpha. So you go on any stock. If you kind of swipe down, you can ask any question you want about that stock, which is very quickly, or honestly has already over the last couple of years since we launched it, become the, the, the dominant way that people research, uh, stocks.
And as you can imagine, it’s just orders of magnitudes faster. Um, and it’s so much better than, than many of the kind of alternatives, uh, out there. And so. So when you, what are you left with? You’re left with a platform where you can invest in any asset class you want and you can kind of research in the ECS, but still very, very kind of powerful way.
Um, and that’s really, uh, the platform that public has grown into.
[00:09:53] Krys: Okay. Maybe this is going too quickly to the deep end. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll see. But my understanding, my rookie understanding. AI stuff is that, you know, it’s as good as the data you put in. So it’s the data set on which a model is trained, uh, that makes the difference. Is, is, is publix’s data drawn from a special bucket or is that sort of financial bucket, or is it drawn from like a larger pool that other financial
would have access to?
[00:10:24] Jannick: actually both. So, uh, when we started out, or before we even started out with ai. We had actually acquired a company back in 2020 that was scraping SEC filings and turning them into structured data so that you could visualize things on a chart. Like if you look at Tesla, it’d be like, uh, how many vehicles would deliver every quarter?
If you look at Netflix, it’d be like, what’s the subscriber growth across different geographies. Even if you look at Apple, it’s like, where is sales coming from? Is it iPhone? Is it this? Is it that? Um, and so we kind of had that as part of our public premium offering already. So when AI came out, to your point, AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on.
We had a little bit of a head start, um, because we already had spent years kind of sanitizing doing all the data, kind of modeling work. And so it was, it wasn’t trivial, but it was easier for us. We’d taken the first few steps already before we even, uh, implemented that into sort of, um, an AI model and, and.
And then obviously we also now have just models that are more trained on public filing data. What’s interesting about the public markets is most of the data is public, obviously earnings calls, things of that nature. Um, then you have a lot of market data, stuff that’s at, that’s not public. Most of the data out there that you’re seeing is, uh, sort of 15 minute delayed data, uh, often.
And so, um, so in the beginning it was even just. For our model to be able to use those market data APIs, because what the general purpose LLMs and AI models do is they search the internet and then they, whatever they find, they take that as truth and then they present it to you. Right? And that’s where these designations come in.
We’ve all kind of tried it. Um, the problem with that in the financial world is it evolves and moves so quickly. Markets change obviously every second. So if you ask what the PE ratio was of a given stock is, you know, for the LLM to go and do a Google search and find a free week old article that says that the PE ratio was X, when today it’s Y doesn’t really work.
And so we trained an AI model to actually just use market data in the same way that an analyst can be trained to use Bloomberg, for example, to go and Fitch real time information. Um, for every single prompt, which massively has, uh, resulted in much less hallucinations than I think other general purpose models.
And that’s where Alpha for us started to become really the predominant way that people research. That’s when people started to feel that they can rely on it. Um, and so today what we’ve seen is, um, north of 25% of questions that are asked to alpha. Actually results in a buy or sell of a stock, uh, within the next few hours already.
Um, that number, if you think of news articles, like other pieces of content in the app was, uh, way, way smaller. I mean, best case it was half and uh, most of the time it was even less than that. And so AI really has proved to be a very, very helpful way for people to just stay. Involved to be more well informed, I think about the, the decisions they’re making, um, which I think is, is a really great evolution because what’s, what’s interesting about the 10 years prior to AI is the big technological innovation that was mobile and things like fraction on serial commission, which made it easier than ever to buy securities.
And the critique that would sometimes come is, is it too easy now to buy stuff? And, um, and we spent years kind of debating that back and forth and we, we always try to kind of check ourself and stay fairly objective and authentic and and transparent. And so nothing is ever a hundred percent good or bad, but we was like, yeah, maybe sometimes it’s too easy.
Then we introduced this thing called, uh, safety labels in the app, so that if there’s a very volatile asset, you kind of have to swipe through understanding that. Understand the risk here, and we’d really point those out. So there was a few more kind of speed bumps on the road. Now I think what’s so great is we don’t have to do that because the AI can proactively, if you’re on a stock page, tell you why this stock is moving.
So if you’re looking at a stock, it’s down 30% and you’re like, oh, this might be a good buyer opportunity. You know, the real thing you wanna do there is research. Is it a good buyer opportunity? Don’t just assume, right? Like anything else in life. And so now AI will already go in, realize the stock’s down.
And Alpha will proactively sort of have a label under the stock, a little card that explains why the stock is actually down in real time, scanning, social media markets, data, kind of everything. And so it’s kind of summarized it for you. You have follow up questions, you can just tap on it and you can ask more follow up questions that way.
And so it just becomes a fantastic way for people to be more well researched, more well informed before they get themselves into traits.
[00:15:29] Luke: That’s a, that’s powerful stuff. I know you as a company, you pivoted a little while ago from more like community driven insights. To your alpha tool and AI driven insights, is that because of that, the emerging
capabilities of these tools that led you in that direction?
[00:15:45] Jannick: a hundred percent. We started out, to your point, as a social sort of investing app with the community. The role that community played back in the day is actually the role that AI plays today. So we liked community because it was a way for people to become more educated, more well informed. Um, they could go to a community and ask questions, but they’d have to wait an hour a day to get a really good answer.
They have to consider the bias of the person who’s posting the answer. Do they own the stock or not? AI doesn’t own any stock. It gives you the answer in 10 seconds. So, and so it just sticks to the facts, and that’s why we found it to be so much more of a powerful model. But you’re totally right. The, the, the role community played in the beginning was to try to, it was the same principle, right?
Get people to be as well informed as possible, make it easy to be educated and well-researched and informed. And AI is just a superior way to achieve those things relative to sort of the social, uh, and community investing, uh, features.
[00:16:45] Krys: Is there something that surprises you about this new generation of investors that we for sure are gonna call them the TikTok generation, since I guess Luke and and I are, we’re, we sort, we’re sort of dinosaurs in a way. I mean, I, when I teach my students at the university, you know, I still experience 18 to 22 year olds every semester.
So I kind of see the shift, but there are things that are both inspiring and things that are scary to me. About how younger people frame the world. How do you, you know, one is maybe, how do you, where do you fit in generally generationally? Are you, do you consider yourself part of this, you know, uh, born and bred, gen Z type?
Or are you kind of on a cusp
somewhere in the dangers?
[00:17:32] Jannick: yeah, so that,
that’s a great question. I am actually, I’m not really, I would say the TikTok generation, I’m maybe more the Instagram generation. Um, you know, I’m, I’m 37, but I started in the space when I was 17, so I actually have 20 years of experience, which is wild. Uh, but, you know, age is just a number.
Um, my biological age, thankfully is much lower. So, so on a biological age scale, I guess I’m a, I’m a Gen Z TikTok
[00:18:01] Luke: Have, have you got your whoop on Yannick?
[00:18:03] Jannick: No, I I I have my oaring. I have my oaring,
but uh, my function health tells me my biological is 23, which is great. So I’m very happy with that. Uh, no. So look, I think there’s a few things to get into here.
Number one. The way information is consumed and dispersed is fundamentally different. If you think about sort of, um, the older generations, it was very much like Yahoo Finance, right? Maybe you’re watching Jim Kramer on TV at the same time every day. Um, the younger generation obviously doesn’t kind of do that.
They let information come to them. Um, they walk around with their phone in their pocket and it vibrates and they pick it up and they consume that. That’s number one. So it’s a, it’s a pull versus kind of push model. Secondly, it’s very bite-sized sort of content, so, um, obviously everyone’s, um, you know, attention, um, span is shrinking and, uh, I think we have technology, uh, to thank for that generally.
And so. The information. It’s actually incredible that long form podcasts in that sense have had sort of a, I wouldn’t call it a compact, but like a resurgence because that actually is going a little bit against the trend. But when it comes to markets updates, especially because markets update so frequently, you see it in sports where people just watch the highlights, not the full game.
Um, it’s very much about delivering this bite-sized content. And interestingly. What the, one of the key use cases in the social investing community on public was when we had it, was summarizing earnings calls, doing these like bite-sized bullet sort of 140 character updates on what’s happening in the market.
Again, alpha is just much kind of superior to that and with ai. You can ask for the content to be bite-sized. You can also ask it for it to be like an analyst wrote it, right? And so it can take on any shape or form. If you ask AI what animal it is, it will ask you. It will tell you, I can be whatever animal you want me to be.
Right? And that’s what’s so powerful here. Um, and so I think that’s the second thing. That’s gonna be where AI’s gonna be really, really beneficial is delivering this bite-sized content, but then letting people have sort of a conversation around it so you don’t have to read eight pages to consume something.
You read one statement, you ask a question, you read a response, you ask a question like that. Engagement is so much more familiar to sort of social media platforms and, and how kind of everything honestly works in the world. I’ve always said. Conversations as far and away the best way to get yourself emerged and educated in any topic on earth, whether it’s investing or, or otherwise.
Um, and I think AI just presented us with a, a whole new way to do that.
[00:20:55] Luke: There’s, I wonder if I can take a bit of a sidebar. ’cause you said something interesting about. Like this generation we’re talking about and the fact that they, they want this sort of like information to be pushed to them, like a notification. And if we think about AI again, like we’re now transitioning from like reactive AI to agentic ai, right?
So then there’s a huge, I’m sure you’ll think about this, a huge opportunity to have just a much more sophisticated version of like. Price targets and screeners where your AI says to you, Hey Luke, like, did you know that this happened in the market today? And you looking at this company last week? And here’s one that you might want to take a look at.
Here’s a bit of, here’s a, like an exec
summary for you if you wanna get like a bite-sized taste. I.
[00:21:36] Jannick: A hundred percent. We actually took some of those steps already, so in the beginning of the year, we redid our models. And today, for example, if you own Nvidia on public and Nvidia has an earnings call, you don’t have to wake up the next morning and ask it for the sum of the year of the earning call. It will just push it to you.
And so we have already gone down that path of proactive versus reactive ai. Analogy I, I often give is if AI’s an assistant, everyone knows the best assistants are proactive, right? If you watch the Devil Wears pr, you’ll get it. You know, she famously has these like assistants that have to read her mind and deliver her stuff before she even knows that she wants it.
Well, that’s what AI can do as well. Um, and so we’ve already taken steps for that to happen. I think, uh, over the, the remaining course of the year, we’ll, we’ll have many more of these kind of a, a gentech sort of brokerage features. Um, but I would say that’s the, so information I would say is sort of category one when it comes to TikTok generation.
Then the second thing is what are they buying and why, which is interesting, which gets a little bit more into investing behavior. Um, and there’s a few familiar things. So I think the, in the baby boom duration, there was always this like, buy what you know thing. And I think the same is true here. It’s maybe more buy what you’d like because there’s a little bit more values driven as well.
So it’s not just what you know, but it’s what you actually like and what you consider to be probably good for, you know, yourself or your friends or the world if the products you really like. Um, and that’s why I think we’ve also seen the rise of thematic investing and, you know, with a lot of these like thematic ETFs and, you know, it’s becoming a bigger, bigger thing.
Um, and so that’s, that’s the second thing. And I think there are companies that. Just do a fantastic job of talking the right to this generation. So back in the day, there was one company I think that did a fantastic job of that, and it was Tesla with Elon Musk, like the way he conducted himself on earnings calls the way he did media.
It was the ultimate star stock. Right. It was basically, he understood that he couldn’t just sit and sound like a banger on an earnings call. He wanted to bring people along on a journey, especially as retail shareholders. And so it become a, it became a very, very retail loft stock. And I think today you have companies like Palantir and others that have sort of picked up that mantle right at its cap is doing a phenomenal job at essentially employing a version of that strategy Now.
And I think those are the companies, and by the way, they are all companies that trade at the highest multiple, right? So it’s sort of like a, you know, it’s a fantastic trade and skill to have. It’s, it’s companies that can really tell a story. I think it goes back to people are not just these days investing in numbers.
They are investing in the trajectory, in the journey of a company. Um, you know, I saw this analysis yesterday between a, a tech company and an a company. And it was like the tech company is now almost worth as much as the incumbent, but the incumbent is doing like $6 billion of buybacks every year. And everybody’s like, so it’s, it’s it’s way under priced.
Right? Right. And it’s like, well, it’s not growing, it’s not telling a story. Nobody wants, knows where this journey is going. It’s not clear what the roadmap is. And so people are just buying the other stock because they feel more safe that like, yeah, this company’s growing. The roadmap looks awesome.
They’ll probably execute that. If they hit half of the things that they say they’re gonna hit, they’re gonna keep growing. And so it’s just a totally way different way to conduct yourself in the public markets as a public company, CEO. And I think that’s something that a few companies really are understanding now.
And that’s something that speaks directly to this kind of TikTok generation, I should call it, where, and, and it fits with the bite-sized kind of content as well, right? Like they hear. They see clips here and there and they sort of start to learn, uh, more about the company that way versus sitting down and reading all the annual reports, which, you know, Warren Buffet always said was a great idea and I don’t disagree with them.
The problem is nobody really does it anymore. Maybe AI is gonna change that, hopefully, but, um, but it’s just, uh, it’s just unrealistic to think that that’s how, especially young folks get educated about the companies they invest in, in, in 2025.
[00:25:56] Krys: Can I pick up a point that you just mentioned? This is my old dinosaur professorial self kind of arguing in some ways against myself too. Uh, when I, I still read books and sometimes I assign books to my students. Luke doesn’t know how to read, so I don’t bother with him, but the amount of. Quality, deep understanding that you could get from something.
Bite size, I would say, is logically limited, literally by, by the size of the bite. And to get alpha in investing, sometimes you need to, you know, if not necessarily become an expert, you need to for go deeper or have first principles, understanding so that you aren’t swayed by the crowds and all that. So that’s why reading something like a book for eight hours say, or listening to a long podcast.
To me has, it’s not so much about the information per se, like those I could get in these bite-sized, but what happens to my mind for eight hours when I just focus
Right. And go deeper and
[00:27:01] Jannick: And when you read it the second time, it you realize things you didn’t realize the first time. Totally.
[00:27:07] Krys: yeah, exactly. So I, I, I feel there’s a question in here to you as an expert who’s building. A tool that both seems to allow for the bite-sized stuff, while also knowing it’s up to the user to seek something perhaps deeper. But how do we get the younger generation to, I call it, learn to think,
[00:27:32] Jannick: Yeah.
[00:27:32] Krys: Learn to not just press the buttons, but to.
[00:27:36] Jannick: Critical thinking. I think it’s an excellent question and the, we always have a very pragmatic approach to this. We are not sort of, uh, too, uh, theoretical on this, if you will. And so we see it as a funnel, right, which is like, you wanna get people’s attention in the first place. If you do that with bite-sized content, if that is how they buy their first stock, great.
I’m very happy. If that is how they buy all their stocks for the next 20 years, then we probably will be like C minus, right? Maybe they, they get some good beta over the years, so it’s better than nothing. So it’s not like failed, but they could be doing a lot better. And so I think it starts with.
Curiosity, it starts with getting people interested and social media and these like bite-sized clips are the superior way to do that. And we can debate whether that’s good or not, but that’s just the factual truth of the matter. Right. And I think what’s so important about AI is that AI is the tool in a world where people don’t read. They don’t go deep. So to say AI is the tool that can change the course of that, by the way, whether that’s markets or politics or whatever, I think that’s across the board, right? Health. And so really starting from like bite-sized content being sort of, you know, having your curiosity be peaked and then you wanna bring that to a funnel into kind of learning more and more.
And so the way we designed that on public is like, yeah, you’re kind of drawn in. You have some see clip maybe externally in social media. You open a public count. In 30 seconds, you’re buy stock. Great. Then what do you do next? And then obviously one thing is that we have a bunch of educational things to like learn more about like diversifying in bonds, et cetera, et cetera.
But again, the way that’s dispersed is so key and that’s why the AI tool with the engagement rates that we’re seeing. It’s so powerful, right? Because even if we put out, oh, go watch these 20 videos on a webinar, like that’s, those days are even gone like that. That was probably back in my Saxo bank kind of days back in oh 5, 0 6, 0 7.
Like that’s how people started, did it. Um, so really now it’s about capturing people’s attention and then sort of like make sure that they can find their path into being more well informed and. It’s kind of part being in science, partly an art. You know, it’s like one of these part science, part art things from a product design perspective, how you, how you might achieve that.
Um, but I would also say it’s probably one of these single most interesting and important things that we’re working on every day at public. And there’s never gonna be a perfect answer. It’s more a question of a ratio of more and more well-informed, deep researched investors to your point. You want that ratio always to go up over time, but I think it really can leapfrog heavily upwards.
I mean, that’s what we’ve seen with AI as well, that it, it just, it, it leads to so many more informed investors, much more well researched. And it’s actually interesting, even things like when you present an answer in the AI type experience, right? So you open alpha in public, it’s like a chat bot type experience.
You’re gonna ask question, you see the little dots. It tells you, Hey, I’m, it tells you where to go for the answers. Like I’m analyzing transcript, I’m looking at analyst reports. Now I’m doing this, that, and the other. And then it comes back in your mind for you to read that. If that was just static content on a website somewhere or in a book, you probably wouldn’t even read those paragraphs in many cases, but because you know that it was created just for you.
You sort of have this anticipation of the user experience where it’s telling you, where it’s looking to find all this information. The, the read-through rates on those are just way higher, right? Uh, or it’s a magnitude higher. And that’s what I think is interesting. It’s almost like a personalized approach to research and education, right?
As if you have somebody in your family that you could text with who just happens to be deep. Any stock in the world, like, Hey, I was a stock analyst and I covered every single company. Like that is such a powerful tool, and I think, um, and I think that’s, that’s really where the world will go. Like, I’m pretty optimistic on this, but I, I’ll say I’m, I’m optimistic, but like in a realistic sense, like I think it’s hard to see the world.
Consuming less AI data over time. And so you’re gonna, so if you’re basically ized, you’re gonna move from, like, you probably went from books to sort of web 1.0 content, you know, web 2.0 content with videos, and these like social types of content, very bite-sized. And so you’ve got more and more compression of information there.
But actually AI is the counterfactual to that. It’s the thing that like changes the trajectory of that because now you can go deep again and, and you can have, see high engagement rates and it can be fun to go deep on things. Um, so I think that’s gonna be a massive thing for this generation.
[00:33:00] Luke: and, and maybe like the trajectory of this stuff is if you think about tools like VO three and video generation, I. Like you could have your personalized Kramer or you know, whichever personality you liked, giving you like your tailored five minute
news briefing every day.
[00:33:17] Jannick: Totally. Yeah, absolutely. Um, a friend of mine runs a company called Esia, which, uh, pioneered these AI avatars. Um, and that’s, that’s another thing that you can sort of, uh. Get into where you can have any person in the world. Remember that super funny scene from the Big short was like, here’s Margaret Ravi to explain to you that, like, you can have that for anything now, right?
Maybe not with Margaret Ravi because there’s an IP licensing issue there, but with somebody else. And so, um, yeah, it’s just, it’s just wild to think of and, uh, I think it’s, uh, I think it’s fantastic and I, I can’t wait to see what the community at large does with the stuff.
[00:33:54] Krys: I wonder sometimes. If we don’t fall into the trap of binary thinking, and now, you know, the, all of humanity is so excited about AI for obvious reasons, but earlier we were talking about the importance of community and human, like flesh and bone. You know, and I, I, I’m, I’m kind of thinking is the, is is what’s around the curve.
Like, are we too quick in getting rid of all humans, all communities, and all newsletters and all. Conversation and putting, given the AI too much power where it, where really it ought to be some sort of like delicate balance where you, you get your information from this source, but then you feed it back to a podcast like ours and conversations with regular guests with whom you cultivate trust over
time.
Is that.
[00:34:41] Jannick: I think it’s a great question. I don’t actually think we will get rid of community, so I think I’m actually very bullish on sort of more old school community type things, and I think you see, you see some signals of this play out almost in real time. You know, the, the Klarna, CEO Sebastian famously went full ai.
Like we’re gonna automate everything, et cetera. And now he’s like very, by the way, transparently in the way that only almost Scandinavians are sort of humble, transparent. He was like, oh, we overdid a little bit. We need to introduce some humans back in the mix. And I think you’ll see that a lot. You know, every big supercycle has a pendulum that swings.
And as a species we’re very good at swinging the pendulum. Too far because we just, we want progress so much. So we just push it very heavily. And so we end up pushing it too far. And so I’ll tell you, we almost, without question, we’ll do that again here. And so you’re a hundred percent right, that will make people think, okay, we pushed it too far, we need community again, et cetera, and then it will fall back.
And so balance is just. We are very volatile as a species, actually, when you think about it, right? But when you look at the 300 day moving average, it’s sort of clear which, which way that we’re trending in. And I think, yeah, the same thing’s gonna happen here. I think we will quickly realize, um, the places where there is a real need for community.
I think in public’s case, the. Use cases that we saw for community was very much just things AI is a lot better at. But there are use cases in community for investing outside of that. Like I don’t think investing clubs, like, let’s take the concept of offline investing clubs, right? In colleges and such. I think that whatever that metric is, it’s gonna grow massively over the next many years.
Because of ai, because people are gonna show up to these investing clubs way more research, and you’re gonna have a lot more interesting debates and discussions. And the great thing about the markets is it’s this, there’s no right or wrong answer in the moment. You only find out later, right? The market is not about necessarily being right or wrong, it’s about feedback balloons and time horizons, you know?
Everything is sort of a function of that. And so there’s always room for more debate. There’s always room for a person to take the other side of an argument, but I think it just becomes a much more intelligent, kind of sophisticated, average conversation that will happen in those investing clubs.
Therefore, they will be more interesting and therefore they will grow. And so I actually think that there are many cases like that where AI is gonna just lead to leveling the playing field across people. You get back to community. Here’s maybe another way of saying it. When social media started, it was friends, right?
Facebook at your friends, people in your class, et cetera. What have social media become today? Does anyone see their friends videos on TikTok? No. You see influencers concept and so what started as sort of platforms where everybody contributed something to the conversation has ended up becoming the 0.001%. Does 90, 99% of the creation and the stuff that actually gets engagement and everybody else just consumes. So ironically, you ended up with back something that actually mimics the, the sort of mass media TV broadcast kind of situation. And again, I think if AI can level the playing field in terms of how well-informed and smart people on certain topics.
My hope is that, you know, you’re probably always gonna have an element of that period, but in smaller communities, you’re gonna have way more people feeling like that they can actually participate because suddenly they don’t think, oh, you know, I’m asking dumb questions that nobody wants to hear.
Everybody will kind of have a certain kind of level that they bring to these types of debates and conversations.
[00:39:04] Luke: I guess here we’re talking about. Like one aspect of investing, which is like understanding a company, doing your research, deciding should I, you know, buy, sell, add, trim. Um, but there’s like another huge aspect of investing as well. We focus a lot on this podcast, which is like the portfolio management side and the emotional discipline side.
And I’m in a bunch of, I’m like the expert in a bunch of WhatsApp groups with close friends and family trying to be there, kind of. So sometimes it’s not about being. The, the guy that says, oh, you know, this is a great company and you should watch out for this company. It’s about, well, like, just buy it and forget about it.
Like, just try and ignore this for the next five years. It’s gonna take that long for the thesis to play out. Stop asking me should I sell it. Right. Don’t panic. Don’t panic. And to, to echo some of your, like, my ears pricked up when you said like. Just keep buying, like buy the companies, you know, dollar cost average.
Right? There’s some fundamental principles that correlate with being a successful long-term investor. So maybe bring it to public, right? You’ve, it’s not, as you said in the intro, it’s not just about stocks. You’ve also got bonds, crypto, lots of other asset classes. Are you trying to do something maybe with AI or, or what’s left of this community aspects where you’re trying to.
Give your customers, give your clients like that. Um, that, that those additional skills beyond researching a stock and actually understanding, are they balanced appropriately? Are they taking on the right amount of risk for their age and their
behaviors?
[00:40:40] Jannick: For sure. That is another thing that we have gotten more into. When you open public today, when to do this thing called the allocation step, where you can just kind of see what your, uh, what your exposure is across these asset classes. Uh, we’re rolling out like a multi-account structure where you can even see that across multiple accounts.
Even like if I was on a legacy platform, like I’d have a really hard, and I have a. Few different accounts, like say that I have an LLC and maybe a joint account and and my investing account or a couple different brokerage accounts, whatever IRAs I, I’ll have a really hard time seeing what’s my exposure to Nvidia in dollar terms because I probably own it for a few ETFs or I most surely do.
I also own it directly and then across multiple accounts. And so those are some of the things that we’re kind of working on to like really give you the like real time true view of your exposure. And then from there, doing things like. Getting more into understanding. So public, FYI has actually obtained an investment advisory license, which is a little bit what you’re getting into, sort of the financial advice kind of side of things.
And I think there too, there’s a whole new experience to be built in terms of like, you know, understanding what, um. Your risk tolerances are, but the way that those questions are normally asked are pretty dull and pretty boring. And so again, if you think about what a financial advisor does, I would argue it’s probably three things of what they need to be good at.
Number one, they need to, uh, understand who you are, number two. So they do that by asking a series of questions and getting to know you better. Number two. They need to continuously give you sort of market updates and keep your abreast of what’s going on and what might fit and be in line with your goals.
And then third thing they need to be is they need to be likable. Right? That’s like the main thing. You know that. And honestly, that’s a huge part of it. Like I think there’s like. Almost 300,000 financial advisors in the US and I guess 80% of them just turn around and buy three ETFs, right? Or five or seven.
It’s, it’s not really, and then they charge one or 2% of your portfolio. So I think the cat’s gotta be out of the back with that kind of a model for, uh, for our generation. And I think you’re kind of seeing that already. Cap I think, did a survey. This came out last week. Where, um, as part of the Great Wealth Transfer, which is these a hundred trillions of dollars being passed from, mainly from baby boomers to mainly millennials, um, they asked them, do you intend to keep your parents financial advisor?
81% said, no, we’re gonna file them. So they will be, I mean, if you, if you just do that math simply, there should be somewhere between. 70 to 90 trillion apol that might change hands over the next, um, decade plus. And, and, and I think with these kind of AI evolution, you can see how an AI can actually be really great financial advisor.
True. And I, I’m gonna sound like the ultimate AI bull now, which actually normally I’m not, I’m normally most skeptical and all this stuff, but the reality, the situation is it can keep you abreast of market updates very well. Well, it can get to know you. Probably better than a financial advisor. The average age of financial advisor, by the way, today is 60 years old.
So I think if you’re a 22-year-old person, you’d rather be texting with an AI than with your financial advisor. And if you’re, the more you’re texting, the better it gets to know you. So it’s just a matter of what is the engagement rate. The engagement rate with a financial advisor is probably a quarterly meeting, so four times a year the engagement grade with a an AI and a mobile investing app.
Four times a day. Right? So it’s just like, so, so the know-how about you is gonna compound to levels that, and, and then with perfect recall as well, right? Which obviously human beings don’t have. And then the final thing is, do you like it? And that’s this funny thing where like, well, an AI can take on any personality you want to like bacteria, a question of like asking what animal and AI is, and maybe it’ll say chameleon because it can literally be anything if it’s smart enough to think like that.
But um. So, yeah, I, I think there’s a huge, there’s gonna be huge movement there as well. Um, now in terms of time horizon, because you mentioned kind of like just don’t ask questions and, and, and hold for five years and stuff like that. I think that’s maybe the third kind of category of where the TikTok generation is different and where it might be a little more challenged, just like the feedback loop.
Maybe it’s expected to be quicker than with previous generations. I think retail generally, by the way, are quite good at holding. Like since the April 2nd kind of tariffs, uh, we saw, uh, 80% of people buying on public. So people are generally like to buy the dip and they like to hold when they do. Um, now I think if we were to look at the younger part of our clientele.
Maybe we’d see that they are a little bit more into the fast kind of feedback loop, and that can create the risk of selling too early. And, but that’s again, where I think that there are ways to kind of design out of that. Um, and this gentech brokerage thing we talked about is one part of it where instead of. Waiting for five years doing nothing like keep you informed every week, every day, every month. This is what happens to your portfolio. This stock did well, this other stock did well. This is the outlook for that. And so just like that is also a feedback loop. Like a feedback loop can be unrealized, gain some profit.
It doesn’t always have to be, you know, uh, just sitting there and looking at a stock and being like, oh, now I’m up, you know, 20% I’m gonna sell, or down 20% I’m gonna sell. Right. It can actually instruct kind of people in thinking more long term, how they build out their portfolios all the time.
[00:46:34] Krys: One of the reasons Luke and I. Decided to make this podcast is because between of us, we have whatever, 40 years combined. And that means we’ve made all the mistakes I’ve made most of them
or so it seems like that. But you know, those are the places where you really learn the most because they hurt so bad, they hurt so damn bad, especially when money’s on the line.
Uh, two part question for you. What do you think is the biggest mistake older? Investors are making that, the younger generation might say, oh, you know, like this, this isn’t what, what it looks like. You might wanna rethink this. And then part two is, uh, if you’d be open sharing, you know, a, a big mistake you made in how you were thinking about public or this whole industry in what
you learned from it.
[00:47:25] Jannick: Yeah. So I think in the first question, I don’t know if, if generally older people, I mean, it’s all about the time horizon, right? So if, which is not a way of saying when do you need the money? I. That’s really actually, people say time horizon and let’s just distill it down. It’s all about when do you need the money, right?
You’re putting money inside to invest, when do you wanna spend it? Right? Or do you never wanna spend it? And that’s the first question because if you’re 55 and you’re retiring at 60, you’re planning, then you’ve got five years, then taking market risk, like markets tend to go up over time. I don’t think there’s been a 10 year period where the market hasn’t gone up, but.
There has been a five year period where it hasn’t gone up. And so if you only have five years left and you’re investing a new pool of capital right now, taking risk was risk of stocks and crypto. Um, yeah, that can be challenging. That’s where bonds play a bigger play a role, right? Where you can say, okay, I’ll just take kind of the coupon payments instead.
And, and obviously they are much de-risk and if you do treasury bonds, um, treasury bonds I think is the only thing that we’re actually allowed to see is the. Is, uh, is, uh, the least risky investment that, that you can make obviously, because you’re living money to the US government. So I think they stay away typically from some of these higher risk stocks, like the storage stocks we talk about, like the Teslas, the Palantier, et cetera.
But I think they do that for good reason now. It ends up being a mistake historically when you look at the numbers today, but I still think that they’d make that same decision again five years ago, because in order to go into. A penalty, for example, which frankly five years ago could have gone both ways.
Um, you know, it, it wasn’t, it wasn’t clear to everyone that that was gonna be part of the s and p 500, right? So I think younger people can take more risk, and I think they do. So I would say the mistake is probably when younger people don’t take enough equity risk. So when you do the opposite, right? So when, when old people take too much crypto or equity risk.
They need the money. In a few years, that’s typically a mistake. And then when younger people go all in bonds or all in cash, like we’ve seen a lot of people get scared and move to cash because you can get 4%. And we see the public, we offer, I think still the industry leading kind of a P wine or high yield cash account, and we see a lot of money moving into that. And, you know, it’s great. It’s better than nothing, but I’m also like, when a 20-year-old puts, you know, 10 20 k in their high yield cash account, I’m like, okay, so, so do you not like where the market’s at right now? Like, how are you thinking about this? Because when you’re trying to be too suboptimal, too much like, oh, I wanna buy at a s and PPE ratio of 24 instead of 25.
Like if you’re 20, that doesn’t matter at all. None of that matters. The only thing that matters is. buy and hold, and whenever you’ve got money, like trying to basically time the load too aggressively. I’ve made these mistakes myself, by the way. I’ve had like some times where I had like a limit order. I, even did it in April where I had a limit order on Nvidia on like a hundred.
And as everyone knows, like a hundred is like perfectly round numbers. So there’s like a, there’s like a support level there. And so it got to like 101 and then I didn’t hit it and I was like, I should have just bought the market order at 105. Like stop being greedy when you’re investing long term about this stuff.
Right? And that’s a little bit sometimes where. I’m both a trader and an investor. I kind of like to do both part of my portfolio and risk for long term. And part of it I speak it a little bit more short term. Um, but if you’re just a long-term investor, don’t get too caught up in, in actually all the metrics, I would say.
I think that’s a mistake that people make sometimes and just like. Buy and hold for the long term. And, and really what’s much more important is that you have the discipline to put money aside, to put in the markets. That’s way more important that you focus on that, I think, versus getting in at just at the right time.
Because if you’re 20 years old, you’re gonna be investing every year for the next 30 years of your life. So you will end up with an average price over time. And that’s just, and, and by the way, that’s a great thing, right? If you run the model on that, you’ll see that that compounds incredibly well over time.
[00:51:45] Luke: It’s, it’s fascinating the amount of data you must have on user behaviors and like some of the metrics you were telling us about just in the last hour, like where people are spending their attention, how much of certain bits of data they’re reading, and then what their. Acting on. So this is a really, must be a really, really fascinating space to be like in your data room, looking at like the behaviors because we, you said all the, you said all the right things that we are totally aligned with around good, solid investing behaviors.
But you insight Yannick is backed up by fact. So, um, I’m glad to hear you’re endorsing like the
the long term approach that we try and endorse on
[00:52:23] Jannick: I mean, the truth is I I love this company. I love this job, and I think I consider it a privilege to be in this position where you get to see all that data and with that privilege, I guess it’s some sense of responsibility of, okay, but so, so we have all this, uh, we have sort of a unique point of view.
How do we use that unique point of view to build more newer, better products all the time? That can keep getting people closer to their goals. Right. And I think that really is just what I’m gonna be doing until the end of time. Right. And that’s really, I think, what it means to be a founder, product builder, entrepreneur, whatever you want to call it.
But like that’s the key thing. And just keep iterating in that loop and then the results there will compound as well, just like your portfolio tends to do in the market.
[00:53:12] Luke: Fantastic. Well, you, you’re clearly making, um, public a better platform for yourselves, but it sounds like you’re hoping the world invest better too. A huge thanks on behalf of our audience to you and hopefully, and if you’re not a public.com customer, unfortunately it’s not open to me ’cause I’m in the uk, but if you’re in the US do go check out public.com
[00:53:31] Jannick: Absolutely. There is one new app we have actually called, so the the Alpha app, the AI app we spun out, which is almost like a. It’s basically like a, just a watch list like apple stocks with AI superpower. So if you go to better watch list.com, uh, anywhere you in the world, you can actually, uh, give alpha a shot if you’re curious.
[00:53:49] Luke: I, I’ll definitely check that out. Will I get like Margot Robbie in a
bathtub explaining, uh, financial concepts to me on
[00:53:54] Jannick: no, you’ll not. No, you’ll not. But you can take a screenshot of your Apple stocks or wherever your watch list and upload it, and it’ll automatically follow all the stocks figure. So not, not quite the same, but.
[00:54:06] Krys: Sweet spoken like a true dolphin. You earned your fins, your flippers.
[00:54:11] Jannick: Thank you. Thank you.
[00:54:14] Luke: That was a fantastic conversation. Janik, thank you so much for, uh, sharing your time with Wall Street Wildlife listeners.
[00:54:19] Jannick: Of course. Was super fun.
[00:54:21] Krys: All right.
