Why Canada’s Trading Market is Ready for Disruption with Michael Arbus of moomoo Canada

Speaker A: If you sit down and say I want to model out what I'm going to take home if I'm successful over the next few years, can I live my life off of this? How long until this business can support a sustainable wage for me as the leader of IT or as the investor in it? And if you do that math, most acquisitions or most startups do not work and you can save yourself a lot of time if you do that. Just that one motion up front, model out what you're going to make and see if you can actually pay for a life. If you can do that up front, you will save yourself years. Years and years and years.

Speaker B: Welcome back to Tank Talks. I'm your host Matt Cohen, founder and Managing Partner of Ripple Ventures and today we are joined by a person whom I've known for a very long time who actually helped me get my very first job in finance. We are excited to be chatting with Michael Arbus, CEO of Moomoo Canada. Michael gave me my first real shot in business years ago as a young co op student on the RBC Capital Markets trading floor and spent years on the institutional side at major Bay street and Wall street desk like rbc, td, UBS and Merrill lynch, covering global hedge funds, M and A event driven situations and mining and energy stocks. He later made the leap into entrepreneurship, turning around industrial businesses in Brazil and scrap metal companies in Canada before going deep into crypto as an early leader at Bitbuy, which he helped scale the company from nothing into a regulated marketplace before exiting to WonderFi. Today Michael now leads Mumu Canada as a subsidiary of the global financial platform for FUTU holdings, focused on tools and community for self directed retail traders. In this conversation, Michael shares what it's actually like to move from massive institutional trading floors to building and exiting fintech businesses, including how he handled the imposter syndrome that comes with those big pivots. The real lessons from scaling a crypto platform under regulatory pressure to a successful exit in just under two years, and why he believes that AI and agentic tools are about to fundamentally change how everyday retail investors should approach today's public markets. We also get his unfiltered read on the current state of retail trading in Canada and how investors should be leveraging AI tools when trading in today's markets. If you're someone who is considering a

Speaker C: big career pivot from a corporate role

Speaker B: into a startup, or just curious about what it really takes to build and scale a fintech in Canada, this episode's for you. Now let's jump into the Tank for this week's episode with Michael Arbus.

Speaker C: Michael Arbus, thanks for joining us in the tank today. But today we're not in the tank, we're in the lovely Moomoo Yorkville Toronto offices.

Speaker A: We're so glad to have you here.

Speaker C: I'm super excited to do this. But before we start, Michael, you and I have known each other for a very long time and I want to start off by saying thank you. Thank you to you for giving me the shot to go into finance in the first place. I started my career at RBC Capital Markets because of you. As a co op student. They thought I was an MBA grad, but little did they know you were

Speaker A: smarter than MBA grads.

Speaker C: I was smarter than MBA grads and I was a co op student because of you. You picked me up when I was and gave me a kick in the ass when I needed lifting up to think I can compete in that world. And I'm still in finance today because of you.

Speaker A: So that's so kind Matt, thank you

Speaker C: very much for that. But in all seriousness, but you were

Speaker A: the best hire we ever had.

Speaker C: In all seriousness, I appreciate that too. But you know, in all seriousness, you did a bit of a tour duty around Bay street and Wall street. You spent your time on many trading desk, you worked with some of the greatest hedge fund investors in the world. Take us back a little bit into the day of Michael Arbus working on the biggest trading floor in the World at UBS Greenwich, Connecticut. Size of 3 football fields I believe. Just so our listene who are maybe 20, 30 years younger to understand what it was like being in that room.

Speaker A: That room was um, basically a casino with pumped oxygen and insanity. As you know from your background too, a, uh, typical day would involve waking up at 5:15 in the morning, newspapers delivered to your house, read all three, get to the office in your head, you filled out uh, every piece of content that you could possibly think of that was relevant. You'd show up to your desk and you would start writing and reading and writing and reading. And then all of a sudden the morning meeting starts and that's seven o' clock and that was serious meeting. There was no room for nonsense. And you would show up and you'd be surrounded by some of the smartest people that had just done all the similar reading and the experts. And we would go around the table for about 45 minutes again sharpening what was happening every single day, every minute until the point you got back to your desk right around 8 o' clock and at that point the chaos almost had started. You would produce content after content. You would think, what's actionable today? What's relevant? Why is someone gonna pick up my phone call today? And you would write and sen. And write and send. And then you would hit the phones next after you distributed to your large and growing list. And it was a constant fight. Then you'd fight to get the attention of the client on the line and say, I've sent you something, you need to see this. This is Michael, um, Arbus calling from Name the Broker.

Speaker C: And then the other saying was if they're not on the phone with you, they're on the phone with your competitor. So make sure you have them on the phone.

Speaker A: It was a grind. It was a grind. And you've got the bags under your eyes, although I can't see them, as do I, from that chapter. And then the real action started. After you'd done all your morning communic, you would, then the market would open and the bell would ring and that's when the true chaos would start. And on a floor that size, or even any of the large Canadian floors, like the RBC floor, the TD floor, UBS Canada floors, they were all the same level of insanity. It was trying to monetize all the action. And I used to think about it as, there's multiple funnels of situations happening all day, every day. You start at the top with the news, you start in the middle with what's actionable today. Three is what, uh, do I know about the company historically, the valuation, the metrics, who cares, cares about it and what have people said in the past? And finally it all gets down to do I execute today and do I execute with the firm that we were working at at the time? And then that funnel keeps resetting over and over and over and over again all day until you, you know, you would, you would have to get up if you have to go to the bathroom in these days, as you recall, you'd have to run with your headset on.

Speaker C: And sometimes you forgot to put on m Mute.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And then you sometimes forgot to zip up at the end of the day and uh, and you throw out your pants every few months. But you'd get back to your desk and then finally four o', clock, you would take a breath and your throat was sore and your legs were throbbing. You were sitting or standing and yelling all day. And then the investment bankers would walk in and say, new issue time. Let's sell some new issue time to

Speaker C: refund on a bot deal.

Speaker A: Yep. No problem. Get in here. We're going to fill your head with just at the end of the day to make sure that your brain still functions. We're going to fill your head with two new situations and you're going to go out and call everyone again and go through that same routine. And then you finally after would go to the bar and you would, you know, reset with everyone else doing the exact same thing.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: And then you would repeat that every single day over and over and over again. And that was the job back in the day.

Speaker C: It was unbelievable to think that you would do that on repeat for as long as you did it. For as long as I did it for. Uh, and there's a lot of scar tissue there, I think for a lot of us. Some ptsd.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker C: Are there any trade specific moments during that time? I know there's one for me that stands out very well and you were involved in as well. But is there one that moment that you remember very vividly that you still have a bit of flashbacks on?

Speaker A: Uh, absolutely. And it's actually the reason why I pivoted out of the industry. So it was towards the tail end of my stint. And as you know, we covered hedge funds. And so our job was to not just call and say, here's the fundamental story of what everyone else wants to hear today. For a long only investor, we would call and we would have to produce our own research our own content, talk about stocks in a different way, maybe compare the capital stack differently, you know, than simple buy. And so there was this one situation, and for many years I did merger arbitrage. So every time a merger was announced, you'd have to quickly come to a view and you quickly have to see if you had any edge and talk about the probability of a transaction closing and then make sure you called the right investor base. But there was this one situation back at around the time of the financial crisis. For those of your listeners that were alive in 2000 and involved on large trading floors, it was a complete chaotic time in life. And compounded with the financial crisis brewing. Ahead of it was the LBO cycle, if you recall. So in Canada, for reference, there were two major transactions that were, let's say

Speaker C: the ticker, um, on the count of three, one.

Speaker A: Wait, wait, wait. What for the one that is my favorite trade or the one that give

Speaker C: you the most scar tissue? Okay, one, two, three.

Speaker A: B.C. i'd high five. You vote.

Speaker C: Where?

Speaker A: I guess that's not even the trade that I'm talking about, but that was the one that changed a lot of lives in the LBO cycle. Credit was available for a reasonable price and uh, going private was thematic at the time. And so there was one trade which involved some the Canadian pension funds as well and it was Tech Kamenko's acquisition of Ford and Coal.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker A: Okay, so that acquisition closed one month after the financial crisis, I think it was In November of 2008, don't quote me on that. But it was one of the largest transactions where the pension fund that held a controlling interest in the target which was fording had decided they were going to hold strong to their pricing and Tech Kamenko had to go out and raise $13 billion. It was some crazy number and at the time it completely levered up the company. Financial crisis happens coincides with commodity prices and demand destruction. So you saw a collapse of the coal sector of all steel production and everything else was falling apart. But the deal still closed. The BCE deal a couple months later I think if I have my timeline right, did not close. But at the time of the forwarding close they had a debt stack as well that completely tanked and the equity fell to I think an all time low around $3.40, something like that from a stock that used to trade around fibs. So I was asked to go to New York City to one of the largest HED funds and without naming them, I'll just say for reference, like they had a founder and the key decision maker would sit elevated in a bulletproof glassed area who would have all of his traders calling into him. It was. And they outperformed firm and they still do today. That fund brought us down for a meeting and I was sitting there with eight members of the Tech Kaminko team and the purpose of the meeting was to do a little bit of a roadshow and say, hey, take an interest in the stock. I've brought some leadership with you to take a look. The team went into this meeting and I sat there in the room from this hedge fund were their coal analysts. They're fundamental analysts, they're technical analysts, they're commodity traders. Basically something you would never see in Canada. In Canada we have funds that are, you know, multiple billion dollars in size with two fund managers.

Speaker C: Generalists.

Speaker A: Generalists, exactly. Large fund guys that are great people. But this is what made me want to leave the industry because I realized I couldn't compete after this and that the advice I was providing was maybe not as relevant as I thought it was. So on tech forwarding, uh, I went to this meeting and we were sitting There and we reviewed everything about the situation. Why did you do an acquisition if you're going to over lever yourself? And why did you still close at the depths of a financial crisis? And the, I believe it was like the head of a sales distribution person told a story which was general public information at the time, said well we did a trip to China that was well televised and there was press releases and we visited a uh, steel plant. And the steel plant required coal that had, I think it was 32 specific. And we realized that they required a certain number of tons a year and that we were the only mining company in the world that could actually deliver it. And then we went and saw seven more all under construction on the China coast. And when they did the math quickly, this is my understanding of what the hedge fund had calculated is in order to sustain the volume of coal that was required for all of those steel plants in production, you would have to have five fordings. It was some or five tech commingos at that time. The meeting ended, I didn't realize what I had heard and I walked out and they said thank you for the meeting. They had a caucus together. And as I was going into the taxi, I may be exaggerating a little bit. I think I got a $100 million order. We filled that stock probably $3 to $4. It was somewhere in there at the all time lows. Fast forward to year end and I think the stock closed out the year. 30, $32. So they really outperformed. Uh, it had nothing to do with the CFA financial engineering. It had to do with their brain and judgment as a group. And that's when I realized that as an advisor it was time for me to hang up my blades as they say. Yeah.

Speaker C: But you also realize that like the people in the arena making the decisions also had a much deeper understanding on just the operating businesses that you were recommending as uh, stocks.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: And I think that's a big difference between like investing in businesses versus investing in stocks. And we're going to get to that because there's sometimes there's good investments, bad businesses and bad businesses. Great stocks.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, right.

Speaker C: And ah, that's something you don't realize until much later on in your career.

Speaker A: It eliminates a whole lot of fundamental analysis practices.

Speaker C: It does. And so now I want to talk about how you switch gears completely. You took time off from Bay street and Wall Street. What did you do and how did you find yourself in an operating business in oil and then scrap metal?

Speaker A: Yes. So, well, I could Tell a little story. I had gone through multiple cycles. Remember we had the collapse of the income trust sector. Like on October 31st. I was actually an investment banker at a tech specialty boutique through 1990, 2000 crash. And then we had the LBO crash, the financial crisis. And I played it out to the end to see the recovery. But then I was sitting there and I got a call from a, uh, client who said, there's an oil company in Southern Brazil that's just been ceded by one of the world's largest investors and we need a CEO. Can you go to Brazil to meet them? And I was working at a brokerage firm at the time. And I remember calling my wife, I was about to have my first kid. And I said, hon, I'm thinking about accepting an opportunity to get off the street, to get away from the paychecks, which were okay back then. Cause we were grinders. And she gave the green light, probably reluctantly is my guess. I think the stat I'd seen is that a child won't remember their first three years in any event. So you're okay not being available. And I got on a plane and there I was in Southern Brazil. And uh, what I found really interesting about that was, you know, you're meeting people in suits and ties in another country and you spend time with their families. You go out at night, very similar to the environment on Bay street and Wall Street. You're talking, you're understanding things, you're quickly absorbing everything that you possibly can about what's important to them and a transaction in the story. And from there you try to formalize in your head, how am I going to create value from what I heard down here? And then you also realize that the skill set that many of us acquired in finance is actually a skill set that most early stage people, whether it be mining, whether it be in tech, whether it be in any operating business, which I'm sure we'll get to. I've, uh, operated a few. That skill set of taking information and processing it quickly down the funnel to get to an actionable item and then making action happen. That's really what I think you learn quick right back to those morning meetings. If you say the wrong thing and waste your words, you're out and you're no longer relevant.

Speaker C: You don't see at the table, those are the people standing at the back walls.

Speaker A: That's right, get on top and they'll be very direct about it.

Speaker C: Right. There's only 20 seats maybe to sit at. And you gotta be making sure you

Speaker A: Add value and someone will throw something at you if you don't. Absolutely.

Speaker C: But you ended up taking on a pretty big operating role into the crypto space. I think. What made you even want to get into the crypto space at the time because you hadn't really been exposed to it I think until this moment.

Speaker A: Right. Well after running the oil company, Arab Spring happened and it collapsed and it didn't work out. So I was at home and I was looking at what to do with my time and I ended up actually partnering uh, with a true operator and we ended up buying an industrial recycling facility in southwestern Ontario. All of a sudden I was running a unionized workforce with uh, the largest independent trucking fleet. I think we had six or locations at the time. And we uh, were losing lots of money and we bought it with a plan. And our plan was to eliminate losses, to zero, liquidate all the assets and then salvage what we can, sell the land. And by the time we got there, within six months of just being kind and working through every problem with an Excel sheet, every decision based on a numerical calculation, whether it be right or wrong, the fire started to get put out, then we started to make money and then the business started to thrive. And then I turned into growth mode, which is something that a lot of people that worked in finance in a high paced environment know how to do. So when that started to work out a little bit, eventually I was able to use Excel to separate into two businesses, sell half, take the proceeds, acquire the land, close down non profitable sites and then I had a great, you know, medium sized business with trucking and recycling. I had a mechanic shop that uh, we were servicing like material handlers and heavy equipment trucking. And I had never done any of that before. I couldn't tell you what, now I can drive down the highway and point out trucks and tell you all about it. But back then I knew nothing. And it was the same level of intensity. Actually one thing I wanted to say was, you know, when you're sitting alone in that room as an entrepreneur, whether it be an oil company, when you get back from Brazil and you're sitting in that chair and the silence is there, or you're sitting alone in your office at your industrial recycling yard and the silence is there, you could choose to think about nothing. When you're there, you could choose to. Or are you wired enough to say, I'm going to create the most stressful day I possibly can for me and let that be my fuel to get out there and try to destroy with Numbers and make great decisions through kindness.

Speaker C: Why do you do that? Why do you do that to yourself all the time?

Speaker A: Why would you not do that? What are you going to do else with it? What are you going to do with your time?

Speaker C: To sit in peace and quiet.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Play guitar.

Speaker A: I think there'll be time for that. With longevity science kicking in and to 200 years.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: But the time is not now. In the final chapter of work, you

Speaker C: want to go and grind it out. Thompson Metals is the company we're talking about, I believe.

Speaker A: Yes. And I was going to pivot that to crypto, actually.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. So talk to us about the exit from Thompson into the pivot to crypto.

Speaker A: Right. So while there, you know, I had a large staff, I think 45 at peak or something like that. And we were all handy. Like people were working all day with their hands and crypto had just become a thing. And I followed it because of course, like my sport, I say this sometimes, my sport was finance. So on my hour and a half drive to the location, I'd be listening to Bloomberg Radio, uh, keeping very. In fact, I'd say I was more current listening to their guest suite than I ever felt. I was back on the old desk days. But you get there and say, something's happening in crypto and I've got time. Where do I fit into this? Where does a middle aged guy that's not. Not technically savvy fit in? So the first thing is I signed up for coding classes at Brain Station, downtown Toronto.

Speaker C: I remember Brain Station. You're doing coding classes in machine learning.

Speaker A: That's right, machine learning. Uh, I think I took CCS and python as well. But I would do that at the end of a day in the scrapyard. I would show up to like an 8 o' clock class. I'd be the oldest person by 15 years. It would all be shopify employees kind of hanging out. And, uh, one story I tell sometimes is I showed up and I'm wearing construction boots that are dirty from the day I haven't showered. And I'm wearing like a, a metal workers like uniform. And I think it was actually the. They said, all right everyone, we're all gonna have our snack. And it's provided by the firm today. And I went to go sit down and no one made room for me. I was pretty. I thought it was cool growing up. Yeah, I was bullied. Matt.

Speaker C: Matt, I'm sorry.

Speaker A: Yeah, I was bullied.

Speaker C: I'm sorry they didn't let you in, but you made a room for yourself.

Speaker A: I did. And we talked a lot about design and screens and you uh, know, logic again that that if you know how to do if then it's all just expansion on if then statements which we all used in finance to do scenario analysis. But you know, at the time I said something's happening in coding and something's happening in crypto. I want to learn and backfill because I think tech is cool. And that was why I did it, you know, a couple years earlier than now leading a fintech where I actually have to use some of those skills. But the transition to crypto was I can buy machines because I had money and cash flow from my business and I can build stuff. So crypto mining was becoming a thing and I know how to uh, at least I believed that I knew how to go raise money to build something big. And some of like hut eights were just starting, you know, data centers. The talk of data center was just beginning. So I went out and I put together a business plan with a former colleague and we went out and we ran a. And we used mining terms and because I was from mining, they were actually remarkably similar. We built a pilot plant and in our pilot plant I had over 100, I think there were S7s, you know, Bitcoin mining machines. And then I would go wait in line for like Canada 1, 2, 3 compute or whatever to buy graphic GPUs and prices were spiking. I hired someone from the University of Waterloo to set up this lab for me. I'd worked with electrical contractors. We built our pilot center and then we went out to say we're mining. I built a crazy financial model. And with that again back to the principles of entrepreneurialism. If you lead with numbers first and you instill confidence and you've thought about all the variables as best you can, you know, same thing as when you're buying a scrap yard when you're doing it talking about a stock properly to a sophisticated hedge fund. This model allowed me to raise $2 million as a uh, they were going to do royalty based financing. They saw the pilot plant, they said we believe in your financial model. Go a 30 megawatt site today. That's a big number. And I found one.

Speaker C: Wow.

Speaker A: That's the crazy part. And it was in Sarnia and it was a Transalta site. I think it still exists. And I was in deep negotiations for a power purchase agreement and we were going to take their off. They burn natural gas and they produce electricity byproduct. We were going to take it and put it into bitcoin mining containers. And then I hired an engineering firm because you needed to have it CSA approved. And I had a mining container set and I was going to transition my knowledge into these containers and set them up in a few field. That was the whole business plan financed, ready to go. And then the crypto winter hit people perfectly. I was all in. I hadn't taken the money. So at this point it was still personally financed with a couple of early stage people. And uh, you actually have to sit back and make a decision and say, am I going to fight something where I can't really control the inputs In a financial model, I had no control over it. I can execute really well, spend really smartly and try to get timing right, but I couldn't control the variables like hash rate or I could control power pricing, which I found a really low cost site for Canada. And with a crypto winter you have to make a decision, say I'm going to spend a decade chasing something I can't control or am I going to liquidate and move on? Had I held through, I probably, you know, wouldn't be, you know, working today. But I didn't. And uh, it was still a great learning experience. But the question about crypto is I was all in from the beginning, 2018, all in with my own capital and time while running a business and, and finally when the metal business sold after restructuring it, I was sitting at home and I got a phone call from a couple of younger guys and there was three founders and one financial person that was involved. And uh, the four of them said, we need somebody to bring. I think they referred to me as a camp counselor at that point, professional camp counselor, which I had done okay, uh, fair, and I enjoy being a camp counselor. But the actual role was a lot more significant. The role was to basically take four really smart people that were all in their own lane making decisions. The business was growing, growing. They owned an exchange, they had an on exchange market maker and then they had an onboarding process, all unregulated at the time.

Speaker C: And I want to talk about the regulation piece because that's come into your life a little bit more frequently as you now are the CEO of moomoo. But how has your involvement in dealing with regulation, navigating compliances, uh, of like regulated markets kind of shaped now how you think about finance versus when you were probably just buying and selling stocks before?

Speaker A: It's a different animal entirely. We never had to face regulators except if there was trouble before. And in Fact in our youth and arrogance, you'd say, uh, ah, uh, you know, what do they know? They don't know the pressures I'm under dealing with clients. But it's much different when you're dealing with a retail public or a B2C, let's say. So in a B2C with retail public, people work really hard for their money. Not to say that institutions don't. Retail people work hard and all they want to do is survive like the rest of us outperform.

Speaker C: Uh, the impacts on the downside are much more significant felt to the person, you're saying than an institution would be.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Ah.

Speaker A: And if you have a moral conscience, which I think is important in dealing with regulators. So, you know, we didn't have to deal with things like trading systems or everything was provided to us. We had Bloomberg terminals that were 20,000. We used to do the math on what does it cost to have me sitting in this seat? How much do I have to make a day to show my boss that, you know, I earned my seat. That was what wired us back in the institutional days. And you know, in the retail land it was, was I've acquired customers who have entrusted us based on paid ads or credibility from seeing our website or a promotion or a feature. Something was, uh, or they wanted to be in crypto and they wanted to find the best platform they could find.

Speaker C: Yeah, we've advertised something that they now want and we have to be honorable and own up to that.

Speaker A: Which is crazy if you think about it. People do respond to an ad and then send their money. So if you're a good person, which not everyone, you know, not all people are good, but if you are one, you feel this sense of accountability. And I personally think that when you have that type of mindset, and that's what I liked about the founders of bitbuy when I went in, they were all good people. They believed in what they were doing and they were kind and trustworthy.

Speaker C: And you wanted to take the high road too. Right. You wanted to do all the right things by the regulators because then in return you would obviously get the value creation from that experience and putting in the groundwork on the regulation side. So what ended up happening? The company, you know, merged and had a good exit and I think was acquired by Robinhood or maybe not yet.

Speaker A: Uh, I think that transaction might move process. I haven't been with the company for

Speaker C: a couple of years. I've been with the company for a couple of years, but during that time working in crypto and A bitbuy. Had you even thought about the traditional finance world of what mumu eventually became for you? Like, how did the opportunity come around

Speaker A: the world of retail crypto investing? What I find, uh, enjoyable about it is it's trading something. So it's bringing your money into a platform, then executing a trade that gets routed to a marketplace of some kind of buyer and seller. Pair off of the marketplace and then there's settlement and then there's custody. Sure. There's nothing terribly innovative about buying and selling crypto other than the instrument, maybe, that you've chosen to speculate on. Fair enough. And when you see that as someone who knows trading, you know, it's, uh, a, it's much fresher look. This has already existed for many, many years. There's a solution for almost everything. You know, the difference in crypto. The tools and suites that they use are a little bit more modern as a tech stack, and there's a little bit more risk as a result, because it's instantaneous in real time, all the time. Plus, we were opening, I think at 1.3 thousand account a day. It was at peak crypto. And you had variability in your cash flow profile that when the market was hot, you're making money. When the market was volatile, you were making money. When the market was stagnant. Things, you're an exchange business, things start to slow a little bit. But, you know, the transition to moomoo, and I think the question was about the regulatory, um, practices. What I liked about that state of the world at the time is Canada put their hands up and said, if you're in crypto, you can't just operate in our country because. Because as regulators, we actually care too. We care. Our job is to deal with the retail public. And some people get offended by that in crypto. And others like myself and my partners at the time, said, well, not only do we have to do this because why would we fight a regulatory body, but let's do it and let's be the best at it and let's be the first. Because if we do that right, we're putting the consumer, we're putting the client first.

Speaker C: Exactly.

Speaker A: And so we sat at home. It was actually like just around the time the pandemic was coming to an end. And writing, uh, documents without the help of an LLM, okay, without ChatGPT and no guidance saying, how do I write an application that's never existed before to regulators, I've never really had to face before. And the overriding principle that you find when you get into this world is if you do the right thing and you try your best to do the right thing, it often is common sense to put that pen to paper. And we were great writers so we wrote hundreds of pages of documents and I'd say when I left the products we, it was trading, custody and staking. And today at Moomoo, in building a platform and we're doing it globally, it hasn't changed all that much.

Speaker C: It's unbelievable. I can't even think about how many pages of regulatory paperwork you actually had to do over your life. But it's, it's crazy because you joined Moomoo in September 2024 I believe.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker C: And uh, for a lot of people they don't maybe know the name Mumu as well as maybe it is known globally. Can you give our listeners an understanding of what Moomoo is? You know, what does it offer and how big of a platform it really is?

Speaker A: It's much bigger then people in Canada would be aware in for example Hong Kong, one of the largest capital centers in the world. Innovation, happening, growth. They're number one. They're number one in Hong Kong. I think the stat was one in every three or one in every two Singaporeans have this app downloaded in Australia we were the most downloaded app last year. We're opening up in two new markets that I'm not sure are public yet. In the United States we have a huge footprint. We're a full self clearing business everywhere using in most markets our own tech that's developed for all of us to share. We're quite collaborative. I'm in multiple CEO chat groups where we talk all the time, share information. On the product side. It's remarkable to be a part of this machine that is prioritizing the client first and constantly doing improvement. It's something that in a smaller business like uh, you know, going back to the Bitbuy days, I started when there was 30 people there and we didn't have a product team, we didn't have a marketing team, we didn't have a data team, we didn't have like a product roadmap. We had had great smart founders that were using their intuition to come up with a plan that worked. And eventually we started stacking our team with all those types of resources. Fast forward to a group that is 4,000 people of which, you know, our product team might have 200, I think plus members on it. We call it R and D, which are mostly full stack developers. That team's really large. And then the culture is all about product data. And that was the biggest transition for me on joining.

Speaker C: Right, so you are a CEO of Moomoo Catalog. Mumu is a, uh, 30 million users globally, something like that. Seven different, like uh, geographies. It's owned by or holding company, Futu Holdings. It's a public company.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker C: You know, massive market cap trades in

Speaker A: the nasdaq, Nasdaq, which is big.

Speaker C: You have a big partnership with Nasdaq. But why is Canada a place that Mumu wants to play? What is the opportunity you see and the team sees in Canada for Moomoo to play?

Speaker A: Yep, Canada, North America generally. The US might have a little bit more competition on this regard, but in Canada we've got the, this, I'll say complacency or loyalty, however you want to look at it. And it's almost indoctrinated into us at birth through, you know, 150 years of brand recognition. Deal with a place where you've got safety and security and you can do it all in one.

Speaker C: Set up your kids R S P at the RBC branch or something like that is just something you had as a kid.

Speaker A: It happens. Uh, taking in rolled pennies with your grandfather to the branch to get 50 cents or a dollar deposit into your account. So it's a part of Canadian culture. And in fact when, you know, when companies like Moomoo decide to enter a marketplace, they'll do not, you know, when companies say they're data rich, MooMoo will sample 1000 interviews. We'll go very far to come up with a view. And what we'd say about Canadians is we are complacent and accepting and we prioritize trust and loyalty over above all the rest of the world has pivoted away from that to say I can trust, I can trust someone who is regulated, who falls to the same regulatory standards as those. So for example, at Moon, we are Ciro registrant, we have the exact same obligations as any incumbent to run our brokerage, to do our regulatory capital daily to report as on the exact same standards the rest of the world. And in fact crypto in Canada is a good example of how people are becoming different generations more trusting of new challenger brands if there's value. And that's where a company like Moomoo stands out significantly. And when they looked at the Canadian marketplace they said, hmm, I hm, don't know if I can break this loyalty pattern, I'm not sure. But what I know is I can provide a product that has not been seen in Canada before.

Speaker C: The Product is unbelievable.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker C: And I have to say this, as a user myself, you introduced me to it probably at the beginning of the year or so and I was blown away right away. Seeing the availability of data, the insights you can derive, the AI trading, you know, system is incredible.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker C: Living on a Bloomberg terminal my whole life like you did, you get used to just things being spoiled. You get spoiled.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: You don't get that in a lot of retail products, especially in fintech. But Moomoo really offers all of the same suite of tools, if not way better, a much more user friendly interface. How's it going? How has the market been receiving this?

Speaker A: Well, first of all, I appreciate that, uh, and I felt the exact same way. It was almost intimidating. It's scary. You open up the product for the first time and you get through some of the nuances that we use in other markets. We give away a lot of promotions, they're all very real. But Canadians aren't used to seeing, seeing there's a catch. Yeah, there's a, you know, so it's got a lot of that that you know, we're trying to Canadianize. But you know, at the same time, why not give away promotions of people that want to try your platform? So, you know, once you get through that wall, you're sitting there on a mobile first app. That's the first thing it is.

Speaker C: Mobile first.

Speaker A: Yes. And I mean we have a great desktop.

Speaker C: I use the desktop app, but it definitely feels more mobile first for me to trade on.

Speaker A: Well, if you think about the amount of information that you need to fit into that small screen, that's impressive. There's a whole bunch of little odds and what I found was I can get lost in it like hitting an eye and all of a sudden it'll expand and it'll tell me about a multi leg option strategy that I'd read about 10 years ago. And it's got examples and then I close it out and all of a sudden I'm, I'm looking at something that you and I might be able to find on a Bloomberg terminal in the past. And now it's a little bit horizontal, right? Oh, in fact I like to lock my screen because then it just blows my mind. But how's it going? I would say that so right now we were one of the fastest growing markets within the FUTU portfolio of groups and we've been live for, you know, about, about two years now. So we're delivering, we have, we're not supposed to quote these numbers directly, but a large Number of active users. So what we've become really is a home for the, the true trader or the trader curious and more, you know, refined as a target audience. Those that are option traders really, really, really love us. And for many that are in the retail public they haven't explored options before because Canada again back to the complacency doesn't have yet. Yet it's always on the come a uh, liquid options market.

Speaker C: Right. Explain what liquid options market it means to people who are not a daily option trader.

Speaker A: Yeah, when a uh, stock trades. You know we've got great stories in Canada to talk about. You know the, our company focuses more on the US where you know the mag 7 type names are heavily traded. We provide exceptional execution for that. There's liquid options there that trade a lot. Whereas in Canada a bid offer spread might be very wide. So if you for example wanted to go long a situation long a call out option and you bought it and you wanted to change your mind and get out of it, you would take a fairly healthy loss.

Speaker C: Uh, just because of the spread, because the spread and execution cost.

Speaker A: There's no one involved. So uh, in the US that's not it at all. In fact it's a retail product and in fact globally. So our expertise globally in all of those markets is that we make option execution really, really easy. For those that are just learning and those that don't want to spend all their time time clicking 100 Things to make one execution and figure out what they're holding in their portfolio in one click. You can do um, an iron condor trade that is a low on the S&P 500 contracts that might yield you 2% in three days. That has a really high Sharpe ratio which basically means it's not for risk taking. It might be a hedge for you, but people don't even know how to use it in Canada because we've never been trained in options because there never was a Canadian market. If I think back historically to what's happened in Canada, most of our savings as Canadians were in Canadian equities. And I think they relate relaxed RP rules back some point in the last 20 years. And I can't remember the date when they said you can now invest abroad. There's no domestic holding mandated. And from that moment forward people started to hold a heavy weighting in US stocks. Most portfolios now, you know, sit more heavily weighted to US than domestic Canadian stocks.

Speaker C: Same thing with institutional investors probably as well in Canada.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And why not? I mean an S&P 500 is, uh, you know, I saw a great parallel saying, if you believe in the singularity, for those that are into AI, an easy way to simply play it is to hold the S&P 500. And I hadn't framed it that way because the world's largest companies will be listed there and the hyperspace, everything's bubbling up into that. Why not just hold.

Speaker C: You've made it almost too easy to actually do some of these things because you're uh, right, turning on the option chain, looking at all the different scenarios you have to model out. It's. You can just talk to the AI inside the moomoo app and get it to actually list out the trades that

Speaker B: you should be doing.

Speaker A: And that's one of our favorite features. We were one of the first to come out with it in Canada. In fact, we were the first AI brokerage in Canada. You can log in and you can ask basket anything. And the best part of it is that it's not like a standard language learning model that goes out to the public and takes publicly available information. We have a huge suite of data that's behind the firewall and our AI feature gives you access to that. When you ask a question, you're getting real, live, paid for data that's responding. So it's a quality uptick relative to what you can get on your own.

Speaker C: I want to talk about AI because it's obviously something front and center for you personally and you vibe code a lot. But also inside the moomoo application. Right. The suite of tools you guys offer is very AI native.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker C: How are you one using AI personally in your day to day life? And how has the firm become AI pelled in its own Right?

Speaker A: Yes. There's a lot I could go into there and I found that I've become the most boring person at dinner parties unless you're into AI.

Speaker C: Okay, I'm into it. So tell me.

Speaker A: Okay. All right, well then we can hang out together after this. So internally in our office and also internationally, there's been a huge push to move to AI or the alternative. And it's not about job loss or savings, it's about efficiency and it's about the culture. Because we are developers first and product people first. It's pushed its way down to operations. So what we'll have in our firm is everyone has, in this case, Claude code and it's an enterprise level version with controls in place, so it ensures that no client data is available. We have crazy access control systems where I have to approve every single user and Everything I approve goes through three other layers of cybersecurity before someone has access to data sets. But we started off by making a large data lake. So everything goes into the lake and then the lake gets created into a series of skills and those skills are available internally to our enterprise users. So that sounds like a lot of.

Speaker C: Tell us, can you share any of the skills that you've created?

Speaker A: I can, generically one that I created yesterday. So I just got back from a conference and I really wanted to understand something called, like what we call the golden process, which is post registration to the point where you find your account. That's our cash register. So we spend a lot of money to get to register and we'll have a large number. And if you follow them through that entire journey to a, uh, funded account, there's lots of different states where people might stop that journey. They might not want to provide a social insurance number. Why did the rate of change on that field change overnight or over the last two weeks? Did we change the screen? I now have access through Claude because the data lake was provided.

Speaker C: What's crazy is you're a CEO, not a product leader. You're not like a data scientist. You're not relying on somebody necessarily to go find this product usage data and then come back to you a couple of weeks later and say, we figured out why they're not rolling through to the next, next stage. You're taking the accountability yourself.

Speaker A: I myself thought it was an area that we should look at. I hear our staff talking about it. I had access to the data, I had a vision on how I wanted to see it, and then I shared it. And now our product team, our integrated marketing team, our operations team that's responsible for account openings or manual reviews, we all have access to the data. And now the coolest part is we can now automate it going forward and everyone can do it.

Speaker C: I would love to talk about your launch of Agentic Investing, letting people bring their own APIs to the system that Moombu provides. Can you talk about that? Because that's really cool.

Speaker A: Yes. So for those of your followers that use OpenClaw or anything that's Agentic, any kind of workspace, the key is to add skills. And the problem is that there's a lot of skills that are unvetted out there and you have to be careful. So we're, uh, a regulated financial institution, globally and large. We quickly came out of the gate and said, we've got all this data that we're using to help people do Analysis within our app, which is awesome. So use that. But if you really want to build your own crazy way of looking at the market, we'll give you that data in the form of multiple skills. And we came out of the gate with that internationally in the last month, maybe even longer. And it's really simple. So I was, uh, off to a conference last week and I had to set up, um, my own trading instance. And I wanted to see how this works because I'm going to talk on the subject. And the steps are go to our website where the skills are located, copy them, paste them into your agent. Uh, and it might be a Claude code agent. So it would be something that you're.

Speaker C: Agent builder.

Speaker A: Yeah, Agent builder. Type please expand on these skills and install them for me.

Speaker C: All of them?

Speaker A: All of them. Wow. They install. It takes a few minutes. And then we put another piece of middleware Software. It's called OpenD. But what it does is it provides that layer of security and trust. So we've given you skills now that you can then start typing things like, make me a screen that has access to my account to show my account information in a paper trade environment. Um, I want to see. One of the coolest features, for me at least was algorithmic trading. You know, it used to be that you had to drag and drop. If this happens, do this for me. I can now type a statement or actually talk a statement. Say, if the market drops 10% in a day and five names from my watch list are down 15% and the option volatility spikes, I would like to do a protective put position. Please build me an algorithm that follows for that on those names and it'll take a minute and it's there. And then you can click back test and it'll tell you your historic performance.

Speaker C: It takes the tree branch method of doing the you, if, if then statements on the quant trading models that people used to build. And you're literally just talking natural language to building it.

Speaker A: And you're testing your back, testing it, and then you're seeing its performance and then you can turn it on in an environment where, you know, with controls you can say, like on mine, I put, I would like to max. You know, I'll make up a number, $500 a day maximum, up to $5,000 in total. And I said make minimum and maximums.

Speaker C: Where does this go from here? You just talked about at the beginning how, you know, we in Canada are very pretty used to sort of the ways that we're brought up with our Canadian Banks giving us access to like the early student bank accounts that roll into direct brokers. If you do the lifetime value of a, uh, Canadian bank customer, it's pretty good tactile tv. But with these types of tools and these types of, you know, younger generation looking to build and take control of their own destiny. Where do you think this leads us in the next five to 10 years for platforms like Moomoo to actually become able to usurp the old stalwarts of the Canadian banking ecosystem?

Speaker A: Yeah, we talk about this a lot. So who is our target audience? Are we after all, Canadian Canadians? For people that need exceptional banking with a, uh, multi million dollar portfolio, that want a ladder gics, we're probably not the place for them. They can open up an account and they can, you know, put some funds in and they can use us for news, for searching, for getting investment ideas and hopefully they'll eventually learn to trade with us. But we're really catered for the generation that cares about their money more. And you know, I think if you play out the AI movement and job loss potential and like the shift in what's happening in the world and said money is a more val commodity than ever, what you got now is what you're going to have to live with. There's some people that believe that if that's the case, you need to outperform, uh, everyone best you can. Why would you not dedicate time if you're going to have more time to something that not only makes you smarter, makes you more geopolitically involved, what's happening in the world and then translate that into outperformance, uh, for yourself. You can do that now today with our app and if you don't know how to do it, we make it so easy. We've got things like the Moomoo Academy in this space that we're in today. We run conferences all the time. We have retail locations where we're doing that live in person and we broadcast those. But also in the app you can learn any. If you've never bought a stock before, you can learn very quickly how to do that, how to sell stocks, how to trade options, how to see the market, how to see the world, all from 30 million people.

Speaker C: And you're really putting in that with Canada's top trader initiative. Talk to us about that. With NASDAQs and partnerships. You guys have real money behind this. It's not just paper money. It's not just like student trading competition. This is real dollars putting behind helping create Canada's Next top Trader.

Speaker A: We've got this really cool contest happening right now. So it's for a million dollars, and we're giving it away. It's the largest prize, 100,000. So you should enroll. If you're a client, you can enroll. And if you're not a client, you can also enroll. I would love it. If you want, by the way, test

Speaker C: the old test skills. See if I still got it. Yeah, you do. I bet. Okay.

Speaker A: But it's real money. We've got, uh, not only a hundred thousand for the top winner, we've got a whole bunch of other prizes. Um, you know, there's 15,000. There's a whole bunch of $1,000 prizes. And, you know, the purpose of it is we're so proud of what we do. And we really do believe, like, as a mission statement, that people are smart and we will help them get smarter with respect to their investments, that they should participate. And the winners actually do get with our partnership with nasdaq, who loves working with companies like us, because we're really pushing the boundaries on trade to bring the retail public into the game. That's existed for a long time in a systematic way. But we're giving out gold certificates, a gold plate in.

Speaker C: I like that.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker C: I mean, you mentioned we're in this beautiful cafe here, downtown Toronto. You know, with a lot of activity on the streets here, you don't see a lot of trading software applications open up, physical locations. Talk to us about why you decided to open up a place like this and what is the benefit to the community with, uh, you know, academies, you know, teaching skills and things like that? What's the purpose of it?

Speaker A: We want people to come here. It's three stories. It's right in the heart of Bloor Street. You know, it stands out. And we've got people in here on staff and we've got, you know, like, what's behind you. That's, uh, a live demo of our product. You can come in and play around. If you wanted to come in and really just see someone, live and talk to them and say this exists because you're used to that in Canada. That's what we're here for. You know, we spend a lot to be here. And we're actually expanding the strategy. We're moving a little bit north out of Toronto to CF Markville, which is a new location that's opening up in, I think, Q3, Q4. Uh, and we were just on the west coast, Vancouver, looking at some other places where it's an opportunity for people to come host an event for, you know, people that are key opinion leaders, for people that are doing podcasts that people that really just want to talk about investing, AI or anything interesting. Come use our space because it's a community for people to come in and talk about what's really important, which is making money for yourself. It's a really simple mission. We really just want people to learn and get there and do better for themselves. And that's what this tool is about.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's an amazing space. We are very grateful to you for, uh, us hosting many events here. Thank you for offering it to us. You know, Michael, you've been on a journey, as I mentioned, starting your career in Bay street and Wall street, being around some of the biggest investors in the world, starting in small family businesses, taking over CEO crypt, crypto companies. For our younger founders listening to this conversation, what advice would you give to them if you had to go back to your younger self, say 20 years or so ago? You know, giving them the idea of like, it's okay to have imposter syndrome, or it's okay to learn new skills, you know, when you're not so young anymore and try new things, but also realizing your own limitations. What advice would you give to that younger self?

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, I mean, this took a, uh, little bit to learn in entrepreneurialism for me, but if you don't speak the language of finance, it's going to be really hard for you to raise money and do anything with science, substance, you know, so you need to speak finance well enough to attract money to do scenario analysis and to think through what you're about to spend your time on. So in between some of these opportunities, I would sit at home and say, should I buy this company with my partnership group? And the math that I learned from my investment banking days that just got solidified then was if you can't come to a number for your own personal take home pay in the next few years, you know, so if, let's say you're 100% successful on your model and your venture is going really well, if in two or three years you can't make a salary to go home and support your family, it might not be worth it. And most people say, I've got the idea, I'm going to tell my friends, I'm going to write it down, it's big, it's thematic, it's topical, I can raise a little bit of money on it. But if you're successful, are you going to be able to Pay your bills on your journey to your grand exit. And I think that's the mistake that a lot of founders make is that they think because they've got the grand story down and they've caught the wave at the right time and they've got support from people that it means that it's a good idea. And then they start it's a self fulfilling prophecy where it keeps spiraling and then it becomes embarrassing to admit that it doesn't work. So if you just pause before you go out to the public and you've convinced yourself that this is the best idea of all time, if you sit down and say, I want to model out what I'm going to take home if I'm successful over the next few years, years, can I live my life off of this? How long until this business can support a sustainable wage for me as the leader of it or as the investor in it? And if you do that math, most acquisitions or most startups do not work. And you can save yourself a lot of time if you do that. Just that one motion up front. Model out what you're going to make and see if you can actually pay for a life. If you can do that up front, you will save yourself years and years.

Speaker C: Years of stress too, I think is what you're saying. If you can calculate the minimum viable budget you need to survive and be continue building that grand vision. That's good. Yeah, right. Don't go in blinded and not think like, oh, that grand vision will pay for it, but in 10 years. And I'm just gonna have to struggle for nine of them. Yeah.

Speaker A: Which is a terribly long time. You've got, you know, what, 10 bullets in your life that you can use. And you know, I like to think about things in chapters of, you know, three to five years, let's say, you know, if you're gonna waste three to five year years on something because it felt good or it sounded good, then you haven't done enough work at the start. And I suggest way more work.

Speaker C: That's great advice. You know, before we wrap up, uh, we always ask our guests for their fast favorite. So I'm going to put you in the hot seat now and ask you for yours. Okay. All right, so first off, your favorite podcast.

Speaker A: I'm on it right now. I've been watching it for years and I finally made it on the show.

Speaker C: Come on, give me another one. Do you listen to any of them?

Speaker A: I listen to Moonshots.

Speaker C: Moonshots, That's a good one.

Speaker A: Not related to Moomoo though not related to Moomoo Moonshots. It gives me a lot of craziness, um, about the Singularity and what's coming in the next few days.

Speaker C: Sounds like it. How about your favorite newsletter or blog?

Speaker A: I've been a lifetime subscriber to something called Stansberry and Associates and they've got a whole bunch of X hedge fund managers that actually talk about equities and option trades all day. But I've actually since not read it as much because Moomoo's got all a lot of the same content, um, minus the recommendations.

Speaker C: Let's put some of that Moomoo blog stuff to work here. You should create the MOO mornings.

Speaker A: Ah, ah.

Speaker C: How about your.

Speaker A: Someone write that down. Someone write that down.

Speaker C: How about your favorite tech gadget?

Speaker A: My favorite tech gadget today. I was going to say my um.

Speaker C: Open Claw.

Speaker A: I have my Open Claw. That one I'm mad at right now because Johnny, my Clawbot has been a little bit irritive lately. But um, you know, I'm still a big fan of. You're not going to maybe appreciate this. The BlackBerry Hub is still something you can use on an Android phone. They don't support it anymore, but it's an efficiency tool that allows me to watch 20 inboxes from everything all at the same time. I brag about it over and over.

Speaker C: So for AI, we actually need to bring that back because if everyone's having disparate conversations across imess and Slack, you know, all these places, LinkedIn messages, we need a hub to collect it all, to be able to have your agent respond back.

Speaker A: If I had an enough money I would buy that from BlackBerry if they would sell it to me.

Speaker C: It's not if anyone's listening at BlackBerry. Michael wants to buy the Hub.

Speaker A: I want to buy the Hub.

Speaker C: All right, Favorite new trend.

Speaker A: I mean I'm going to jump on the bandwagon of AI and agentic and I'm an avid user of it.

Speaker C: You're a Daily Vibe coder?

Speaker A: Daily non stop. I'm putting in two to three hours a day and at least by while

Speaker C: also being an excellent musician, uh, in music. Not as good as your twin brother?

Speaker A: I have a twin brother who plays in a Grateful Dead cover band and he's the Jerry Garcia he's from Phenomenal, but yeah, nice.

Speaker C: How about your favorite book, Metalman?

Speaker A: Um, the story of Mark Rich? I suggest everyone tell people what it's about. Mark Rich was, uh, exiled for being uh, one of the world's largest traders of things that were vice. And it tells the story of how he got caught and eventually received a presidential pardon and was allowed to exist. But it's his whole story of how he built up from being nobody to being one of the largest traders globally, uh, trading weapons when there were rep. It. It's an incredible story of trade and growth.

Speaker C: Got to become a movie one one day.

Speaker A: You think it might be actually.

Speaker C: Okay, last but not least, your favorite life lesson.

Speaker A: I think, uh, that kindness goes a long way, not only in your personal life, but, uh, in the workforce. So something we didn't talk about is I've now scaled two entities, three entities from, you know, under 15 people to 50 to 60 to over 100. And, uh, in the hiring process, what I look for, Everyone is smart. Whether you're sitting in a boardroom in southern Brazil and everyone's in a suit and tie after a long party night, or on Bay Street, Wall street street, in Mumu's office, in bit, wherever you are in a scrapyard. Kindness goes a long way as not only as a leader, but, you know, I think that, uh, the world needs more of it. And whenever you're working with somebody, if you think about it, how can I help that person as best I can in their journey and be kind to them along that journey? It goes a long way.

Speaker C: Yeah. Amazing advice. Thanks so much for everything you've done for me in my career and for what you're doing at Mumo.

Speaker A: Thanks, Mike. It's really been a pleasure watching you grow, man. Thank you.

Speaker B: Hey, everyone, thanks for tuning in to another episode of Tank Talks. We hope you found today's conversation as insightful as we did.

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