Why This Self-Made Billionaire Believes In The Power Of Fintech To Democratize Investing

when we became peak six we put traders on the trading floor and we put on our test was let's never put a trader on a trading floor and see which one wins right because we thought we grew up on a trading floor you must have to do that to really understand what was going on and turns out that they basically had pretty equal returns now we said well but i don't want to pay for an office in a different location paper so if i can just keep them all on a screen at this time in an office in chicago so this is in 1998 right so we've been sort of trying to democratize ourselves and then of course fast forward all the all the robos and everybody that have come along i think that the only problem with this whole idea of democratization that technology is allowing it us to do it is that it's not true democratization until 50 of the people are using the technology that's such a good point so today of our over 20 million clients 29.5 i asked this morning percent are women it's it's okay but not where it should be right and of our crypto clients they're seven percent so it'd be like a country says they're open for you know voting everybody can vote and only 20 or 30 percent that show up are women so i think we're not at the phase where you know the tech is leading the the hearts and minds i think of families people how they're thinking about using and why do you think we're seeing that lag in crypto investing for women right it's now a one trillion dollar market we spoke about this with kathy woods she's a big investor in crypto so she's definitely um not not in that percent of of women non-investors but what do you think the hesitancy is there yeah i think it's not unlike a lot of other things that happen in in the fintech space we we tend to wait until we're comfortable until we have enough information um you know men tend to run in quickly and take the risk early and without full knowledge right we're we're going to do our homework takes us a little longer a little longer but i i think we don't and i know uh maybe i'll pr pre pre-address your you know crypto fad or not yeah yeah um i think crypto's here to stay the problem is we don't know how big crypto is going to be when half the world isn't using it right so who knows how deep how wide the crypto space will ultimately be we went to our our team went to conference in uh a big crypto conference in last may right when colvin sort of was away and there were we had three women there and there were like four women total at the biggest conference all right all last year in crypto so like we there's a we have a long way to go to see where crypto is going and you know i i would i would i would say what you know the other panelists have said before which is if you don't have a wallet just open up wallet right do it do it the right way with the ledger you'll figure it out it's it's awkward technology isn't great the way you do it through somewhere like apex crypto it's easier because if you already have uh let's say you had a sofi account two clicks you're in you can you can be trading crypto some places is easier than others right but and certainly if you've never bought or sold a stock right you should do that tomorrow and it doesn't have to be a lot of dollars remember we have fractional shares today so you can do 100 of amazon even though it's trading much more so we only have 23 minutes and i went over last time so i promised i would question it but i want to quickly touch on the fact that you are a big poker player and you've created an initiative to train one million women in texas hold'em why poker for women how how does it help us get ahead poke so i wasn't a poker player to be clear i've been surrounded by poker players my whole career and i always thought it's just another guy thing wasting time and as it turns out it wasn't and it was really quite brilliant so in the last two years i did learn to play i've learned to play from some professionals and we are teaching women every single day we are we've taught thousands of women so far um you learn strategy you learn to take risk you learn to better understand capital allocation it is a fascinating game we have partnered with some schools from the mba programs we partnered with senior women at law firms who are taking the female lawyers or taking our classes with their clients in teaching those women we are teaching you know morningstar a 7 000 person firm internationally and they're finding all different seniority all different seniorities all different ages coming together networking around this game and the most important thing about it is that you're practicing making decisions and those decisions allow you to build confidence and i will tell you if you go to our fourth lesson and you don't end up in a meeting where you go that was just like that hand of poker you it's fascinating fascinating way to have a tangible way to help you in your everyday work