Modern Brokerage, Real Impact: How Eric Chu is Reengineering Investing for Busy Professionals EP-549

All the AI technology, be it ChatGPT, you know, cloud, what have you, all these, guess what? All these computations were done in data centers, right? All the, you know, the storage, the processing, the computation, and the transmission of all those information are all done in data centers.

Wall Street was built for brokers, not for investors. In this episode, you'll discover how one insider is flipping the script Rebuilding the brokerage model so your wealth works harder, faster, and smarter than ever before. Welcome to Streams to Impact, brought to you by Steve Tucker Capital. I'm your host, Dr. Allen. There comes a moment in every high achiever's journey when success feels less like freedom and more like a system you just can't escape. You've mastered your career, you're earning at the top of your field, Yet your wealth still depends on your time, your focus, and your effort. But what if you could rebuild your financial life the way today's innovators are rebuilding Wall Street, putting control and opportunity back into the hands of professionals like you? If you've ever felt that the traditional system was designed to keep you busy rather than free, this episode is for you. And when you're ready to take the next step beyond trading time for money, I invite you to watch the mini masterclass Beyond the Paycheck: How High-Income Professionals Build Freedom Through Passive Investing. You can access it free at go.steedtucker.com Beyond-paycheck. Once again, that is go.stetucker.com/beyond-paycheck. Now take a deep breath, feel the reins in your hands, and let's ride together into today's conversation. Just a brief disclaimer. All information shared on Streams to Impact is for educational purposes only. It is not to be construed as investment, financial, legal, or tax advice. All investments incur risk. You should not invest if you are not prepared to lose 100% of your investment. Always consult your legal, accounting, and tax advisor before making any investments. What happens when a seasoned Wall Street insider decides the old model no longer serves the modern investor? After 2 decades navigating capital market hedge funds and public company boardrooms, Eric Chu, co-founder and CEO of Trade Desk, saw firsthand how traditional brokerage systems were built for brokers, not for investors. Today, he's rewriting that playbook with Trade Desk, a mobile-first brokerage platform built for today's global professionals. Eric is leading a movement to make investing faster, more transparent, and more aligned with how people actually live and work. From the trade floor to the palm of your hand, Eric is reimagining how busy, successful individuals can invest smarter without sacrificing their time, freedom, or opportunity.

Eric, we're so happy to have you with us here. If you would just start off by just telling us a bit more about yourself and your background and what took you into this new kind of trading that really is more democratic than what it has been in the past. Sure.

Sounds good. Well, thank you very much, Alan, first of all, for inviting me, inviting our firm on this show. Really appreciate the opportunity. My name is Eric Chu. I'm the CEO of Trede Securities. So my background has been on Wall Street for about 20 years. It's kind of an interesting journey on the sell side. I started my career on the sell side, what we call sell side. which is investment banking, that I used to cover a telecommunication industry as equity research analyst for a number of years. And then I also worked on the buy side, which is, in my case, is the hedge fund where we managed a couple of billion dollars in clients' assets for a few years. And then I moved on to the corporate side as the chief compliance— chief investment officer and chief financial officer for a very large joint venture for an Asian data center company for a number of years. And for this, for Trade Securities, really, we started the company 3, 4 years ago, right after COVID. We actually saw the opportunity of investing during COVID years, right? You know, a lot of people had more time to dive into investing. And we saw that there are not that many investment platforms that are well designed for the newer generation of investors, especially for the busy professionals. You know, certain features, certain functions, certain pain points that these people are looking for are just not being offered by more traditional, some of the large, even large sort of investment platforms. That's kind of the origin of the— of Trade As Securities. And I think before, you know, before we dive into the details, I would like to put out a quick disclosure. So Trade As Securities is an SEC-registered broker-dealer or member FINRA and SIPC. You know, the conversation today is not meant for investment recommendation.

Well, thank you for that, Eric. And in this new environment where you are attempting to design a platform that really is more friendly to professionals, more democratic, what are the blind spots that you That you actually saw in traditional markets and what brought about the revelation that you needed to do something different and what brought you to this place in Trade Desk?

Yeah. So I think let me, let me start from sort of the professional, the young and busy professionals, you know, think about them as maybe you're a doctor, maybe a lawyer, maybe an IT professional, maybe a pharmaceutical exec, perspective, right? You have, you know, very decent income, and you have the willingness, right? And then the willingness to build up a financial future for yourself. However, what you don't have is time, right? You're busy building your career at whatever profession you're in, you're busy raising a family, so on and so forth, right? So what you find is a lot of these busy professionals, they don't have time. But they want to be successful. So that's, I think, what we found is the most important pain points for a lot of our clients, our investors. So we designed our platform to address a lot of those concerns. For example, traditionally, if you were working on some of the other traditional platforms, you will find that you have to spend a lot of time doing fundamental research, right? You're digging through SEC documents, you look at companies' news, so on and so forth, right? You are trying to do well, right? You are trying to dive into each and every individual company's information. However, by doing that, you're essentially playing the game of the— trying to play the game of the larger financial institutions, right? Try to beat them, try to beat the market, try to do well in the market. It's a very fast-paced, changing market, very dynamic, could be very volatile sometimes, right? So I think the key part, the key, the important point for an individual investor is How do you allocate your time, very, very limited amount of time, so that you can do just as well as the market? So a few things, that's kind of, you know, the thinking process behind the design of Trade Desk platform. So a few, you know, we have designed the platform, especially a few key features to address some of the key pitfalls, right? For example, a lot of people, investors, especially new investors, they're trying to hype the market, right? You are trying to buy low and sell high to make a lot of money, right? But it's easy— a lot easier said than done because there are, you know, being there myself personally for a number of years, there are a lot of institutional, very smart, very dedicated institutional investors that putting in billions of dollars, a lot of resources, human resources, you know, monetary resources into diving into the research. of companies, right? Individual companies, a lot of them, and then chasing them day in and day out, right? But as an individual investor, you just do not have those kind of time and resources. So what do you do? I mean, you— but there is one key advantage for an individual investor, which is time horizon. So a lot of institutional investors, right, One kind of a detrimental drawback, intrinsic drawback for them is they have to report their performance on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis, which leads to a lot of the short-term behavior, right? Just because they have to make the numbers, they have to beat their peers, their competitors in the short term, right? Very short-term basis. But as an individual investor, you could have a long-term investment horizon. Could be 5 years, 10 years, maybe even longer, right? That's Me personally, after being on Wall Street for almost 2 decades, I think that's one key advantage as an individual investor. So for us on our platform, we have designed recurring investments just so that either based on dollar cost average or maybe based on value cost average, but you know, you keep steady investing into a certain theme, into your financial planning, um, clean, and then day in and day out keeping steady. And that's one way so that you can avoid timing the market, avoid trying to dive into individual companies, because you stay there, um, you know, whether or not the market is volatile, whether or not the market is going up or down or sideways, right? So that's one key element, uh, that we have, we have designed on our platform. The other is thematic trading. So that's another one that, that is very popular by a lot of our clients, investors. What that is, is you— let's say there is a certain theme that you're interested in. Maybe it's AI investment, maybe it's the EV investment industry, maybe it's nuclear. Maybe it's crypto, right? But by investing into a theme rather than individual companies, you avoid identifying individual companies, which is difficult by itself. And you also avoid, as I mentioned earlier, you also avoid market timing. So you are investing into a basket of companies in one certain investment theme to your liking, to your choice, right? You know, we have put together a few, a few investment themes. For example, as I Imagine nuclear, nuclear investing, EV investing, AI investing, could be mobility, could be cryptos, service providers, so on and so forth. Right. So you essentially, you can set up, you can combine those 2. You can set up a recurring investment into investment themes so that, for example, you invest a couple of hundred dollars per month into a basket of 10, 15 stocks. into a certain theme, into a certain theme. And then the program, our platform, will set it up, you know, after you provide the order, provide the direction. The program will set it up automatically, do the investments so that you don't have to worry about, you know, timing the market or picking stocks or so on and so forth. So just to give you a couple of examples of how we kind of, you know, a lot of features, you know, are really were generated, originated by our customers' pain points. So that's kind of how we, we, we have designed the platform for the most part.

Well, uh, interesting, uh, how all of that has come about. I think there's a, a lot of confusion, uh, from a lot of people, a lot of individuals, uh, who say day traders out there, uh, essentially what they're doing is attempting to time the market and putting money in, pulling it out the next day, whatever, and using various different techniques, and as well as shorting and other techniques that they use. I don't really know much about it because I don't do that, but I understand even though it's quite popular, it isn't particularly profitable for the vast majority of day traders. Can you talk about that?

Yeah, so I, I kind of, you know, briefly mentioned that previously, but I think day trading, it's not easy. Essentially, as you mentioned, day trading, the premise is you would be able to time the market, right? You would be able to buy low and sell high in a very frequent manner, right? Sometimes holding the stocks or positions, either equity or maybe options, long or short, right, for a fairly short period of time. Maybe you follow a certain strategy, either long-short, right, long-short or market neutral, what have you, right? You may follow a certain strategy. But again, after being on Wall Street for a number of years, I've seen a lot of institutions, right? These are algo trading investors, again, investors with a lot of resources, a lot of dedication and actually experience trying to do these kinds of things. And then they also have a lot of access, for example, latency, right? They can own an infrastructure that reduces latency, maybe milliseconds, you know, but those milliseconds make a difference in the area of algo trading. So these are sort of the clear advantages for the institutional investors that are just not available for individual, you know, say day trader to be able to have. You just simply do not have those kind of access. So essentially starting off, you are following that path as a day trader, you are already kind of, you know, on a losing path, right? So that's why maybe a lot of the day trading strategies may not necessarily be profitable. But again, you know, you know, from what we can see, what we have seen, and also personally, I think, you know, it's the average investor— our investors are better off following a strategy with a plan in mind and just keep steady, try not to get emotions impact their action. And that's, I think, over time, that's a kind of a long-term strategy that's more likely to be successful. Again, no guarantee still, but just more likely.

Yeah.

Well, you spent really several decades really at the highest level of finance and working with large institutions. And large capital, lots of money. So what motivated you to really pivot towards empowering retail investors where you're dealing with more investors, smaller dollars? So a big shift there for you. So what was the defining moment when you realized that that this could be very beneficial for the system as well as for, of course, those retail investors who don't have those huge portfolios?

So, very good, very good question. So I think we had, obviously, back in the COVID days, you know, had a little bit more time to do a little bit more sort of soul searching and then sort of going back to my my professional career, I think, you know, really a lot of conversations with my friends, with prospect investors, customers back then a few years ago really led to my decision in this area because I found that many of those are very successful professionals, right, in whatever profession they're in. You know, but many of them, surprisingly, they did not even have a financial plan, or a decent understanding of some of the basic knowledge, basic theory, that could be very detrimental, detrimental to them over the long term, right? They may be very successful, they may be working very, very hard. But if they didn't have a successful plan in place, a lot of things would really just work against them, rather than helping them, right, day in and day out. I think that's one sort of a contributing factor for my sort of the change in my professional career. And then the other is really with the availability of AI. So AI, you know, really at this point, I think we're still in the first inning, second inning of this AI revolution. You know, as a former equity research analyst myself, you know, just in comparison, when I was covering companies almost 15 years ago, We used to spend hours and hours just to be able to dig out one piece of information, obviously a very important piece of information we're trying to find of a specific company. Those are hours, sometimes could be days just to put together something, maybe a few bullet points. But now with the AI, you literally can put in a few prompts. A few prompts later, there's a well-summarized, well-sourced, a well-documented output from the AI engine that essentially does all those hard work that used to take hours and hours, if not days, right? I think that's one big change in the era of AI is just, you know, way back when, you know, those tools were simply just not there. But now with this newer generation, their needs, right, you know, especially busy professionals, coupled with AI technology, we absolutely saw a market where we can potentially merge those 2 things, the technology versus newer generations, their investors, their need. So another, the 3rd one pillar, I think it's really the access, right? Wall Street, it's well known for their access, premium access to everything. to capital, to technology, to talents, right? I think especially for asset class, certain assets, right, certain opportunities. I mean, we wanted to, as part of Trade Desk, we wanted to be able to bring to average investors, not necessarily just institutional investors or accredited investors, average investors, right, busy professionals, access to, you know, Maybe investments in data centers, right? You know, that has been a very, very critical theme of investments over the last 20, 30 years. That went all the way back from the internet days, right? The mobile computing, the cloud computing, now the AI computing, right? Throughout the period of time, you know, digital infrastructure, data centers, These were a pillar, very critical pillar to support a lot of the growth of a lot of companies, right? Of whatever the wave of technology is. Today, we're not able to be running away from that. It's even more so, you know, all the AI technology, be it ChatGPT, you know, cloud, whatever, what have you. All these, guess what? All these computations were done in data centers.

Right.

Right. All the, you know, the storage, the processing, the computation, and the transmission of all those information are all done in data centers. But, you know, a lot of people, they probably never heard of data centers, what they do, what is a data center, what does that do, what does that mean as investment, so on and so forth. Right. So just to give you a quick example, there are certain asset class that are well known in the institutional world. It's just never heard of. But those could be, if you add a portion of that potentially to your portfolio, could add to the overall sort of potential value, well diversified. That's the premise there. So things like that, just so a few different areas, a few different reasons that's really led to sort of the origin of Trinidad Securities.

Well, those high-achieving, high-income professionals are the individuals that we work with, and you're absolutely right. They— I mean, they're brilliant in their careers, and all of their careers are competitive careers. If they want to get ahead, they have got to dedicate themselves to years of education, and then once they're out of school and in their profession, they have to work hard in their professions to stay ahead. So it's not surprising to me that they just haven't had a space and an opportunity in their lives to really look to see what is going on with their financial life because it's just been a very secondary part of their experiences. And what we find, just like you, that they're making very, very poor decisions, generally speaking, in terms of This high-income opportunities that they have are just going to waste because they have never been put in a position to really find the opportunities that can really be very, very beneficial to them rather than detrimental. And traditional retirement plans, many of them are exposed to that, and those are just essentially— Useless, and they find that out not until they come to retirement, and that's really quite unfortunate. So you had— you were talking about AI, and this is probably the first generation, and the second generation is going to be even a very, very different world than what we currently have. So looking ahead, what What is your vision for how platforms like Trade Desk are going to reshape the relationships that professionals have with their wealth over the next decades?

Yeah, very, again, very, very good question. Very relevant to the era of AI and also investments. So Trade Desk, I think in the direction of AI, a couple of current themes or thinking process. One is, you know, in the near term, as we speak today, I think AI would be, you know, in the first inning, very early stage. But at this stage, we think AI is going to be able to help investors, right, clients, customers save a lot of time. As I mentioned earlier, save hours, days, right, weeks of time that you used to have to invest, right, your personal time, your weekends, your nights into doing research, into trying to catch up with either investment theme or how to plan financially or how to look into individual investments. But now with AI, a lot of them are readily available. The information is readily available. Of course, you learn now these days, you just learn how to ask the questions, right? How to prompt the AI engine to give you the answer in a way that is useful to you.

Right.

So for Trade As Securities, we have integrated AI technology, fully customized and fully integrated to our entire platform where our customers can ask questions into the AI chatbot chat box, not only questions related to markets, right, but also questions related to individual stocks. And most importantly, most interestingly, you can also ask AI about your portfolio. You know, give you a few quick examples. How does my portfolio do in the last year versus the S&P 500? How is— what is my portfolio's concentration risk? So on and so forth. So, you know, these are, again, even as early as 4 or 5 years ago, these kind of technology was simply not available to at least to the average investor. Now, they may already be available to the institutional investor, but just not average investor. But today they are. And then these are— these tools, new technology are getting better and better, are getting— because companies like ourselves and our peers are optimizing these on a daily basis. They're getting smarter, they're getting faster, and more and more relevant to the customer's questions. So I think in the near term, that's how I see the direction of the AI sort of integrating with the research, helping customers save time. Now, over, I would say, probably in the next decade, if not sooner, I mean, we do— I mean, I do see personally, AI would be more and more into the automatic trading in a way that's— think about, I think the interesting analogy, it's autonomous driving, right? We're not 100% there yet, but we're clearly moving in that direction. I think for trading, for financial services, I think that's probably in the next decade, if not sooner. We're moving in that direction. You can one day, you can just open up your box, your trading platform, and ask the questions, hey, put together a portfolio for me for the next 5 years, given 1, 2, 3 criteria. Then the portfolio, then the AI would put together this investment portfolio for you and then does everything else automatically on your behalf. So I think down the road, in the not so distant future, we do see that's happening. That's basically more and more integrated with people's financial sort of journey, and more and more easier and easier to use, and more and more automatic. So that's kind of where we see where the AI is helping. investors over the near term.

Yeah, I suspect you're right on target there, and I like your analogy of the automated vehicles, which— well, we are already there. Some cities already have taxi services that are automated, so it's not that far in the future. Well, Eric, thank you so much for Being with us and providing us with a very insightful conversation. We're so glad that you were with us today. So we were talking with Eric Chu, a leader who's not just talking about the future of investing, but he really is building that future for retail investors. Eric reminds us that technology should simplify our financial lives, not complicate them. And that trust remains the ultimate currency, and that empowering investors begins with thoughtful design, transparency, and with education. If you'd like to learn more about the groundbreaking work that Eric and his team are doing to reshape the brokerage experience, you can visit tradedeck.com, and you can also connect with Eric directly on LinkedIn and you can find him at Eric Chiu CFA. There he shares regular insights on fintech innovations, investor empowerment, and leadership. And if today's conversation inspired you to rethink how your wealth can work for you, you can take the next steps and watch the mini masterclass Beyond the Paycheck: How High-Income Professionals Build Freedom Through Passive Investing. You can access it free at go.stetalker.com/beyond-paycheck. So until next time, remember, wealth is not about working harder. It's about aligning your resources with your purpose, your time with your freedom, and your money with your mission. I'm Dr. Allen, and this is Streams to Impact.

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