It’s not about picking stocks it’s about building habits

Welcome to Trader Talk, where we dish out the latest Wall street buzz to keep your portfolio sizzling. I'm Kenny Polkari and today I'm not coming to you from the New York Stock Exchange, but I'm coming to you live from the Yahoo Finance offices here on Broadway in New York City. I'm still bringing you decades of market insight and energy. Now let's jump into my big take for the week. Let's settle this once and for all. Buying shares and buying options are not the same game. One builds a portfolio, the other tests your psychology. If you're treating options like a shortcut to wealth, you're not trading, you're gambling. Shares give you ownership, they give you time. They let you be wrong for a little while and still be right over the long term. You get dividends, you ride the cycles, you, you compound. And most importantly, you get to breathe. Options, they're the opposite. They're a bet on speed, direction and precision with a ticking clock tied to every move. You're not betting on a business. You're betting on market behavior. And if your timing's off by a week, doesn't matter how great your idea was, you lose. That doesn't mean options are bad. If used correctly, they're very powerful. They hedge, they leverage. They give you flexibility. But too many retail traders use them to skip the hard part. Conviction, patience and risk management. So here's the truth. If you can't win with shares, you have no business trading options. Learn the long game first. Learn to hold. Learn to sit through volatility without panicking. Because until you can do that, you're not using options. You're being used by them. Bottom line, Shares are how you build a future. Options are how you test what you've learned. If you mix them up, the market will make sure you learn the difference. Joining us today is Brandon Cree, co CEO and co founder of Stash, the pioneering fintech company that he co founded in 2015 with the belief that all Americans deserve the advice, tools and opportunity to invest in themselves. Starting with just $5. Most recently, Brandon led the launch of Stash Works. As well as Stash's AI money coach, Brandon also serves as CEO of Stash Capital, the company's broker dealer. Prior to Stash, he co founded Edge Trade, one of the first and largest agency trade, execution and software firms. Later acquired by Knight Capital and served as head of electronic execution at Macquarie Securities Group. I am thrilled to have him join us. Please welcome Brandon Creek. Brandon, it is a pleasure to have you. I've been Looking forward to this conversation because you and I have so much to talk about and so much in common.

Yeah. So, I mean, so many years of overlap from what you used to do and years of my old life.

Yeah. Yeah, Your old life.

Yeah.

I like to.

I have my old life and my new life.

Yeah. I call it my prior life. New life.

Right, exactly.

I mean, I spent 40 years on the New York.

Yeah.

Which was great, but that was my prior life.

Right.

And so tell us just a little bit, you know, I. I introduced you, but tell us a little bit about how you founded Edge Trade and how that whole thing happened and now how where you are now.

Yeah, I mean, it's just been incredible since 1998 when I moved to New York and I got very lucky. I met these two incredible guys that were running and started the company Edge Trade, which was called Precision Edge before that, and it was a trading firm, and joined them and really started taking technology to find ways to make trading more efficient.

So wait a minute. Where were you before in this business?

No, I have no business being in this business.

Okay, somewhere when you moved, you. You had no experience?

No, I knew software and I knew about technology, but the ability to marry technology with trading for me was like, wow, this is like the most beautiful recipe. And it was very early as, you know, like, I hated you guys.

Can I just tell you remember the New York Stock Exchange? I hated that whole idea.

It was. It was wild. I mean, but at the time, Mark, the markets were so fragmented, Unbelievable. Trading was all over the place. And we were able to, like, just assemble an amazing group of people, and we started building algorithms that would trade in the market, and we would give those algorithms to hedge funds and different mutual fund trading desks that would use these to be better at trading. And this business just took off and it got really big, and eventually it became part of Knight Capital and they acquired it. And I spent five years there. Just. It was amazing because going from a business that was relatively small to being in a business that was trading about a quarter of the US stock market volume every day was like, wow, right? This is what. Like, this is what size and scale look like.

Yeah.

And I'd stayed there for five years and took some time off. My wife did not like that. She's just like, push me. Push me back to work.

My wife doesn't like it either.

It was not good. And I went to Macquarie, which was an amazing business.

Were you there when Amy Be was at Macquarie?

I don't. I don't.

She would have been like the chief financial officer.

I don't know, I was way, way below that level. But I was focused on building a new type of electronic trading business which is where I met my co founder at Stash, Eddie. He was at Macquarie for 10 years, he's in Aussie. And we were running, building out this, this new group to trade in 58 countries at the same time electronically. And then the idea of Stash popped up and we had to do it, which was basically that every American deserves advice.

Right.

And we wanted to build effectively the private bank for the middle class.

Okay, so, so then, let's talk about that. So, so then was born Stash. Right. Now it's interesting that the listeners should know this. There's another company out there called Stash wealth which is not you. No, right. Because it's a, it's a, it's another Fintech, but I think they're down in the Carolinas or something.

I think it's like an advisor.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but it's funny because it's got that same name, Stash. Yours is just stash.

Just stash.com.

Stash.Com. Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about who your demographic is, how you appeal to them, how you get them involved, how you draw them in. Would you equate it to an early Robinhood type of, a, Type of an organization?

Yeah. So Robinhood started before us and my co founder, Eddie and I, we had a lot of, a lot of time to think about this. What do we want to be when we were starting the company and we had to dream and say like when we grew up, what do we want to be? And I didn't want to be a day trading app.

Right.

Because I've done this long enough. As you know, most people that day trade or take active trading, especially doing it from a phone where you don't have the compute that I used to have, you're likely going to lose money. Maybe not on the single trade but over time, over time. And so I wanted to build something where you could actually build long term wealth.

Right.

And to do that you need to do it where either I'll do it for you through a managed account, you do it yourself through advice or and there's some new stuff that we have now that we could talk about around banking and investing is your spend while you bank. But ideally it was around getting advice. So what I wanted to do was have people buy ETFs or have them buy investments they want and be there to give them guidance and advice.

They could buy individual stocks as well.

They can, yes. And they can. And they still can.

And so what's the advice? You give them the advice before or after? If I will. If I say it was me, I came in, I open up an account, and now I want to get started. And I don't put $1,000 into the account to get it started.

For instance.

Do I have to. How do I get. How am I getting advice? Do I have to sign up for something? Do I. Is there a query on the, on the page that I just type something in?

Yeah. I mean, like any good financial advisor, when you onboard the Stash, we ask you a lot of questions, right? We don't ask them because the regulator says we have to. We ask it because we have to. We actually use that information. So what we do first is we kind of calculate a risk profile for you.

There you go. I was waiting for you to say that.

How old are you? What's the rate? We ask you direct questions, of course you have to. Do you own a rent a home?

Right.

Any advisors should ask that. They all probably do. Right. We actually use that information to say, okay, now we understand what type of customer this is. Right now we use fractional shares, so you can start with $5. So I don't think the share price should matter for you to be able to buy a company or an etf.

Right. So you can. So what he means by that is you can buy $5 worth of Apple.

That's right. $5 of Amazon. It doesn't matter. We use fractional share.

Fractional share, yeah.

And so once you start, you decide what you want to do. So right now, if you onboard today, it will ask you, do you want us to do it for you? If you want Stash to do it for you with $5 at a time, you could have us manage the money through you, for you through something we call Smart Portfolio, which is a portfolio that we manage. It's diversified, globally.

Automated.

It's automated. We ask you to turn on something called autostash, because investing once isn't that good. Investing every week or every two weeks or every month for 20, 30 years is really, really good.

100%.

And so we ask you to do that. And we will rebalance the portfolio as it drifts, and we'll do that once a quarter, at a minimum, we do it once a year.

So wait, let me ask a question. Yeah. If you ask me to. To. To sign up. What was that you called it?

Smart portfolio.

Smart, yeah. But then do you Go into my bank account and just take the money every week.

That's right. We will.

I don't have to send it to you. You just pull it from my bank account. I have to do basically nothing. You're doing it all.

That's right. And the way, the way I think about it for our customers is we want to actually help you create a really positive habit. We all have all these negative habits.

100%.

Putting money away and quote, paying yourself first.

Right.

There is nothing better that people can do.

That's right.

Than that. If you treat yourself like a bill.

And they don't understand, you know, a lot. I agree with you 100%. And that's the thing that a lot of people don't understand.

That's right.

Treat yourself like the first bill, like the, like the utility bill, like the phone bill. Make the first check out to you.

That's right. And I, and I look at, you know, people on customers that use autostash on stash. Whether I invest through Smart or you do it yourself, they're like nine times ahead of the average American who doesn't stash just by turning on autostash.

Right. Hold that thought one minute. We're going to just take a break. We'll be right back. All right, so let's just pick up from, from what you just said about the autostash about, about, about really forcing people. Kind of. You are forcing because you're automating the process for them.

Yeah.

Right. You're taking it out of their hands and helping them grow their wealth.

Making it easy.

Making it easy. Right. I don't. It's not a negative, it's a positive.

Of course.

Right.

I mean, look, when I think about myself right. When I was 23 years old.

Yeah.

I started investing and putting money away every week. I don't come for money. I'm self made.

Right.

I'm really proud of that.

Yeah.

I put money away every week. I did it through the dot com crash. I did the Great Recession. I mean, what, what am I missing? Multiple wars, multiple presidents, multiple everything, everything. Everything crazy bad and crazy good. I kept investing through all of it. And what I want stash customers to do is do the same thing.

Do the same thing.

You know, right now with the tariffs, with the interest rate decision today, with whatever happens tomorrow or the crazy thing that will happen at some point next week, just keep investing through it. That's why autostash is so awesome.

Right. So what's really great about that is that it doesn't. While the person Themselves can get emotional feeling about the market. It's crashing. It's not crashing, it's this how tariffs are. What autostash essentially does is it takes that emotion out of it for them.

That's right.

And you just keep investing. Yeah, right.

That's right.

Which is exactly the message that people need to hear.

Yeah. I always say this to people on stash is I've been doing this for 25 years and I don't have a crystal ball, but I can make a promise the market will go up, down and be flat. That I can promise you something will happen. What will happen? I don't know. Which is why dollar cost averaging and you say this all the time to your listeners. Just being consistent and thinking about long term growth. It's time tested. There's no guarantees in any of this stuff. But consistently paying yourself is really important.

Correct. But building a portfolio that has high quality names in it adds to that ability to generate wealth. If somebody's got to, you know, a lot of people, they, you know, and I, they want to day trade, they want the latest name. The latest, you know, name that's going to make them rich overnight. Right. And that's where they go off track. It's fine to have a mad money account if that's what you want to do, of course, but you need to have a long term wealth account. You need to have a long term account that's going to generate long term wealth for you, for your family, for your children, your grandchildren.

That's right.

And the earlier you start, the better off you're gonna be. So tell me who your demographic is.

Our demographic literally is America. There are nurses and teachers and plumbers, name it, they're America. So one of our top customer demographics is US military. It's just everybody. It's the people that unfortunately the wealth managers don't want to serve. So they're not going to sit there and sit down and go, all right, you have $500. Let me spend an hour with you giving you a wealth plan. Talk about your budget. Let me help you think about how to put money away for your kids and retirement. So those are the customers I want.

Okay, so if I come to you, I'm one of those customers, is it who's talking to me? Is it AI talking to me? Or is it actually a live human being that's talking to me?

Yeah. So it's not a live human being. And this has changed now. Technology is incredible. It's like literally I help contribute to, with the engineers on the AI Side, there are days I like almost fall off my chair with like I can't believe it just did that. Right. It's amazing. The way it historically has always been was we have a lot of different experiences built into the Stash app.

Right.

That will show you your diversification score. It'll give you recommendations around ETFs to balance out. Because to your point just now, like if you really, really want to buy Tesla, you really, really want to buy IBM, it doesn't matter.

Right.

Go ahead, you should do that. I want you to do that. I want people to invest in things they believe in, things they care about. That's not for me to decide for you. That's on you right around that though. I don't want to see you concentrate your position in one stock.

In one sector.

Yeah, in one or one stock, Right. Those are things that you don't need AI to do. Right. You could do that through experiences in the Stash app and you know, I think we do that really well.

Right.

AI though has been incredible because I can't go out if, look, if I go out and hire 500 human advisors.

Yeah.

I have to pay them.

Right.

I have to raise the prices. It doesn't work. I hear you, but what does work is we've spent the last year and a half training an AI model and built out AI ecosystem and Stash. That's really good at talking to you. It's not going to tell you what stock is going to go up or down.

Right.

But it will tell you about what sector you can think about and how.

To balance out the risk in a portfolio that you might be overweight, technology, you need to add some consumer staples, you need to add some health care. Or you, you know, you, you might want to look at it with an etf.

That's right.

Or particularly if you like a name, I'm sure you can query a name. Yes. If I like Kellogg, I want to put in a what about Kellogg or what about Procter and Gambler? Johnson and Johnson?

I mean we, we, we could do that. I mean we do that. Now we bias to ETFs though, right? It's like I would say, if you like, love farming, right. Let's look at a farming etf.

Correct.

And then around that, let's look at are you, do you have enough international exposure, do you have enough bonds exposure, things that are time tested to give you exposure to all asset classes? Because look, we're in this environment now with the tariffs and interest rates and the only way that I know over my career to handle this is to have a really robust, diversified portfolio.

100%. And yeah, look, I went from the institutional trading side, transactional side of the business for 40 years, and now I move to the high net worth and ultra high net worth management side. Right. So as a chief market strategist at a $2 billion RIA down in South Florida. But we do essentially the same thing at a. At a for a client that has significantly more assets, which isn't necessarily good or bad. It's just. That's the demographic that I'm in. Right? That's right. But everybody has to start somewhere.

That's right.

And so the sooner you start, particularly the younger you start, because time is on your side.

Yeah. And I, you know, that's exactly right. If I look at Stash's user base now, we have about 1 point, just over 1.3 million monthly active users who have accumulated over $4 billion of assets on Stash. And I'm really, really proud of every single one of them. Because whether you start with $5 or $1,000 or you have a million dollars, I actually don't care. What I want you to do is start. Right. That's what I care about, 100%.

Where do you custody the money?

Apex Clearing is where the money sits.

Does it sit in my individual name or is it in an omnibus account under your name?

No, we don't do omnibus. It's literally in your name. In your name.

So my account is in my name?

That's correct.

Just like if I go Robert, I go to Fidelity, it's in my name.

That's right, your name. With you get your statements, and I can access.

I can sign in and see what it is every day. No one else has access to it other than the Automatic Investment Program.

That's correct. We're both ra and we're also a broker dealer.

A broker dealer, yeah.

Right.

Okay. So. So let me ask you a question about the recent. The recent angst that we've seen in the market, really since the beginning of the year, More recently since Liberation Day. Yeah. Tell me the reaction in from your demographic. Were people panicking? Were they saying, get me out, get me out, get me out, or were they in fact saying, here's more money?

So we've seen some of the biggest inflow days on Stash in history over the last few weeks.

Yeah.

However, and I think this is really important, there are always going to be people who look at the headlines and panic.

Right.

And through the AI, I see a lot of it. Because we see the conversations, you see the questions. Yeah. And look, we. We represent. Our base is America. There are some people going, I love what's happening right now.

Yeah.

I love what Trump is doing.

Yeah.

There are some people saying, f this, F that, F this. Okay. The advice is going to be the same.

Right. And that's Right.

I think that people have a right to pay attention right now. They should be paying attention.

They should be.

But just like we've seen over the last hundred years, for me, 25 years. For you, what, 35, 40 years.

40.

I heard you say 40, but I lowered it to 35. It's gonna be. You have to just take the long game.

100%. You have to take the long game. I think that's the part for me when I talk to investors, especially younger investors, convincing them that start now at 25, 26, 20, even if it's $100, $100 a month, might be $20 a week. Whatever it is, do something to get yourself started. Cause you'll be amazed at how it grows.

I agree. I mean, our. Our average customer on stash is in their upper 20s, early 30s.

Yep.

And I always ask myself why. I wonder why they're not like, super young. And I think what I figured out now, after 10 years, and we've asked a lot of people. This is. People are kind of getting their s. Their. This is. I don't know if I could say the S drop an S bomb, but you can. They're getting their shit together. Yeah.

Right.

They're getting married, they're having families, they're getting promoted at work, and they have expenses. Yeah. Or, you know, someone in the family died and they're starting to really think about their futures. I don't know of a single person in my life that has day traded a stock in and out a thousand times a day and has sorted out their financial future.

Right.

That's in the movies.

Yeah.

I have not met anyone who's done it.

100%.

If I could do that. Tell me.

I'm so with you. Listen, I've really enjoyed this conversation, and as usual, we run out of time. I want to come back the next time you're right here in New York. It's easy. Easy to get back together. I'd love to get back on and continue this conversation. Especially as we move into the second half of the year and we kind of see how this all played out and where the market is and kind of what the economics are in the country and how people are really feeling. But I think what you're doing is great. I think stash wealth for individual investors and for a young demographic that's just getting started, or for someone who's never. Someone might be older, who's never done it. You have to start somewhere and stash is a great place to do it.

Thanks for having me. This is great. Thank you.

Always a pleasure. Thank you for joining.

See you later.

Let's wrap things up with three essential market tips to keep in mind. No matter which way the wind is blowing, if there's no volume, it's just noise. You see a stock is moving, but the volume's dead. Walk away. That's not real interest. It's a ghost move. Pros wait for the volume to confirm what the price is telling you. Volume is commitment. No volume, no conviction. Do you want to trade with the crowd? Not against the echo. Once you exit, what it does next is none of your business. This one's hard, but it separates traders from gamblers. You close out a position, maybe you locked in a profit, or maybe you cut a loss. Either way, once you're out, you're out. Don't chase it, don't stalk it. Don't rewrite history in your head. What it does next is none of your concern. You made a decision. Respect it, learn from it and move on. Next, respect the macro, trade, the micro big picture keeps you grounded. Fed policy, inflation, geopolitical headlines. But that's not where you make your trades. You trade the chart in front of you, the setup, the risk, reward. Don't get paralyzed by the noise. That's how you stay sharp in any environment. So you know, at the end of every episode, I feature a classic recipe. And today I'm going to give you chicken piccata. Now here's a short history. Piccata is an Italian term that refers to a style of cooking where the meat is sliced, then dredged in flour, sauteed and served in a sauce made of lemon, butter, wine and capers. In Italy, the traditional dish is made with veal and is especially popular in the northern regions like Lombardy. Chicken piccata as we know it in the US Is a classic Italian American adaptation, born out of practicality. When Italian immigrants came to America in the early 20th century, veal was much more expensive and much harder to find. So they turned to chicken, which was much more affordable and more available. The method stayed the same, though, lightly floured and pan fried meat in a vibrant lemon caper sauce. But the protein changed popularity in Italian American restaurants. It gained all kinds of popularity at Italian American restaurants throughout the mid 20th century and has since become a loved staple, appreciated for its bright flavor and simple elegance. You can scan the QR code on the screen for my full recipe. That's a wrap for today's Trader Talk, but the conversation will keep going on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you got any questions or topics you want covered and email me@tradertalkahooinc.com I'm listening. Until the next time, stay sharp, stay disciplined, and stay in touch. Take good care.

This content was not intended to be financial advice and should not be used as a substitute for professional financial services.