Public.com launches AI agents that monitor markets and execute trades automatically inside the app

Yeah. Get get ready. The chat's going to be your strongest supporters. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. We'll talk to you soon, Will.

Have a great one. Goodbye.

Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market, your business on MongoDB? Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. Continuing our lightning round,

you know who we got? The CEO of public.com, Yanick. How you doing?

Hey guys, I'm doing well. How are you? We're doing fantastic. Look at that stuff in the background there.

I know. Do you recognize any of this stuff?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. You got the whole head to toe. Head to toe.

I don't recognize what Jord is wearing. I don't think you got to get one. This is the new polo. You're right there. Top left. You got lean left.

Plenty of room on the wall. There's plenty of room on the wall.

Anyway, uh enough about our merch. Let's talk about your business. Uh walk us through the launch today. Yeah. So, today we launched AI agents for investing.

Yes.

The easiest, safest way to put AI agents to work directly inside your portfolio.

Yeah.

Um, and the way it works is pretty simple. There's now an agents tab directly within the public app. You chat with an AI to set up agents that monitor markets, move money around, and even execute trades for you all within the app, right? So, there's nothing to install from a security standpoint. Obviously, everything stays in a safe controlled environment because it's within the brokerage. all Axios.

No, do not do that. That is such a niche joke. Everyone's going to think you're talking about the publication.

Um, no, but I mean it's it's been really fun. I have a bunch of agents running now on my account. It's been really awesome to see how it's changed my behavior as an investor, right? So,

John, relax.

I like the sound of that.

I knew you were going to do that.

We got a little John and No. So, so, so, uh, make makes total sense. What like if people are like uh already signed up, which they should be, how what what should they what what what's the first thing that that they should try to like set up or experiment with? Like what what was your first few agents that you've set up and and like continue to keep running because I'm assuming you can effectively like run them, you can retire them at different points.

Exactly. Exactly. The first one I set up was um one that checks the oil prices before the market open and buys protective put options every day as a hedge.

Sure.

If there's a spike in those, I call it the

I'm tired of seeing red due to war agent. Um and so, uh today that didn't fire, thank God. Um

you know, I have another one that just looks at my bank accounts and automatically sweeps any cash in excess of a certain amount into my bond portfolio. So, I'm always yield maxing. You want to be yield maxing always, especially while rates are still high.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Um and uh and then I got some more advanced stuff like I got one that scans the markets for opportunities to write covered calls.

Okay.

Across my top position. So if there's a lowrisk opportunity to make like 20 grand a month.

Yeah.

Um selling options premiums. I instructed it to just go ahead and place those orders. So that just rolls

every time. All the time. And I don't have to think about

that. strategy was the first thing a uh a private wealth manager ever pitched me in my career like a decade ago. They were like I and they had like a guy that did it and you had to have a lot of money to like access that and there were minimums and stuff and now check on that guy after no but uh so so I I there are obviously like incredibly advanced things that you can do with these agents in in the market. I'm also interested in just driving behavior change because a lot of folks that I know are earlier in their career. They don't want to necessarily take a ton of risk. The biggest lever on their financial future will just be seamlessly funneling money from their paychecks into something as simple as VTI and then they can do something more more advanced down the road. But what does it look like in terms of uh the best practices or best functionality for just creating a set it and forget it. I want to make sure that every time I get paid, money's flowing into the market. How easy is that these days? Um well I think with agents that becomes really really simple right I think this is sort of the whole point you know the stock market has always been about manually entering orders right like you do all this work and eventually you end up manually being like buy 200 shares of Apple at this price

I think that user interface is now shifting to something like

um increase my position if valuations compress 15% from here

you know and it stays within my defined risk tolerances and so forth and so I think it changes is how people think about and manage their portfolios um in a pretty profound way and and we do see it as a user interface shift like you know the the the interesting thing about this industry is every technology kind of had their model of brokerage right like we started on the horn

and then the dawn of the internet gave us the discount broker with mobile came the neo broker

and I think now with AI it's the era of the aenic brokerage but

what's uniquely interesting about this shift is every previous shift was about streamlining the process and reducing the responsibility set of the broker you know to basically just trade execution ultimately

but it actually used to be much more full service to Jord's point there used to be a guy used to call you used to pitch all these kind of ideas risk you know trade ideas etc

I think with the identical brokerage model you're reversing back to that

um and it's much more full service than obviously any human service could ever be because this thing can like write an algorithmic trading script for you in 10 seconds it can do tax harvest it can instantly analyze risk.

Sure.

And so it's it's a shift back to a world where the brokerage plays a much a much larger role than just trade execution. It sort of goes into the realm of maybe a quant and a financial advisor and that's what we're excited about the brokerage playing at a much bigger role through essentially a

uh Jordy

uh can it can can it pull in external data sources yet? I'm thinking like fear and greed index like should I could I said something unemployment if you have like max fear that you you want to buy on days when when the the

yeah fear index is high but that might not be an an actual uh like instrument in that you can buy and sell directly.

Yep. 100%. unemployment data, CPI, Fed cuts, like one that people have been kicking around today is,

you know, whenever there's a Fed cut,

move money obviously out of my high yield cash account public, put it to work into high growth tech. Yep.

We like the sound of that. Am I right?

That makes sense.

Um, and so

and u and so there's a lot of those.

Yeah.

CPI like like the fear and greed one uh was requested today. I think that's coming in in the next couple of days. And so really it's about getting all that into this natural language interface and just letting people kind of instruct AI to um to do this on their behalf.

Last question for me about uh AI on the platform. What have you what are the capabilities? What have you learned about users educating themselves about various financial instruments within the public ecosystem? uh you know, okay, I see a company. You're going to surface price to earnings ratio, market cap, the usual stuff, but there's so much more that you can ask an LLM these days about what does a company actually do? What is their strategy? How what's the history of this company? Do I what's the founder like? These things are are perfect for LLMs and you can vend those in, but what are users actually using? What's adoption been like? What have the learnings been? Yeah. I mean I I think one of the core task in application lay AI is to sort of figure out obviously what do users want to achieve.

Yeah.

And then which model and kind of harness is best suited to achieve that purpose.

Sure.

But then also focus on like

what are we uniquely able to deliver. Right. So we know what you own. We know what you used to own.

Yeah.

We know what your risk tolerance is. By the way, we also know the difference between what that actually is and what you said it was when it signed when you signed up.

Yeah. um and and and we have real time data feeds of everything, right? And so I think as a product builder, those are

like some of the situations where you can really create a magic moment that general purpose LLMs can't. And I think a lot of that comes because we just have a lot of that kind of history about how people like to invest, what questions they've asked to your point in the past about the PE ratio, what the founders like, etc. Because we've been basically running a research assistant since 2023.

Yeah. and we're only a six-y old company, so it's already for sort of like half the time that we've been live. Um, and so we've been able to gather a lot of data for the last three years that we can now kind of repurpose into this.

What's your theory right now? It's obviously day day one, but do you think in the future we'll get, you know, more volatility because you have like financial institutions that are effectively using like agents or algorithms to do trading and then you also have retail. So when you get like a new CPI print, you know, you have, you know, even even, you know, additional trading activity off of these single events. Like do you think this is something in the future that that everyone will effectively have like a handful of agents running just naturally in the product and then some people will you know be like you know maybe proumers people that are more into it will have you know many or or at some point is everyone you know at what point do is it like you know old-fashioned to be just like you know buying a stock yourself even with a button.

Totally. I actually think we will look back at like tables and buy buttons and feel that's a little antique maybe already uh 12 months from now but I think the effect is things will get priced in faster for sure on the institutional side they've you know they've used some version of AI for the longest time right but then at the same time retail have gone from being like 5 to 25% of the market and on the retail side folks haven't been as fast to react always right they haven't been that disciplined they're not necessarily glued to the screen 24/7 and so you know they can't always react as quickly as they want to and agents obviously change that right and so I do think that there might be I mean it's a little bit like whether it's crypto prediction markets there's always a little bit more of a of sort of an alpha opportunity or an AR opportunity in the early early days

um and then over time it becomes more mainstream and that kind of fades away and I would suspect that this follows something

like a similar pattern at least I've just been thinking about it because because a content on X is primarily user generated at least the big accounts. It means that an event happens in the real world. It gets reported on or it pops up on a website or you get a newswire and then a human takes that and puts it on X and then this trade even the majority of retail volume is like flowing off of like that human seeing the news posting it and then you get this sort of trading activity. Think of it in a perfect world, you see news and then you go to your broker and the the the the right trade has already been made on your behalf.

Um and anybody that's not adopting this will just be like well I I missed kind of I missed the opportunity unless you want to get out entirely.

Totally. Speaking of ex a fun one is uh that was if DJT says buy just buy.

That's actually that's actually really smart. probably back test very well.

It back test extremely well.