Why Most Investors Need a System, Not More Stock Tips With Eric Chu | EP43

Most investors are drowning in information.

News alerts. Social media opinions. AI generated stock picks. Endless market predictions.

But according to Eric Chu, CFA, the problem isn't a lack of information.

It's a lack of a repeatable system.

In this episode of The Wealth Clock, Steven Weinstock sits down with Eric Chu, CEO and Co Founder of Tradesk, to discuss how investors can make smarter decisions, avoid emotional investing, and use technology to separate signal from noise.

With nearly two decades of experience across capital markets, engineering, and fintech, Eric shares why consistency often beats chasing the next hot investment and how AI can help investors become more disciplined rather than more reactive.

Topics Covered:

• Why most investors make emotional decisions
• The power of consistency over chasing market hype
• How institutional investors think differently
• Building a repeatable investing process
• AI powered investing tools
• Portfolio reviews and risk management
• Thematic investing
• Dollar cost averaging
• Data centers and emerging investment trends
• How Tradesk is modernizing retail investing
• Why investors need systems instead of stock tips
• How to separate signal from noise in today's markets

Guest Information

Eric Chu, CFA
CEO & Co Founder
Tradesk

LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-chu-cfa-7159567/

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/tradesksecurities/

Email:
ruhani@moburst.com

Phone:
609-240-8375

Hosted by Steven Weinstock

Real Estate Investor

Founder, WE Capital

Goethals Capital Fund

WE Capital Mortgage Fund

Podcast Host, The Wealth Clock

I help investors earn passive income through real estate.

Book a call with the link in my profile.

🎙 About Steven Weinstock
Steven Weinstock is a real estate investor and founder of WeCapital and the Goethals Capital Fund. Since 2001, he has built a diverse portfolio of residential and multifamily assets while helping investors access passive income through strategic real estate opportunities. On this podcast, he shares real-world insights on investing, capital raising, and what it really takes to build and scale in today’s market.

📩 Want to invest or get in touch?
Visit: www.WeCapitalX.com

📱 Connect with Steven:
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stevenweinstock1

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wecapitalx/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheWealthClockPodcast

Transcript

0:00

Hello. What if the biggest threat to your investment portfolio isn't inflation, market volatility, or interest rates, but your own emotional reaction to the daily news cycle? Today's guest spent over two decades in the trenches of Wall Street as an investment analyst, a hedge fund insider, and an engineer. He watched institutional pros use rigorous frameworks while retail investors were left to gamble and all the hype. He's built a platform designed to give regular people institutional guardrails. We're gonna unpack all this chaos and see how he has become a radically consistent investor. I hope I did that correctly. welcome back to another episode of the Wolf Clock. I'm Steven Weinstock. For more than twenty-five years I've been investing in real estate, raising capital, operating apartment buildings, making loans, And building businesses. On this show, I sit down with operators, founders, investors, and entrepreneurs who are actually doing the work. No theory, no fluff, just real conversations about business, investing, entrepreneurship, and building wealth. This is the wealth clock. Our guest today is Eric Chu, a CFA charter holder and the CEO and co-founder of Trade Desk. One word, Trade Desk. With 20 years of experience cutting through the complexities of the capital markets and engineering, Eric is on a mission to modernize retail brokerage. He's taking the high-level tools once reserved for the big boys, for the hedge funds, like insider trader tracking, thematic allocations, and advanced AI decision filters, and putting them into a calm, systemized interface built for everyone. From high net worth professionals to the next generation of investors. Before we jump in, I have a sponsor, Cable NOI. Cable NOI. NOI stands for net operating income. Cable NOI is looking for apartment building owners who own any property, any multifamily property with 20 units plus, and they will tell you how much money you could earn from the cable companies. Spectrum, Charter, Cox. You will get residual income. You'll also get an upfront bonus per door. It doesn't cost the building owners anything. There is no wiring. There is no bill back. There is no anything. Nothing to do with the tenants. Tenants will call up their regular cable companies, water internet, water phone service, order TV. And the landlord will get a cut of the action paid directly from the cable companies. CableNOI.com. Cable N O Y dot com. Eric, thank you very much for coming on. Hey Steven, thanks for inviting me over on the show. Uh glad to be here. Okay. before we start, where are you based out of? So we are based out of Short Hills, New Jersey. you know, not too far away from New York City, about half an hour, forty minutes train ride, depending on what day you hit the traffic. Sure, Short Hills, I know it well. I'm here in Brooklyn, New York, so I know New Jersey market very well. Short Hills is a nice area, famous for a big mall. And I think you have some basketball players who maybe former basketball players who live there. So it's definitely a nice area. a nice part of New Jersey. tell me what Trade Desk is. What are you doing? What are you working on? Let's unpack it. sure. So TradeSk we we focus on two parts of the business. The one part is on the retail investors. So for retail investors we have built uh essentially leveraging um you know decades of experience working on Wall Street. we have hand picked very selectively a few tools that used to be, you know, available only to institutional investors. Um tools such as in insider trading tracking, portfolio allocation, thematic trading, as well as AI insights, research. and that's on sort of on the retail side. And then the goal there is really is to help retail investors. maybe your active trader or just you know um busy working professional want to have a you know financial plan for your future, for your kids' education, what have you, right? So so that you have a dedicated tool that's specifically designed for for that purposes. And separately we also have an institutional practice. We help, especially my background, has been in the data center industry for about 15 years. We help with data center operators as well as institutional capital investors sort of navigate through the data center space, which a lot of the people have known for a while that that's one of the sort of the high Area that's supporting a lot of the in AI expansion, you know, be it uh AI training or inference or AI application in the next wave, a lot of these uh you know uh technology advancement has been supported by the data centers, and that's the space that we are also focusing on as well. Got it. So your background is in engineering, but you also worked on Wall Street. when you worked on Wall Street, what industry? Uh most of our audience is in the real estate uh industry, that's my background. but you know, as most investors, uh we dabble in alt type. we we When I was an analyst, I used to be a telecommunications anal coverage analyst. Uh company covering companies such as data centers, which I mentioned earlier, uh, as well as wireless carriers, ATT Verizon, and also um wireless towers, you know, American Tower, SBA Communications. And interestingly, I would point out is you know, data centers has been for about the last 20 years a crossover industry between real estate. State and technology. Uh twenty years ago, when I, you know, before this is even before I started coverage, one the now the largest data center companies f sort of first became public com publicly listed companies, data centers were pretty much a technology play, right? These were companies that are very good at networking equipment. computing equipment, data storage equipment, and essentially hosting, providing hosting services. But over the last 20 years, more and more of these traditional uh technology focused data center providers, they have taken over the real estate. Behind the data centers. They have taken over the assets, built assets from the ground up, essentially acquiring not only real estate assets, but also power, uh generation, backup, network equipment, along with the shell and the data centers and the GPUs these days, in AI data centers, everything around it. So more and more it's becoming a commercial real estate asset class by itself. so it used to be a lot, only kind of you know, the Technology focused investors are interested in the space, but over the last 20 years, because these data center operators, companies, they generate uh regular cash flow, uh, either in the form of dividends or um in the form of share buybacks uh as appreciation for their equity for their shares. So becoming more and more attractive to uh you know sort of commercial real estate investors who With by investing into data center space, they can not only generate sort of the regular income that they are looking for, but also the capital appreciation as these companies grow with the demand and also with the waves of technology advancement in the marketplace. So that's kind of a good combination and convergence of of these two trends to kind of formerly separate verticals. and these companies, interestingly, the data center companies, most of them they have since over the last call it 10-15 years converted to a REIT, REITs, uh real estate investment trusts, obviously with a lot of different, you know, sort of a tax code treatment and then some certain obligations they have to follow. But that's just to give you give people a sense, you know, what where you know that kind of data center is is coming into play. Understood. understood. So let's back this up a little. somebody's listening to this podcast, they hear the trade desk name, they Google it, they either download it, go to the website. Who is this targeted for? Is this targeted for what type of investor is this targeted for? so we primarily target um what we would like to say as the busy working professionals. most of them are not necessarily in the financial services industry, but also in other professional uh industries. For example, lawyers, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, marketing executives, so have so on so forth, right? So these people, most of them they are are highly paid, right? They have the discretionary income to support investments in in whatever you know area in their liking. But in a I think our platform Trade Desk really, as I mentioned earlier, we have selected uh a few key investment tools that can help these uh investors not only manage their sort of portfolio, you know, understanding their portfolio's risks, and do research on individual names, stocks in a highly effective and efficient manner, and essentially helping these guys uh kind of stay connected with the market and also help them build the build their financial future. this software, this pr this service that you're offering, this is not and tell me if I'm wrong, this is not necessarily pitching them certain deals or certain investment opportunities. it's more a matter of managing or looking at the what's out there and then helping you manage that. That's absolutely correct. We are there's no pitching, uh there's no uh sort of selling of certain securities or ideas. for the most part, our platform has been designed as a what we call self-directed uh platform. Uh customers we provide customers with these tools on a highly selective basis, these tools that customers can utilize in order to, for example, set up uh recurring investments, pick certain thematic trading themes. That they would buy in and also to utilize. We have also designed the AI engine, what we call Prism AI, that's fully integrated with our platform. Investors, customers, they can not only research specific stocks or ideas, they can also do uh portfolio level analysis. For example, what's my portfolio concentration? How what's driving my portfolio's performance over the last six months, one year, right? Because the Prism engines. fully integrated to each and every individual's customer, you feel like you are working with the agent that's helping you analyze your portfolio along the way. This service is a fee or subscription based. So for now we are not charging a fee or subscription. it's commission free for US-based investors. and so we are still in the fairly early stages and we're just working with a selective uh group of uh customers, investors sort of trying to build up the presence of the platform. Is this invitation only or application available or could anybody just apply and now they have to get approved? anyone can apply. It's available on in Apple Store, in Android. Uh there are uh essentially three platforms, uh our you know, investment tool is available, either Apple and the iOS or Android or on the web. you can also directly you don't have to download everything, anything or just go direct to Tridex.co and then you can uh put in an application and then you know start investing right away. So as of now, since you're not charging a fee, this is I guess the you know you're building up to get enough numbers where it's now feasible to start charging a fee. You're letting the early people in for free, you're vetting them, you're making sure it's somebody that fits your fits the kind of customer that you want. but eventually you know this will be a s subscription based. I think that that's it that is the idea. Ultimately we would like to provide enough tools that can add our customers enough value to justify a subscription, hopefully multiple of the value that we can help our customers with, versus the subscription fee. But ultimately I think that's the model. And based on what you're saying, and I know I asked you this earlier, but your target customer is not gonna be a twenty-eight-year-old who's making a hundred and forty grand a year. It seems that your target customer is somebody who's making more money, more than the average, and they have a background with investing in some sort. you know, more than just, you a 401k match. these are people who are, you know, I don't know I I don't know if I want to use the word skilled, but these are investors who are investing. Uh they're splashing some money around in uh potentially different investments, not just uh you know buying a hedge fund. sorry uh a mutual fund. And these are people who want to, you know, be involved in more opportunities and have better ways of analyzing their current portfolio and potential new portfolios or new uh investments. That that's right. I think that's a fair assessment. You know, we are not um you know, there are some sort of tools out there in the marketplace that are more suitable for beginners, right? Someone who have never invested before, who just wanna sort of you know, put in five hundred dollars a as a as a start to start sort of dabbling into the investment investment world. I think I don't think that's where we are. that's not where we're targeting. We are definitely targeting someone who is a little bit more experienced. I would say, you know, in the with the anal analogy of school system, right? We're targeting someone not, you know, elementary school student but not a college student we're targeting someone who may be a middle schooler, a high schooler, who have had a few years of investing experience, who are looking for uh a good tool, not you know, something that would feed them a lot of noise, but a good tool that can help them sort of cut through uh some of the noises, navigate through the market, and and and also help them with managing the portfolio or research individual stocks uh or look into certain thematic trading themes and and recurring investments, right? Just to name a few. So I I think that's kind of where we what we would like to play and where we're targeting. Do you need any licensing or any kind of certifications to have a a software like this? Or is this more uh I'm an engineer, I'm gonna build out, you know, excellent uh an excellent product and I'm not going after the masses, I'm not looking for, you know, every guy who's making a hundred grand a year, but I'm looking for those I don't want to say rear, but you know, uh a smaller group of high net worth individuals. who going to be dedicated and using my uh using your software. uh mentioned earlier. We are operating in a highly regulated industry, financial services industry. We are a SEC registered broker dealer uh and also member of FINRA. so we have to follow strict regulations, rules, you know, and and securities laws for everything that we do, uh all the way from you know offering from servicing customers to opening a accounts, maintaining customers' records, providing confirmation statements, you know, uh funding, you know, margin uh loans, just to give you a few examples. We work with a few you know household names at as our sort of vendor uh provider partner companies like AWS companies like alpaca just to name a few and obviously with the exchanges directly or indirectly for data service for data services. But that's kind of a where the background backdrop we are working against. We also have you know full-time compliance personnel on staff that's you know looking into and you know supervising all the activities that we do on a daily basis. again just to follow you know FINRA and SEC rules and regulations. So from what I hear, this is not just, you know, some business that was started with a guy who knows how to use Claude and prompts and a whole bunch of back end. just just to get compliant with some of these agencies. We're talking you know, legal bills, lawyer uh stuff, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars or you know, s somewhere along those lines, maybe even more. You know, I'm just thinking on the real estate end. when I do loans with HUD, you know, all of a sudden there's an extra thirty, forty grand of legal, just to be compliant, you know, for the property. here you're dealing with tremendously highly regulated businesses. you must have spent a lot of money to start this. So this is not just a a fun project that you're doing Mm. yes, it might be fun, but it's not just something that you launched over a weekend uh with AI. you really put a thought into this. you have uh obviously people involved, whether it's employees or legal or third party contracts on this. You had to, I guess, raise money to put this together or bring in partners to put this together, or maybe you're just independently wealthy and you paid for it out of your own pocket. good again, very good questions. So we actually Trade Desk Securities, we are part of a global uh corporation. you know, I you know Trade Desk is the US sort of operations. Uh in addition, we also have offices in Asia, specifically in Hong Kong. And we're also a registered broker dealer in Hong Kong with local securities and futures uh commission. the real the local you know financial regulator. We're also servicing through our Asian entity regulated entity, we're also servicing Asian-based and and other non-US based customers from other countries. so you're right, there is uh again, this is a highly regulated area. we have to follow a lot of you know. compliance regulatory rules and then there's um a lot of infrastructure that we have invested in that we have put in place over the last call it last three plus years and that's part of our sort of you know value proposition as we work with potential customers. for example one vertical is we work not only you know individual or retail customers we also work with other you know small business Businesses or enterprises, other FinTech firms, just so that because we have spent the time and the money and the efforts to build the entire sort of a compliant infrastructure, other companies they do not have to. This could be a high-frequency signal provider who are looking to vertically integrating services to their customers by not only providing signals but also providing trading, you know, execution services. That's kind of where we would come in, right? Again, they don't have to worry about. about you know getting a you know a license, doing all the compliance work, which we have done that already. so we also work with customers uh in in those verticals, what we call B2B, right? Or or maybe B2B2C type of customers. Are the big retail brokerage guys, Schwab, Fidelity, are they your competitors uh at some point? I I I I understand you're not fighting for the guy who's making sixty grand a year and he's dollar cost averaging, you know, the extra two hundred dollars a week that he that he has left over from his job. And you know, there's something to say about those people in a good way. But are you competing for some of the same high net worth customers in terms of research and I don't know, knowledge. Uh a again, very good question. So, you know, we would would like to say that we compete with them, in one in in s in in in certain ways, but I think we we're trying not to compete. against them head to head, right? I think we they focus on providing a wide range, right? Millions of customers, a wide range of services, products. and then, you know, and in contrast, I think we serve a small segment of the customers with a you know, hand almost handpicked services that addresses certain pain points of certain customers, especially with working professionals. I think that's kind of a where the difference or the differentiator for us are. so we're not trying to be, you know, the jack of all trades. We're really just trying to put together uh a a ki a small tool set that serves a certain, you know, segment of the customers, especially in Yeah. Since some of these brokerages are, like you said, the jack of all trades, they do have different segments that target different types of investors. So yes, they'll have you know schwab.com, you know, anyone could join. But hey, if they see you're worth, you know, twenty-six million dollars and it's sitting in your uh money market account, they'll have somebody from you know a a different department reach out to you and try to, you know, focus on you and you know, get you to do more than what's available to the masses. you have a lot of these big brokerages that own, you know, uh private wealth, uh high net worth uh wealth, you know, they have different arms, they're making acquisitions, you know, to bring these people in. Is this the type of service that if you scale up and you're past uh, you know, the the the phase of offering it for free and you're a couple of years down the road you have, you know, quite a few uh paying subscribers that are high net worth. Is this like is this a buyout opportunity? Is this something that one of the big firms, you know, the the the well known, named Wall Street firms would buy, you know, to bring you along, uh bring along all your uh investors, uh whatever money you're making, hey, that's great, but we feel, you know, with our brand, you know, we could skin this cat and, you know, really make some more money and scale it out. Is that something that is out there? know, not not necessarily, but obviously we would like to keep all our options open. I I think uh you know, one of the areas that we think were special is especially compared to the more traditional broker dealers, right? We are more of a fintech firm. Than the traditional broker dealer. And if you look at, you know, across the financial service, financial markets, right, it's becoming more and mu more fintech driven. you know, be it 24-7 trading or tokenization or RWA, right? These are not the traditional sort of uh brick and mortar, right? You know, broker dealer services that very much sort of high touch relationship based. And those those are not where we focus on. You know, we have Yeah. Internally we have more engineers on staff than the traditional registered broker dealer brokers or registered representatives. And these are entirely you know skilled engineers that help us not only put together the platform as we see today, but also we are constantly in the process of you know putting in new features along with sort of development in the market. for example, you know, the the 24-7 trading, the tokenizates, the tokenized securities. These are and and then you know crypto, you know, uh in tandem with other partners and entities. So these are sort of the more newer uh innovative services areas and more fintech driven, very sort of API heavy, API driven type of services. And these are kind of areas that we think we have a we were specialized in. you know, we we don't again, we don't compete with You know, Charles Rob or fidelity of of the big guys in there. You know, their business model is very, very different from what we're after. What are you doing to grow your user base besides podcasts and besides traditional marketing? How are you going after these high net worth individuals? I I think a lot of these are through events, offline events. we find that to be one of the more successful uh channels in terms of customer conversion. just because you know, these customers that we're going after tend to be more reliant on trust, more reliant on you know what we can offer in terms of kind of track record. and you know these I think the offline kind of a channels it's one area that we have spent a lot of time and efforts in. And also in connection with our more institutional business you know related to sort of digital infrastructure and data center space. you think the best asset classes over the next couple of years? That's a great question. It's very, very um Hard question to be honest with you. But you know, again, I mentioned data centers for a few times already. And I think that's one area that I know, but also that's also one asset class that kind of combines or merges both the technology side as well as the hard asset or real estate side. That's kind of a you know uh you know, leveraging both you know benefits from the both verticals, both industries. But I think most importantly, if you if you for for for some of the audience who are not too familiar with data centers, you know, I've covered the space for 15 years, uh all the way from the internet you know wave back we're talking twenty years ago to cloud computing to you know to now these days AI, right? Every technology wave, at least in the last 20 years, it's all related around data, right? Around data storage, transmission, processing, and exchange. All these four key functions cannot happen without data center. So in going forward, you know, either, you know, especially with the AI everywhere you look, right? You know, it need you need data centers to be able to support the growth, the expansion, and all the functionalities, the speed, right? The the shortened latency, everything that you are you are looking for, the requirements that these um you know comp companies or customers are are are requesting. So you know I think I still think data center it's a very interesting asset class and continue to sort of benefit from the technological growth over the next you know through C Yeah. yeah, no, I I I agree. data centers have been a word for quite some time. maybe it started with all the cloud computing and yeah, Facebook needs data centers and uh Google needs data centers. And if I'm not mistaken, there are a couple of REITs that specialize in data centers, maybe Digital River, I think is one of them, but maybe that sa sound digital reality. Yeah, so it's obviously an asset class. I'm in the real estate business and you know, I always hear about different opportunities, whether it's in development, they get involved uh with data centers. I think the masses uh have been hearing more about it really the last year or so because of AI. And AI obviously puts a tremendous strain on or uses a tremendous amount of data. So you have data centers popping up left and right. uh become a little controversial, you know, not in my backyard, you know, build it, but not in my backyard. Same with the cell phone towers. I need perfect 5G, but I don't want the antenna anywhere near my house. And um, you know, more and more people are hearing about data centers. And you know, there's a lot of advocacy uh pro and con. Uh some environmental, some you know maybe a little more global. but data centers is definitely An asset that is here to stay. And as we rely more and more on these uh little devices, like show the cell phone for those of you listening, the more data we need and the more data centers we need. Hopefully some of the electric that's used can be uh optimized and you know, maybe not as much carbon uh being entered into the atmosphere, but at the end of the day I gotta live uh for today and I need my phone to work as fast as possible. Eric, tell everybody here how they could reach out to you. website, uh newsletter, YouTube channel, whatever you got, social media, whatever you say we'll put in the notes and um go ahead. Yeah, sure. so you know, we are you can first of all you can find us at our website, www. dot treadas dot C O. And you can also find me personally on my LinkedIn or the our company's LinkedIn. just Eric dot chew. and social media we are most active in LinkedIn for now. And so these and then you can obviously you can reach me on my on my work email, eric.chew at tredesk.co. you know, we'll be happy to you know do a follow-up conversation you know, as as as needed. Eric, I think the major takeaway here is that successful investing isn't about outsmarting the market with a single lucky trade. It's about building a repeatable, unemotional system that allows you to outdiscipline the chaos. Thank you for joining me, Eric. I appreciate it. Thank you to everybody for joining another episode of the Wealth Clock. Like us, share us, subscribe to us. Eric, thank you very much. Thank you very much, Stephen.