Kevin Kennedy (02:40):
My brother-in-law wound up working at the Philadelphia Stock Exchange in the late 70s for Ivan Boesky, for those who are old enough to remember Ivan Boesky. And then my brother got a job at the stock exchange, and like so many people on some of the old trading floors, just word spread, and you start to hire people. I went to college in Philadelphia at La Salle University and coming out of college, I got an interview with Vanguard and was right about to take the job in internal audit. I was a finance major. And then my brother said, they’re looking for some traders on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange floor. I know you’re interested. I said, kind of? Yes, count me in. Can I go meet with them? As fate would have it, on March 17th, 1987, I graduated in 87.

Kevin Kennedy (03:24):
I met with a few folks down on the floor and I just was immediately taken in. I’ve heard this from some of your other guests on this podcast, the floors is just, especially in the 80s, it’s just so, in a good way, intimidating. I was just overwhelmed, but in a positive way. I went home that night and I’m like, wow, I would love to do something with these guys. The deal was, you come down, you graduate in May, you train with us, you stand in the pits for three or four months. If you’re good enough to trade, the capital to trade, we’ll give you half of whatever you make. And Kevin, if you lose money, don’t worry about it, we’ll eat the losses, but we’ll keep some tight risk strains on you, you’ll be able to spend a couple hundred, thousand dollars in margin, which in 1987 was a fair amount of money.

Kevin Kennedy (04:08):
I remember getting a call and then speaking with my father who was very risk-averse at the time, worked for the Federal government, and said, like that, I think I’m going to take this job. He said, “Over the Vanguard job?” I said, yeah, this is what I want to do. He said, well, how much does it pay? I said, well, I’m going to get to keep 50% of whatever I make. Well, when are you going to trade? Well, I have to earn the right to trade. Well, what are you going to make in the meantime? Nothing. Not even $100 a week? No, nothing. I said, there’s just no doubt, this is what I want to do. He’s like, I don’t think you should take that, you need a job. I called my brother back, Robert, this is probably before your time, but a three-way calling, you click the button and I’m patching Tom in you. We clicked in, and my brother’s like, dad, he’s got to take this job.

Kevin Kennedy (04:53):
There are people down there making hundreds of thousands of dollars, and this is the mid-80s, coming out of college. I took the job and as fate would have it, luck in a bad way, I guess, the 1987 crash happened a month after I started trading. I started trading on September 17th, October 19th was the crash, even bigger than the 1929 crash. Lesson learned I was not going to make hundreds of thousands of dollars. That day I did make a little bit of money, but the next year or two was really tough in the options markets because banks like Merrill Lynch and others just got so risk-averse and said, we don’t understand this game for retail. We don’t understand this game for our clients, period. And they really pulled back.

Kevin Kennedy (05:35):
Out of that, the Options Industry Council was born, from what they call OIC, out of OCC and said, look, we need to educate. We need to sell our brand. We need to sell options to investors. And it was a long path. Anyway, I digress. Bottom line is, I got into the markets in 87, 88, loved the options markets. Fast forward, six, seven years later, I decided to grow a specialist business. Started to hire people, raised a little more money. Eventually turned that into a 15 to 20 person firm called La Salle Trading, where I went to school. And then eventually folded that into the Goldman Sachs, SLK, a whole conglomerate of options trading and worked for them for three or four years. And then eventually mid-2000s, 2006, joined the Philadelphia Stock Exchange as a member of staff, and then eventually became part of Nasdaq. And now I get to oversee the options, the equities, and our co-location business for Nasdaq.

Robert Leonard (06:34):
When you were doing that trading, is that what’s called proprietary or prop trading?

Kevin Kennedy (06:38):
Yeah. It’s truly market-making, I would say, and it is prop trading. You’re not representing any customers, nothing like that at all. You’re trading for your proprietary account. In that respect, it is prop trading, but you’re truly the bookie, right? You’re the market maker. And the goal was to, much like the market makers in inequities and options today, for many of them, the goal is to just come out flat, manage what we call the Greeks, the Deltas, the theta’s, the Vega and try to just make it every day chopping wood and make money that way. I was trading for my own proprietary account and I was a market maker. Definitely never traded any customer representation or broker. In fact, I have family members, one of my brothers is a broker, and I say, I’m not a broker, I’m a trader. I like to just, always wanted that differentiation. I didn’t really want to deal with the public, and I just wanted to deal with myself.

Robert Leonard (07:27):
Is that differentiation right there? Is it brokers deal with the public, traders deal with themselves? Is that really the big differentiation?

Kevin Kennedy (07:34):
That’s my understanding basically. And now you can’t really be a trader without many of them have to have a brokerage arm and things like that, where they’re considered wholesalers, as things got bigger, you almost need to have that diversification in your business, in order to really interact with retail order flow and other order flow. A lot of co-mingling there, a lot of market-making firms now have broker-dealer arms, where their information barrier is set up that deal with the public and then help fuel and attract some of those retail orders onto an exchange where they can interact with them.

Robert Leonard (08:10):
You mentioned that you’re a market maker. For people who aren’t familiar with what that means, can you explain to us a bit more detailed what a market maker is and what they do?

Kevin Kennedy (08:19):
Sure. A market maker is very similar to, I guess, a sports bookie because I think so many people understand that, you have one side of the market. You have somebody coming in that wants to make a trade-in Apple puts, and they want to buy some Apple puts, well, there needs to be inventory. If there’s not someone willing to sell right there, you need someone to supply that quote. It’s fine, in Apple, if somebody wants to buy calls or puts and there are very at the money call option or at the money put option. But what if you want to go out six months, nine months, two years, and then strike 50% lower or 50% higher? You’re not going to find another investor that wants to trade that exact option, call or put, that exact term and have it to do it the same price you want to do it.

Kevin Kennedy (09:05):
The odds of meeting up with that other potential investor are almost zero. You need somebody to be in there and provide liquidity. Let’s just say Apple’s trading at 200 and the Apple, January of 2023, 250 calls are worth, I don’t know, 30 or $40. You’re going to need somebody to make a market in that and provide a displayed quote. You’ll see a market that is actually exceptionally fair, exceptionally tight, that you can get in and get out, and maybe just a 10th of a percent or 1% of a bid-ask spread. They’re the ones providing the displayed liquidity that allows investors to come in and out of the market without too much transaction costs.

Robert Leonard (09:47):
And so you were acting as that market maker back then?

Kevin Kennedy (09:51):
Correct. Yup. All-day long. And you would do it all verbally. We’ll talk about the evolution of the markets, but in 1987, when I did it, there were no electronics. The only electronics on the floor were an old CRT monitor. And you would say, hey, change my quote in Quaker Oats, April 60 calls. And you would yell down to a clerk and say, please post that electronic bid and make it a $3 bid, offered at three and three eights. That would be the electronics. And then if you wanted to trade in order, Robert, you would call your broker. The broker would call another broker and call down to the floor. That person would walk into the trading crowd and say, hey, Quaker Oats, how are the April 60 call options? And they would say, I’ll pay three. I would yell out, I’ll pay $3. I’ll sell them at three and three eights.

Kevin Kennedy (10:37):
Then somebody to the next to me might say, I’ll sell 10 of them at three and a quarter. They would then take that indication of the market back over the phone call, to a broker. Then back to the upstairs broker who would then call you and say, I think you can sell these at $3. Or if you want to buy them, you can pay three and three eight. Then you would go back. It literally would take two to three minutes. And that was good if it only took two to three minutes. And now that happens in a hundredth of a microsecond.

Robert Leonard (11:02):
If somebody wanted to make a trade that there was no market for, and you had to come in and be the market maker, are you taking every trade or are you analyzing each trade that’s coming in? How are you deciding whether you’re going to actually take that trade or not? Because it sounds like, if you’re doing that and you’re making that trade, one of you is making money and one of you is losing money, you can’t both make money. Either you are, or they are. And how did you manage that dynamic?

Kevin Kennedy (11:28):
Great question. I’m glad you brought it up because it really tells the story. I’ll stick with Quaker Oats because I actually traded that back then. Let’s say somebody does want to buy 10 call options in Quaker Oats, because they believe that stocks going from 60 to 70, over the next six months. It’s September of 1987 and they asked for some April 60 strike calls. How do I even know what they’re worth? Well, there’s a model. I think people may be familiar with this. There’s a couple of various models. One’s called Cox Ross, one’s called Cox Rubinstein. One is Black Scholes. And you put in these inputs and you say, what is the strike price that the customer or the trader wants to trade? We want to price the option at. How much time is there till expiration? Does there pay a dividend that’s going to make the stock drop? What are interest rates?

Kevin Kennedy (12:13):
But the key point is, what does volatility? Because that’s the unknown, those factors that I just named, the dividend, the ex-dividend date, the strike price, the interest rates, they’re all just static inputs, but what is the volatility? And that’s the expectation of how much that stock is going to move over the next period that you’re looking at. So six months. I might believe historically that Quaker Oats has always moved at a 32 volatility, which would imply about a 2% move per day. Generally, there’s consensus there in the crowd. The markets are very efficient, even back then. People would say, all right, they’d have literally a piece of paper that we called sheets and you’d print them out. And at every single stock price of Quaker Oats, you would turn the page and say, okay, now that call option is now worth 3.22. It was worth 3.12. Now it’s worth 3.22.

Kevin Kennedy (13:01):
And then later in the afternoon stock were up a dollar, you’d say, well, now there were 3.62. Let’s say they are worth 3.62 and somebody comes in, Robert Leonard comes in and goes to his broker and says, I don’t know whether Robert is going to buy these or sell these. He may already own some, where can he buy some and where can he sell some? I’d say, okay, they’re worth 3.62. Tell your customer to outbid 3.5 and I’ll offer them at 3.75. So yes. And if you bought 10 options at 3.75, in theory you would be losing $13. The difference between 3.62, what I thought they were, and 3.75. So you would pay a cost. That’s just the cost of doing business. It’s like paying, when you buy a TV, paying over the cost of the TV and that would cost you about $12. And I would get that and I would call that edge.

Kevin Kennedy (13:51):
Multiply that by me doing hundreds of trades a day or a thousand of trades on busy days, and all the sudden it’s $1,000 a day business, a $1,500 a day business, a $2,000 a day business. Did you lose? Yes, but that’s just a cost like you lose when you go to Best Buy and buy a TV, you technically lost. If you buy that TV and then turn around and sell it, you’re not going to get the same price for it. But those spreads were pretty tight even back then because there was so much competition in the crowd. But as the markets evolved and things became more electronic and things became able to be displayed much more quickly. And with even more democratization of market makers, I used to trade five to 10 stocks. That’s all I can handle with turning my sheets constantly. And you would go home and you think you’ve really got a busy day.

Kevin Kennedy (14:32):
Now, most market maker firms trade somewhere between hundreds and up to four or 5,000 options a day, because of the automation.

Robert Leonard (14:39):
Are you only banking in that spread? Are you not taking the opposite bet against that person? Let’s just say that the call option does go, or the share price goes to 65, 70 and they do execute that option, that call option that they bought. Are you not taking the other side of the bet and you’re just taking that spread or where does that play in?

Kevin Kennedy (14:59):
Another great question. What market makers generally do, they’re not going to just sell that and hope that Quaker Oats doesn’t go up or hope that Quaker Oats goes down. They’re going to hedge that. Ideally, you would hedge that with the exact same option. So you just sold them for 3.25 or three and a quarter. Ideally, the best hedge is to buy them back at three. The odds of that coming back in, in the next few minutes is not good. What you do is, you say, well, I need to make sure I don’t have too many risks. So the first thing you’re doing is hedging with the underlying. I might say, well, that call option that I just sold to that retail customer is going to cost me $200 if the stock goes up a dollar. How do I hedge that? I buy 200 shares.

Kevin Kennedy (15:42):
So now I’ve bought 200 shares, if the stock goes up a dollar, I’ll largely break even. You’ve built a guard rail around your position. But then you have to start thinking about longer-term, and what happens if I sell more of these or what happens if the stock goes up $30? That 200 shares is not going to cut it and you’re going to have other risks. You’re looking at different ways to manage risk. The most immediate way is to try to put a guard rail in or protection against that first $1 move. Generally, people refer to that as hedging the Delta. And then you’ll start to think of things, like, wow, as my position grows, maybe I sell another few hundred of these. I need to have something that’s also going to do exceptionally well if the market moves and you’ll buy maybe another month’s volatility or that same month, maybe the 65-strike instead of the 60-strike.

Kevin Kennedy (16:28):
And then you put them in your position and it spits out a risk model or risk position of how much exposure you have on the $1 move. How much exposure you have if the stock were to move $5, how much exposure you have if just the volatility, the stock doesn’t move, but the volatility just starts to go up, because there’s a takeover rumor and there’s a ton of demand. That’s what we call the Vega risk. Then you have the risk of, well, how much am I going to make every day if this thing doesn’t move? That’s a good thing. But those who own call options, every day, there used to be a hundred days left to expiration, now there’s only 99. Now there’s only 98. They’re losing money that way. So you’re hedging, we call that theta. That is the decay of the option.

Kevin Kennedy (17:08):
There’s a lot of different avenues, right? The volatility component, which can go up and down, we call Vega, the decay of that option, which can go over a period of time, which will become closer and closer to zero in the amount of premium. And then there’s just the Delta risk of, hey, what is a $1 move going to do to my position? The first thing market makers do is hedge with the underlying stock.

Robert Leonard (17:30):
Having been involved in the capital markets for decades now, back in the 80s, what we just talked about to today, how have you seen capital markets evolve? How has technology had an impact on the markets and even the rise of retail investors?

Kevin Kennedy (17:45):
I think of some anecdotes, when I first started, I remember a broker coming up to me and I was really happy. So now 87 and 88 were challenging. 89, the market’s starting to come back, I’m like, I like this. I’m making good money. I’m 23 years old. A broker, a guy who had been down there for years, said, by the way, we’re all going to be out of business about two years. What do you mean? He said, well, this is all going to be electronic, we don’t need you. The market makers, we had such egos that you’re thinking like, nobody can do what I do. I’m yelling out three bids at 3.25, and I’m doing that with my sheets. Look how quickly I am. No computer can absolutely do that and do it as well as I do. And then you start to read the tea leaves and see that, wow, technology is really changing and changing fast.

Kevin Kennedy (18:23):
And then all of a sudden we started to get these orders. The example that I used, Robert, where you come in and you called your broker, no, no, no. You called your broker maybe at Merrill Lynch, but he had a front end that he could just send it to the floor broker quickly and get an automatic execution and took that two and a half minute example down to about 30 seconds. And it’s like, wow, that’s pretty cool. And then we saw more business when that came. And then the floors kept going and there was even more and more technology. We would post quotes electronically instead of yelling them to that clerk that I said, hey, can you make that Quaker Oats bid three to three and a quarter. I would have a little bit handheld in my hand. And I would just push a button and it would say three bid at three and a quarter.

Kevin Kennedy (19:03):
Then we expanded that to say, well, why do you need to be on the floor to do that? We started to give those what we call auto quote features to larger firms that wanted to expand and take advantage of economies of scale. And then we saw somebody that said, well, why do we need these floors at all? And the International Securities Exchange, ISE as opposed to the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange, ICE, the International Securities Exchange said, we’re going to create a consortium of banks and retail order flow providers, and we’re just going to send in orders electronically. We’re going to create a brand new exchange. It’s not going to have a trading floor and we’re going to compete in everything. Because one thing I did not touch on, is years ago, the way the markets were set up, when option started in the mid-70s, was that each option, generally there were a few exceptions.

Kevin Kennedy (19:51):
If you traded Apple, you trade it on the Pacific Stock Exchange. If you traded Microsoft, you’ve traded on the Pacific Stock Exchange. If you trade it Quaker Oats, you trade it on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. IBM, CBOE, Disney, Amex, and likewise. ISE came out and said, we’re going to trade all of these things on our exchange. And again, traders were saying, that’s not going to happen. That’s not going to work. You need human interaction. The ISE did exceptionally well, they got off to a great start in 1999. They grew market share for 15 years. Well actually for about 12 or 13 years, up until about 2012, peaked, their market share started to erode, and then ironically in 2016, Nasdaq bought the ISE, which is now in my portfolio of products where my team runs the International Securities Exchange. Nasdaq owns that. We paid 1.1 billion for it five years ago.

Robert Leonard (20:45):
Where are we today? Do we still have any physical trading floors? Do we still have any physical traders anywhere?

Kevin Kennedy (20:51):
Yeah, we do. And I love saying this. This is my favorite statement. The oldest stock exchange in the country is owned by Nasdaq. It’s the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. We did a complete revamp. The last day of the old stock exchange was right around March of 2017, which ironically was 30 years after I started. I had my first interview in March of 2017. I had great accomplishments personally for that. I felt really good about it. We created on the eighth floor of a building in Philadelphia, right near 30th Street Station, a brand new trading suite, trading floor, all the rules still intact, except that all the floor brokers have unbelievable technology that they walk around with handhelds and they can trade. I call this the deep sea fishing pier. They can trade these large orders and they can immediately put them right into the electronic market. So they respect the bid and offer.

Kevin Kennedy (21:45):
They have to trade within that bid and offer all 16 options exchanges that are across the US. Nothing trades out of line. Customers get the best price. And we’ve done analysis on the trading floor. Generally, there are about 20 traders on that floor that come in and trade 4,000 stocks. The prices they get are so close to the midpoint, and they’re for very, very large orders. We feel really proud about the fact that we’re getting investors really good prices there. That exchange exists today. It’s gotten a brand new refresh. We kept it open largely through the pandemic. We closed from March 18th, 2020 till June 3rd. We put in all kinds of safety measures and it’s thriving today. It’s one of the best options floors out there. There are still three or four. CBOE still has their floor. The ICE, which owns the New York Stock Exchange. They have two floors, the Amex and the old Pacific Stock Exchange, which they now call Arca.

Kevin Kennedy (22:37):
And then the Boston Options Exchange actually has a trading floor in Chicago. There are still a handful of floors, but the Philadelphia Stock Exchange is the oldest stock and or options exchange, older than one of our competitors in New York, which was founded in 1792. So we are the oldest.

Robert Leonard (22:55):
Something I think about a lot is how today’s stock market is functioning compared to how it has over history. Even back when the time period we’re talking about, and even before then, some would argue that it’s fiscal and monetary policy that is really driving why markets are acting differently today than they have historically with interest rates and other different policies that have been enacted. Some would argue that it’s technology from things that changed in the 80s that you just talked about, to where we are today. When you study the markets, how they are now, have we seen a fundamental shift that makes these stock markets truly “different”?

Kevin Kennedy (23:36):
Yeah. it’s funny, right? You hear that phrase and I refuse to use that phrase. It’s almost like, if you say it’s different this time you’re going to get in trouble, it’s going to come back to bite you. Here’s the way I look at it. I think markets were going to evolve technologically. They just were, and they were going to be democratized. I think three or four or five things really sped that up. I would say the monetary policy was one of those four or five or six things. Let’s think about what they were. One is just the technology I laid out for you a couple of times so far on your podcast, which is just, things are getting better, more efficient, more market makers, more participants, and more competition. The ISE right around 1999, 2000, really took volume up, double because of the competition.

Kevin Kennedy (24:20):
It’s just a great reminder of what competition can do for an industry. But from 2000, in 2000, through the crisis options, the volume went up a few percent a year, seven to 10% a year, which is a great clip. And then it leveled off from 2012 to 16. And then what happened since then is, 2016 and on, we bought the ISE. I felt really good about the ISE because I had seen this. And a lot of times and much like one of your other favorite asset classes, much like real estate, the options volume moves a lot like that. I look at it as a staircase. It’s flat, flat, flat, flat, and then huge jump. And then flat, flat, flat, flat, and then a huge jump, which is what you generally, at least I’ve noticed in real estate.

Kevin Kennedy (25:00):
We were flat from 2013, well after the crisis, through 16. And I thought like, this is going to be a great time. We doubled down, we literally went from three exchanges to six and then a lot of weird, interesting things started to happen. Crypto became much more prevalent. I think that democratized trading, you saw it overseas at first and then eventually here. People got used to taking risks. People got used to 24-hour trading. They got used to trading on screens. They got used to trading small lots at a time. And now you have retail coming into our markets, the options markets then also created expirations that are weekly. The ability to have instant gratification on hedging risk. And think back to that Quaker Oats example, I said, I need to hedge.

Kevin Kennedy (25:45):
Well, generally I would look at the underlying, but now with weeklies, I would look at something that’s going to hedge my risk for three or four days. And maybe that big, instead of being three to three and a quarter and most weeklies, it’s a penny wide or two pennies wide. You get really good prices there. You have a couple of things. You have the technology going in general, you have volume just starting to grow. You have crypto is becoming more prevalent. You have social media, people just educating people. We’ve seen the flattening of the world in the last 10 years specifically, but you can get options information very quickly on Twitter, on Instagram, on TikTok even, wherever. And you’re just educating people. On top of that, it was November of 2019 that commissions for retail went to zero.

Kevin Kennedy (26:29):
They didn’t go to zero in options, but they went to zero in equities and they got really, really cheap in options. I think if you trade enough, you can get down to zero, but that became another ingredient of why things started to go. And then on top of that, the crème de la crème, the final cherry on top for growing of options to me, was COVID. And COVID was a coming-out party for many, Peloton, for Zoom, for even Amazon, for Netflix. I would throw the US options industry right in there. It was just, hey, I’m going to be at home. I’m getting a subsidy. I see things like Penn National Gaming, bringing more and more light to the markets. I have time to read and educate myself about options trading. It’s a perfect storm of five or six things, and now we’re at that staircase.

Kevin Kennedy (27:10):
To put it in perspective, options volume from 2013, till about 17 was about 15 to 17 million options a day. And now this year we’re averaging 39 million options a day. It’s coming in a little bit this month, in that low 30s. But I think the last I looked at 15 of the largest volume option days in history was in 2021. We used to be tied to volatility, traders would go to a conference, they’d commiserate with other traders and say, well, we just need a volatility gauge and Nasdaq has a great volatility gauge called VOLQ, that gauges the volatility of the Nasdaq-100, but we need VOLQ to go up and just double and do this and do that. Well, volumes have been coming down. Things have become less volatile and options volumes is going up, which is an unbelievably healthy sign for the options industry.

Kevin Kennedy (27:57):
So will volumes come down in the next 3, 6, 9 months as people get back to work, as people become out of COVID and people actually take vacations again? Absolutely. Will it get back to where it was in 2018 and 19? I don’t think so. I think we’re at the cusp of just a huge inflection point of unbelievable options trading over the next decade. And I’m super excited about it,

Robert Leonard (28:18):
Which has had a bigger impact on capital markets, fiscal and monetary policy or retail investors’ access to capital markets and education?

Kevin Kennedy (28:26):
I think it sped it up. Just like COVID did, I would say the latter, but I think fiscal policy played a part. If you don’t have a place to put your money and get 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10%, when I started in the business in 1987, the broker loan rose rate was 10%. If you don’t have a place for that, then you don’t mind keeping it in Dogecoin or Bitcoin or Ethereum. Right? I think monetary policy has played a part, but it’s not just the monetary policy. I think it’s just the stagnation of economic growth over the whole world. It definitely has played a part. I don’t know if it’s been the largest part, because I think it’s a key part.

Robert Leonard (29:01):
One of my personal concerns about the rise in popularity of options trading is that I’m seeing it anecdotally. This is just from what I’m personally seeing, not research study or anything like that. I’m seeing it come from a lot of brand new investors who don’t fully understand what they’re buying or why they’re doing what they’re doing, and specifically with the options. Is the current growth in options trading sustainable? Is there going to be a point where this crumbles and backfires on speculative options traders?

Kevin Kennedy (29:32):
I think if we’re not careful that can happen. I mentioned it early on in 1987, 88, it did backfire. There was a lot of speculation in 86, 87, 88, and it did backfire. This is where I would not say, no, no, Robert, it’s different this time. We have to be careful. We have to educate people, so things that would happen to Alex Kern, we have to make sure those things don’t happen. We have a lot of work ahead of us to continue to educate. And you see this in cryptocurrency, there are a lot of good things in cryptocurrencies. And then you see some of the more speculative currencies that people just create bubbles. That happens even in options, right? You are going to get a segment of the population that shouldn’t be an option. They need to be careful and we need to have those guard rails.

Kevin Kennedy (30:14):
I will tell you this, the wholesalers, the broker-dealers, OCC, OIC, the exchanges, people largely do their part, but it’s one of those things you always need to do more and we need to be careful. But I also would say that the new investor, while there’s certainly a segment of the new investor that is likely in any time, likely in a little bit over their head, and we need to be careful, just need to really do what we can to help and educate. The average retail investor anecdotally that I’ve seen, and we have a lot of really good interns at Nasdaq, I’ve come across just family members and their friends, people are educated. A lot of that is the flattening of the world. You see sometimes the pundits will say, retail, it’s going to happen again. I would say that’s not necessarily the case. There are a lot of really well-educated investors.

Kevin Kennedy (31:04):
The new retail isn’t all traders. And in fact, you see a little bit with the comical things that go on in Twitter land, but paper hands and diamond hands, a lot of these people are in. Could it backfire? Sure. Are they paying a high multiple? Sure. But in many things like Hertz, I’ve read recent articles that they’ve done well. I think we have a responsibility as we’ve always had, to continue to educate and continue to put protections in. But I think we need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The right answer isn’t to just shut down options trading for retail, it’s to be more thoughtful, to educate more, to provide some safeguards. I think Robinhood is doing that. I think Robinhood grew really, really quickly and has the opportunity to really help, much like others, and provide a lot of education. And we’re learning a lot over the last year and a half of where we can do things better.

Robert Leonard (31:53):
For those who don’t quite have that education piece yet and they are just speculatively testing the waters and they’re doing it with bigger positions than they should be. What is it going to take for them to understand the difference between speculating and true investing or just to at least get the right education for options trading? Is it going to take them to completely blow up their account and lose all that money that they have invested before they really take those steps?

Kevin Kennedy (32:19):
I certainly hope not, but you do learn by losing, right? You learn, if you touch a hot stove, you learn when your hand hurts. And if you lose money, you learn quickly. What we want to do, is to make sure that people use this acronym, right? ELO. I hope that that’s an exaggeration. I’m sure it’s not in many cases. I hope that’s not the case. Well, are there are people that are going to touch the hot stove when you tell them don’t touch the hot stove? Of course. But I think if the order flow providers provide the right mechanisms to make sure they can only lose X amount, and I’m in contact with a fair amount of CEOs of retail trading firms. They’re trying to take those steps. I think risk protection and risk mitigation are probably taken more seriously now than I’ve seen in my 34 to 35 years of trading.

Kevin Kennedy (33:02):
But Robert your right to be concerned, we’ll always be concerned, no matter how good we are, we should have that concern. I think we’re at a pretty good spot if we do the work. The work has to be done. But I see it, I see people are taking this seriously. I don’t see the leaders in our industry saying, oh no, it’s fine. Everybody should have the right to lose whatever they want. No, they know they need to protect. We need to put the right protections and I think those things are happening.

Robert Leonard (33:25):
You mentioned that the Nasdaq has six US options exchanges, and you lead all of them. Tell us a bit about the different options exchanges the Nasdaq has and why six exchanges are even necessary.

Kevin Kennedy (33:38):
It’s funny. We get this question a lot. In fact, when we bought the ISE five years ago and we had already had three exchanges, some people were saying, good, you’re going to close the other two or three of the ISE. Well, why would we buy them to close them? But there’s a huge amount of segmentation and differentiation. I know to the average investor, the example that I just laid out in Quaker Oats, three to 3.25, why do I need six exchanges? But let’s focus on the market maker for a second. You have certain market makers that invest in technology that they’re really good at. They hire great engineers and they’re really fast at providing that market. Instead of taking two and a half minutes like it did in 1987, instead of it taking 10 seconds like it did in 1999, instead of it taking a half a second like it did five years ago, they can put a market up there and change it in a millisecond or a microsecond. And that provides better prices.

Kevin Kennedy (34:27):
We have a segment of market makers that do that really, really well. And we cater to them on a place where maybe there’s a platform where we get a lot of retail orders that come in. We want to make sure they get the best price quickly. There’s one example of a segment that like, wow, we have a really fast market maker, they provide really good prices. But then you have other liquidity out there from other market makers that say, I would love to provide liquidity. I think I can give a really good price. I did not have the ability to spend a hundred million dollars on MIT engineers, but I could provide liquidity. We know the markets really well. What we do is, there’s another segment that runs options and we run it for a hundred milliseconds, and I’ll stick to the same equation.

Kevin Kennedy (35:04):
That Quaker Oats market, which in 1987 was three bid at 3.25 today. I don’t think Quaker Oats exists anymore. But in a symbol, it would be three bid at $3 and 4 cents. So now your spreads have tightened and you get a retail order from Robert Leonard that wants to come in and buy 10 at the market. What happens is, we’ve run a Kmart special, a blue light, a little indicator goes on, on everybody connected to the exchange and says, wow, there’s an order to buy 10 call options. Much like 1987, when I was standing in the crowd, anybody connected, whether you’re a market maker or a customer, you can get that indication if you connect to the system, see that there are 10 contracts to buy, and you can say I’ll sell these at $3 and 3 cents. And that it happens all within a hundred milliseconds and we call that price improvement mechanism.

Kevin Kennedy (35:52):
Every exchange brands a little bit differently. But then all of a sudden that customer paid 3.03 instead of 3.04, that’s a big segment. We have various ones that have little nuances and they run on our different exchanges. Then we have the trading floor. So that’s a whole different, what I call the deep sea fishing pier. 2000 contracts at a time, representing a notional value of $10 million or $30 million. We have that segment. Then we have one of our exchanges, ISE that we bought five years ago, it’s really, really strong and complex orders. They build a really good complex order. When I say complex order, think of a spread, right? If somebody who wants to buy the April 60 calls and layout $3, but they also want to offset that and they’ll sell the April 65 calls for a dollar, so that they’re financing their purchase and they’ll have what they call vertical bull spread, call spread or vertical bull spread. And they can put that order on one of our exchanges as a complex single order.

Kevin Kennedy (36:46):
And then we have other market makers, I’ll walk down the streets of Chicago, where many of our market-making firms are. You’ll see some they’re really good at pricing volatility and want to show extra size at certain prices that are active and then we’ll reward them for giving them a bigger percentage of the trade. They may be not the fastest, but they’re really confident in their volatility numbers, those old sheets that I had. They’ll look at that and they’ll provide deep liquidity and we want to cater to that. Of our six exchanges, they all cater to a different segment. I’ll tell you, the success story for me is, when we bought the ISE, the Nasdaq owned three exchanges. I had the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. I had the Nasdaq Options Market and I had something called BX Options.

Kevin Kennedy (37:27):
The ISE had three and we bought the ISE stock exchange, something called GEMX or Gemini. And then the last one was something we called Mercury. Mercury and BX Options were both literally 0.1% of market share. We got taken a task by some clients and some industry groups and said, what are you doing? You’re causing connectivity problems. People now have to connect to your exchange. What are you going to do? And I said we’re going to grow it. It’s what we’re going to do. And now both of those exchanges are approaching a combined 2.5 to 3% on any given day. And we’re providing real value, because another piece of the pie that I didn’t mention to you, is if you’re somebody that’s going to be out there… When I was a market maker, Robert, I could leave in the middle of the day and go to the movies and be done.

Kevin Kennedy (38:11):
Like, all right. I was three bid at 3.25, but I’m out of here. I’m going to go catch Jurassic Park, and leave. A lot of market makers did that. Now market makers can still unplug and if they have to reset their systems or do whatever, but then you could have a void in liquidity. What we do on a handful of our exchanges, is we run what we call a lead market maker or a specialist system. And for that, we make sure that market makers are there over 99% of the day and they’re there and they’re providing that liquidity. Let’s say you want to be the specialist or the lead market maker in Apple, well, that spot may already been taken. And then we may have a good market maker. This is why I love to do that.

Kevin Kennedy (38:46):
And we say, well, we have actually another venue for you, and you can be on BX Options and you can be the lead market maker there. And then you’re feeding, you’re growing that entire ecosystem. You’re allowing other market makers to become a specialist or a lead market maker, which is just helping the liquidity. I think overall the industry, not just Nasdaq, the industry has done an incredible job about building out that ecosystem over the years. That’s a long-winded way of saying why we have six exchanges. They all cater differently, or we wouldn’t get the market share. It would just all go to one or two venues. But we at Nasdaq provide really six valid reasons if not more to differentiate between order flow.

Robert Leonard (39:22):
What I find interesting and what a lot of people I think listening that probably don’t realize, is that, even though Nasdaq is a stock exchange, it’s a publicly-traded company. And the same with the New York Stock Exchange. How and why is a company or an exchange like Nasdaq publicly traded? I think somebody listening might be like, well, they’re just providing a service for two parties to exchange goods. Why are they not, not for profit or nonprofit? How is this a publicly-traded for-profit business? Where does Nasdaq make money?

Kevin Kennedy (39:54):
Look, we’re a very large business that caters to a lot of different segments. So not only does our options business cater to different types of market makers, we at Nasdaq are a FinTech company that provides great governance and listing services for our list of companies. We provide market technology overseas, over a hundred stock exchanges. We provide back-office solutions for people. We trade the equities market. We have various reasons for ample opportunity to cater to investors. I think we’ve done a terrific job. I wasn’t always with Nasdaq as I laid out, I’ve been here about 12 years now. But since exchanges have been mutualized, the competition has been incredible. It’s not driven. I lived in a world where it was driven by the members and the members’ profitability. That’s not good.

Kevin Kennedy (40:41):
Being pushed to be efficient and come up with technological solutions and innovation and compete among other public companies and other exchanges, and largely most of the exchanges now are public companies, a few are not. But CBOE, the largest are, CBOE and Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange not to mention CME and ICE. I think the record is clear, if you’re catering to members like we did in the 80s and 90s when customers never traded anything for free, customers would pay 35 cents a contract, maybe 50 cents a contract, I think the innovation has been exponential being part of the public ecosystem.

Robert Leonard (41:16):
Of course, I don’t expect you to disclose anything proprietary or that can’t be shared with the public yet, but sharing what you’re allowed to. Where does the Nasdaq and the crypto world collide in general? And then where does the world of, and specifically your world of options collide with crypto?

Kevin Kennedy (41:37):
Okay. Really good questions. Things that we think very often about and have been for years. There are a couple of avenues, none of this is something that we haven’t discussed. There’s a lot of listings publicly. There are a lot of ETF applications down at the SEC now. I think that the crypto world is craving some type of regulation and clarity towards regulation. And if ETFs are approved, I think you’ll see Nasdaq play in that space as well. We’ve a business that we’ve re-energized in the ETP business and we’re leveraging off that the derivative of success we’ve had in options and we’re re-engaging there. I think clearly ETP could play a role depending on what chairman Gensler decides to do over the next coming six months to 18 months. But one of the strengths of Nasdaq is in market surveillance.

Kevin Kennedy (42:21):
I’ll be careful here. I’m not sure what we disclosed, but I don’t think it’s any secret that we are exceptional in regulation and surveillance. And that is something that I think the crypto world would benefit from, transparency, surveillance, making sure that that world is regulated as possible as more and more people, as it becomes more democratized. I’d say the two pieces of low-hanging fruit are just on the surveillance and regulation side and in the ETP business, both of which are public obvious statements that we can do. Now, whether we do more than that, we’re watching it closely, look, it’s a $1.6 trillion market, which sounds huge. On the other hand, it’s equivalent to just one of many Nasdaq stocks that have accelerated in value over the last few years.

Kevin Kennedy (43:01):
I think there’s room for tremendous growth. I think it’s still super early and I think Nasdaq will be playing a part, so many ways for us to add value there.

Robert Leonard (43:09):
What do you see is the future of capital markets?

Kevin Kennedy (43:12):
More democratization, without a doubt. You’re already hearing it and seeing it, in a way that I didn’t hear it in the 90s. 90s, it was about, hey, I’m into this stock thing. Now I think it’s just people taking it for granted, that you need to be an investor. You need to be a time investor as opposed to trader. I think the capital markets will continue to attract new money and more comfort value from investors, knowing that the best place for their money, over a long period of time, much like the Buffet approach is in the capital markets. I think we will become more competitive against things like crypto. I think we need to evolve as an industry. We need to be in the cloud and everywhere that we can, we need to continue to democratize and allow access to more and more participants on the liquidity side. What I call the market making, just providing liquidity throughout the day.

Kevin Kennedy (44:01):
I think eventually you’ll probably get maybe a bit of extended-hours trading. We already have that today in our equities markets. And there’s just not a lot of interest, but I think you might see an uptick there. I think there’ll be more and more automation and it will just be easier to interact with the markets. You and I have discussed this throughout, the two and a half minutes is down to a microsecond. But I think you’ll be able to say, look at your portfolio very quickly and interact with AI and just create something that you want to do. I’m not a very, very innovative person, so probably a little bit over my head, but I think you’re going to see continued, unbelievable innovation, things that we can’t even think of just yet.

Robert Leonard (44:38):
Do you see crypto forcing traditional financial stock exchanges to extend their trading hours? You mentioned it briefly there. Crypto is 24 hours a day. Retail investors, younger investors that are going to lead the market over the next decade, they’re going to be used to that because of the crypto world. That’s what they’ve grown up with, right? Is that going to become more prevalent in the financial world that we’re used to, the traditional world?

Kevin Kennedy (45:02):
I think about it a lot. As you know I’m a former trader and traders like to trade. And as an exchange operator, I want to maximize our opportunity. The thing that you have to weigh is clearing and settlement. One of the things that have come out of this, what I call the Reddit, GME scenario early this year, is that settlement is at T+2, meaning it takes two days after the trade for equity trades to settle, which is too long. Right now there’s a push, depending on what the SEC, direction they provide, we’re likely to shorten that cycle. I think as things shorten, then it becomes easier to be open for the whole day or a bigger part of the day. Things you have to weigh in though, are things like corporate actions. In the corporate listings world, you have a lot more things that are affecting that price and things where you need to pause the markets, things like earnings, things like a dividend that may be a special dividend.

Kevin Kennedy (45:53):
There are those factors, but will we get to more extended hours? Probably. I don’t know that it’s coming in two to three years, because we have a lot of work ahead of us as far as just education and getting on track. All the things that were exacerbated during this last crisis, things we did exceptionally well on one hand, and then, on the other hand, things like settlement and may be increased surveillance, I’d like to get our act together there specifically and make sure that we have everything buttoned down and then we can continue to grow. Because think about it, you can trade equities after hours today. They trade on certain days, but they’re not through the roof busy. I think it could eventually happen, but I don’t think it’s just around the corner, not just yet.

Robert Leonard (46:33):
Having run your own trading firm and being a derivatives trader, what lessons did you learn as a trader that those listening today can learn from? What major mistakes did you make?

Kevin Kennedy (46:43):
I made a lot. One is to realize it’s okay to make mistakes. And two, much like anything, just try to limit them. I use a phrase a lot, sort of like the trading world and then there’s your millennial investors’ world. Let me talk first about what I tell young investors. I spend a fair amount of time with college students at my Alma mater on their finance clubs, and they come in for visits. I’m close to a few professors there that we keep in contact with. Just as far as an investor, I would stress, don’t fumble in the red zone. What I mean by that is just, if you want to be a little more aggressive with your investing, fine, but don’t all of a sudden put 90% of your assets in Dogecoin, because you just feel really good, but Elon Musk is going on Saturday Night Live.

Kevin Kennedy (47:28):
Have a plan, have a long plan. It needs to be 80% Warren Buffett, and 20%, just some sort of Jim Cramer, I’ll call it. A little more aggressive, and I think if you keep that balance and just try not to give in to that impulse of doing something that you know doesn’t sound right, because you’re getting a little greedy, then you’re going to have a really successful investing career. I would say just, it really is that broad-based, diversified portfolio, in for the long haul, and just put it away and hope that the market goes down a little bit. If you’re an early investor for the long term and you buy, let’s say you’re working, you’re out of college a year or two, and you put $100 a paycheck and you get 26 paychecks a year and you put $2,600 in the market. Do you want the market to be up 10% next year or down 10%?

Kevin Kennedy (48:18):
I kind of think you want it to be down 10% next year, because you’re in it for 30 years, and it’s nice to have those ups and downs in dollar-cost average. Maybe you step on the gas a little bit when the market’s down five, hits a correction of five or 10%, but just have a plan and stick to the plan, and try it not to over speculate. You might need to speculate a bit to just learn, because you do learn by losing a little bit of money, but if you speculate, the odds are you’re going to lose. Regarding trading, Robert, I could go on forever about that bad trades that I’ve made. When I golf, I can’t remember the hole before me. I golf with golfers who are like, I can’t believe I hit that out of the trap and I should have done this and I should’ve done that. I’m like, well, I’ve already forgotten that last hole.

Kevin Kennedy (48:55):
When it comes to trading, I think I remember every bad trade I ever made, and there literally are like thousands. I could probably list to 200 right here in about 10 seconds. It’s okay to lose money and just try not to be emotional, do the right thing. Here’s the one bit of advice I would have if you do have a position that you’re just thinking too much about, or you’re just not sure what to do, there’s nothing wrong with selling a quarter to a half of it. And then you’ll be happy no matter what it goes or you’ll be miserable no matter what goes. I’m going to give you one, an example. Somebody owns 2000 shares of a stock. They bought a few years ago at $5. They put $10,000 into it. 2000 shares and they look at it. They have done all those right things, they haven’t been sweating it out, but now it’s six.

Kevin Kennedy (49:34):
And now they’re thinking about buying a house, they want the money, but they want to stay in the market. They own 2000 shares at 60, it’s $120,000. And they’re thinking the market’s toppy. I’m just not sure what to do, but I really want to be in the market. You sell half. If you’re really close to pulling the trigger and you’re just not sure, you sell half. So you sell 1,000 at 60. Now, the next day it’s going to move $5. Do you want it to go up or down? If it goes up, you’re miserable that you sold a thousand shares yesterday and you gave up $5,000 opportunity. If it goes down, you’re miserable that you didn’t sell the whole thing, which is what I say welcome to being a trader.

Kevin Kennedy (50:11):
You’re an investor at $5, at 60 because now you need to make a decision in the next couple of days or the next couple of months because you’re thinking about buying a house and putting a down payment down. Now you’ve gone from investor to trader, and no matter what you do, you’ll be miserable. Wherever it moves, you can beat yourself up. My advice, don’t beat yourself up, because hopefully, that illustrates that, depending on whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist or how you compartmentalize trading, you just need to move on. You need to be even-tempered, make a decision, move on, and lowering risk is an okay thing.

Robert Leonard (50:42):
This doesn’t necessarily work in the case that you just mentioned when you need the money for something like buying a house. But one of my favorite ways to approach what you just mentioned is, sell the principle. In that case, I would take $10,000 out. Everything else that’s in there, just let it ride, essentially free money, right? If you lose it, obviously that’s going to suck, but…

Kevin Kennedy (51:01):
That’s part one. That’s really the first thing you should do. While you’re debating on how much to sell, get the principal back. If something just weird and bizarre happens in the home market, you at least got that. There’s never anything wrong with getting the principal back. I think that’s great advice.

Robert Leonard (51:14):
Yeah, I do that. And then, or even just lock in a certain return that you want to have, doubled your money. Take out 20 grand, at least you got 100% return. Something that you’re like, okay, even if I lost everything else that’s remaining, I’m okay because I doubled my money or whatever the return is, it could be 7% a year, whatever it might be. If you were an options trader today, how would you approach these markets? How would your approach be different today than it was back in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s when you were a trader?

Kevin Kennedy (51:44):
I love that question. I’m glad you asked it because I want to get into something that I think is really, really important for your listeners. One, the liquidity in most of the options that are trading is exceptional. So that three to three and a quarter, yeah you might see three to three and a quarter if you hit up a stock right now at Starbucks or something. It’s like, what’s Kevin Kennedy talking about, there’s still three to three and a quarter. The bottom line is, if you look at that if you watch them for a minute and look at that midpoint of the bid and the ask, and you cross that midpoint by about a penny or two, you’re going to get a fill. If somebody, one of your listeners does hit up a market, and it’s three to 3.30, that midpoint being 3.15.

Kevin Kennedy (52:19):
If you bid 3.17, you’re going to get filled. And then if all of a sudden you didn’t mean to buy that and you need to sell it and nothing else has changed, you’re going to sell it at 3.30. You’re not going to have to pay 3.25 or 3.30 and then sell it at a three. Because of that, I would say, you must trade options as a tool for anything you’re doing. To me, stock is a blunt instrument and options are a tool. Much like using a chainsaw in your backyard, you need to use it correctly. You need to read the instruction manual. You need to educate yourself, but you should use it. Don’t try to cut that tree down in your backyard with a hammer or an axe, probably use an axe, but a chainsaw is going to work a lot better.

Kevin Kennedy (52:59):
Here’s my example, I haven’t looked at Starbucks in a while, but you have a listener that just says, yeah, I really wanted to buy Starbucks at the beginning of the pandemic or the middle of the pandemic and I missed it. And now it’s $80. I’m not sure where it is. I’m going to get back in if it’s 70 in the next month or two. Okay, well go sell. How many shares would you buy? Well, I’d buy one. I’d buy 100 shares. I have $7,000 that I would love to put the work in Starbucks. Go sell one put. Don’t chase the stock at 80, go find a strike. You’ll collect a premium and collect a couple hundred dollars in premium. You sell one, not 20, not 50, one, because you’re willing to put $7,000 of work. Of the 70 strike put, you’ll collect a couple hundred dollars.

Kevin Kennedy (53:39):
It may never get the 70, and you’ll never get put that stock, but you’ve given an insurance policy to somebody who might want to dump it at 70. But if you were willing to own in any way, go sell a put. There you’ll collect a little bit of premium. That’s just one example. Let’s go back to our other example, where we said the stock was 60. You bought at a five, let’s say you did what you said. You got your principal back. And now instead of 2000 shares, you own 1600 shares or something. And maybe you’re not buying a house yet, but you’re not sure, but you’re thinking about exiting. And you’re saying, well, if it gets to 70, I think I’m going to get out. Well, don’t just put a limit order at 70, go sell the 70 strike calls, give somebody else the right to buy it from you at 70. They will pay you a healthy premium for that.

Kevin Kennedy (54:18):
And if the stock just happens to sit around 60 or 55 or 65, you’re going to collect that premium and you’ll have done nothing. And if it rallies up to 60, 70, 70, 80, you’re going to get pulled on the stock, which you would have gotten out anyway. I think if you look at the market and you have a plan, which we referred to earlier, you can put the limited amount of options. And again, within your parameters, you can put some options to work and make that tiny bit of money and find entry points and exit points. Options are an exceptional tool, which is why I think if we do all those things, not only to educate for safety purposes but to educate for our growth, we’re going to have explosive growth in options in the next decade.

Robert Leonard (54:56):
You’ve had a successful career, a couple of different careers, I guess I would say, but as an active trader and a successful career, more on the corporate side of things. What is a piece of advice you’ve received, it could be about investing, business, your career, or even just life in general that has had a big impact on you?

Kevin Kennedy (55:16):
Really two different answers I have. One is, I think by creating an unexceptional amount of overhead, by committing to certain things, whether it’s running an apartment with a couple of friends or moving out or taking that job at a startup that’s not maybe the money that you could have gotten somewhere, but committing to something, having a little overhead, having a little drive and risk, is going to take you a long way. But most important I would say, is to stay really close to mentors and to people you trust and people who are really smart. That’s what has been, when I look back at my career, I’ve been around really, really smart people. I listened to everything they could possibly say. Didn’t always agree with them when I say listen to them, I didn’t act on everything they said, but I spent a lot of time.

Kevin Kennedy (55:59):
And then at the flip side of that, I tried to give back and do the same thing. I spend a fair amount of time with younger people because honestly, I think a lot of them are way better investors than I am. So not only am I learning from the really smart people who are older than I am, I’m learning from the other side, the younger people. But that always wasn’t the same, right? When I was 20, 25, I didn’t have that group. I wasn’t listening to a bunch of 14-year-olds. However, by being close and spending time with those people who you know are going to be successful, I’d say having a really good trustful network and just keeping your ears open. I can’t tell you, there’s probably five to 10 people who I was really close to, really, really helped my career, because they just knew I listened. I cared, I worked hard.

Kevin Kennedy (56:41):
It’s still another long-winded way of saying, create a network. I don’t mean an Instagram network or a LinkedIn network, I mean a network of close people you can confide in, ask advice for, and just maintain trust with those people.

Robert Leonard (56:56):
Kevin, thanks for joining me on the show today, for those listening that want to learn more about you or just various different topics that we’ve talked about, where’s the best place for them to go?

Kevin Kennedy (57:06):
LinkedIn, is not bad. I usually respond to LinkedIn. If they say I heard you on the Robert Leonard podcast, I’m happy to connect with them when I can. Things get exceptionally busy at times, but happy to just try to give some advice. Again, people have helped me so much in my career. I’ve had conversations with people over LinkedIn that I’ve never met, and if I have the time to do it, I’m happy to try to help. And it all helps, right? The more we do for our industry, it’s an unbelievable industry. Things you’re doing Robert, like listening to a few of those podcasts, they’re so exceptionally helpful to growing out everything we do. And even, like I said, financial literacy, you’ve had some guests, Chad Collins, it’s just great. Those things all help and they’re really, really important. You’re a big part of that. LinkedIn, I’m happy to try to provide any help I can do.

Robert Leonard (57:51):
I appreciate those kind words, Kevin, and anyone that’s interested in talking to him. I recommend you reach out to Kevin on LinkedIn, take him up on his offer. Even if they don’t Kevin, you’ve made an impact today. I know you’ve helped and educated tens of thousands of people who have listened to this episode. You can leave this interview feeling good about that, even if nobody reaches out. Thanks so much for your time.

Kevin Kennedy (58:10):
All right. Thanks, Robert. Really nice to be here. Thank you.

Robert Leonard (58:14):
All right, guys. That’s all I had for this week’s episode of Millennial Investing. I’ll see you again next week.

Outro (58:19):
Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to We Study Billionaires by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Every Wednesday, we teach you about Bitcoin, and every Saturday, we study billionaires and the financial markets. To access our show notes, transcripts, or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.