At just 28 years old, financial advisor Luke Lloyd learned some of life’s toughest lessons—many of them forged in the blue-collar heart of Martins Ferry, Ohio. Growing up in a town where generations worked “their tails off” in coal mines and steel mills, Lloyd saw firsthand the grit and dedication it takes to build a life from the ground up.
But it was his father’s battle with cancer—and the cold way his employer treated him after 25 loyal years—that ignited something deeper.
“I might be a little crazy,” he admits, “but I didn’t feel a sense of purpose building someone else’s dream.” Watching his father be “discarded like a line item” while fighting for his life, Lloyd realized early on that you have a choice: “You either work for the man, or you are the man.”
That lesson from his dad stuck and, this year, Lloyd launched his own firm — Lloyd Financial Group. In a conversation with Benzinga, he offers his perspective on today’s market trends, the emerging role of artificial intelligence in finance, the need for universal basic income, and what the second half of 2025 will bring.
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Benzinga: With so much market volatility, how do you gauge what stock to target?
The easy answer is: Know your specialty. You need to know your craft and what you excel at. Is it trading stock futures? Is it trading options? Is it trading stocks? Is it trading the bond market? If you’re a trader, rather than a long-term investor, many people will spread themselves too thin. They focus on too many areas — even with the help of AI.
So, if you are a trader — day trader or swing trader — you want to make sure that you know exactly where your best kind of chance of success is. Once you’ve identified the best thing you’re good at, it’s essential to start incorporating the technical indicators, like Fibonacci.
Suppose you’re not using technical indicators as a trader. In that case, you’re behind the curve and losing out on potential opportunities to know where to buy and sell. I do expect that volatility is not going to go away. There will be a lot of back-and-forth news, especially about tariffs and China. However, it’s essential to have a stop loss in place for any position and stick to it.
BZ: What’s the hardest skill to have as a trader?
The most challenging skill for a trader to possess is the mental fortitude to adhere to their strategy. Once you stray away from the strategy, you’re already at a disadvantage. So, having a sell target on the upside and a buy target on the downside is probably the most straightforward yet most important advice I can give to any trader out there, as someone who used to day trade in college. I’m more of a long-term investor today, but I’ve been around the game long enough.
BZ: From April 9-10, President Trump walked back some of his tariff rhetoric, triggering a historic market rally. The S&P soared 9.5% in one day. There were signs of manipulation. Should retail traders or long-term investors be happy about that?
As a long-term investor, I have to not only analyze what I think will happen, but also position my clients accordingly. So it doesn’t matter if it makes me happy or sad. It doesn’t matter whether I like it or not. It’s the world I was born into, and I have to play along with it because I won’t change the system. The government’s too big. The Libertarian in me says that we’ll never go back to a proper free market, capitalistic system. So, yes, it does upset me, but it doesn’t matter because I don’t live in that system and never will. My clients rely on me to listen, not necessarily to share my opinion. As a trader, confirmation bias — or what you want to happen — is one of the biggest mistakes you can make: positioning your portfolio around what you want to happen, not what will happen.
BZ: Anthony Scaramucci recently said he uses Grok AI for his business. What are your thoughts on AI being used in finance?
I use it every single day, and it probably saves me, personally, 40 hours a week, between marketing, branding, and emails.
BZ: What about financial analysis, like stock picks and research?
Instead of going on Google and having to read 10 articles, I can type in a prompt to get the macro analysis news of the day, and it gives me the most important news. Of course, I fact-check it. But I used to have to wake up two to three hours before work, read the news of the day, and spend a couple of hours digesting stuff. Now it probably takes me 30 minutes to digest everything, because I can get it so quickly. So, yes, I use it every single day for stock analysis. However, the key is that, and this is where people often get themselves into trouble if they rely solely on AI.
BZ: Will AI take finance jobs?
I don’t think AI will ever be able to do all the jobs, or all of the analysis. I call it “inefficiently efficient.” We’re going to reach a point where AI and algorithms will account for close to 100% of the volume on the New York Stock Exchange. At that point, you’ll have essentially things priced to perfection. The only way the stock market works is if there are inefficiencies; if something is not priced appropriately, because supply and demand will eventually give it a fair price. So that’s discrepancy, and that inefficiency is what makes a market.
If you have AI, or all the same kind of most efficient algorithms pricing stocks and digesting the same information — giving out PE ratios, price-to-sales ratios, and growth ratios — you have almost a too efficient market where there will be no traders left. So, yes, my answer is that it will take the trader’s job. If you’re a day trader, it’s going to be a lot harder to make money, because AI is going to be so efficient that it’s going to make the markets inefficiently efficient. And UBI will come into the equation.
BZ: How does UBI (universal basic income) factor in?
Once AI starts taking jobs on a bigger scale, especially in the white collar world, you’re going to see a lot of people get angry, because no one likes losing their job on a massive scale. You’ll see systematic unemployment rise, and the solution to that will be a universal basic income. There’s no doubt in my mind that this is likely to happen over the next couple of decades due to the rise of AI, which will replace jobs and systematically increase the unemployment rate.
BZ: We can’t even get both parties to agree on basic stuff. They’re going to agree on UBI?
They have to. If you have fewer workers or fewer people working, because AI is so productive, it will also funnel money to the top. If you have a more productive corporation with fewer workers, margins increase, which in turn creates a higher stock price. Essentially, the only way it doesn’t create a higher stock price is if there are workers who can’t afford the product themselves because they are unemployed. So, that’s where the social safety net comes in to protect those people, because they do need an income, and that money will get funneled to the corporations.
BZ: What are your short-term predictions for the third and fourth quarters of 2025?
I think the third and fourth quarters are going to be very similar to what we saw in the first month or two of this year and right after the Trump election, in some ways, where you saw a lot of the equal-weight S&P 500 do better than the cap weight. I think the days of big tech are little bit behind us. In some ways, they have too much beta on the market — too much money in them. I think you’ll see money rotation into more international areas that we discussed, as well as some of the smaller mid-cap names, particularly on the value side. And you’ll see the equal-weight probably do better then the cap-weighted indices.
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Image: Courtesy of Lloyd Financial, Shutterstock
