00:00 Speaker A
You know, Steve, more broadly, I always love having you on because you have such unique line of sight into the retail investors and and what they’re doing with their money, Steve. Um, November trading volumes are they’re interesting, uh, Steve for you all. It looks like equity and options volumes if I’m reading this right, they were up year-over-year but they were down month-over month. Then it looks like crypto, Steve, uh, it looks down both ways. How how should we be interpreting this?
00:26 Speaker B
Um, I would I would look at it in the context of the whole year. If you look at in the whole in the context of the whole year, um, the months pre prior to that were the some of the all all-time high months um in in our history. So, I wouldn’t look at it as a a real slowdown. I would look at it as more what I’d call a little bit more of a return to norm even from this year. But even what we’re seeing today and and by the way, I I think there’s a lot of hope that this is the start of the Santa Claus rally which typically happens mid mid December. Um we’ve been four days down, so I think people have been waiting for this. Um, I think you’re seeing people that are still pretty engaged. You know, they’re wrapping up the year and kind of rounding out the portfolio and making sure that everything is in order um before the new year.
01:12 Speaker A
In terms of of of uh specific names, Steve, always curious to hear. what are what are you seeing? What are some of the more popular commonly held stocks?
01:21 Speaker B
You know, it’s funny, they there’s a lot of rotation that happens. People are their own uh portfolio managers. Um but what we’ve seen recently is they’ve rolled out of names that have had some appreciation like Rivian and rolled into back to the mag seven, which, you know, for a while kind of fell out of favor but now they’re it’s back in favor. So, you know, this rotation is is something that’s really fun to watch. And as we we watch customers typically take gains and sort of rotate into ones that they think have opportunities for appreciation.
01:54 Speaker A
Another another stat that jumped out Steve, margin balances. I see here they’re up about 150% year-over-year. What do you make of that? Is that to you Steve, do you see that, okay, that’s a sign of is that a sign of confidence, risk appetite? What’s your read?
02:09 Speaker B
Uh I think it’s a it’s uh it’s it’s a it’s really a factor of two things. Number one, we’ve been growing our margin business. So a lot of that is just net growth of that business, attracting new customers who are utilizing margin. And then the second component of it is again with elevated trading and elevated interest in the market, you’re naturally going to see those margin balances go up. But you’re right, the um the the um increase has been pretty extreme.
