Stocks Took the Stairs Down and the Elevator Up

**Michael Batnick** (0:00)
Sam is here, everybody.

**Josh Brown** (0:01)
Sam Ro, all right. So, Sam. Hey, Sam.

**Sam Ro** (0:04)
How's it going? Good to see you.

**Josh Brown** (0:05)
I haven't seen you since. What do we think about a new Bloodsport?

**Sam Ro** (0:16)
I mean, listen, I'm not paying for it, so yeah, the answer is yes. I'm willing to try it out. But what do you mean?

**Steve Sosnick** (0:23)
I don't know, just...

**Sam Ro** (0:24)
New cast, full reboot, or one of these AI things that...

**Josh Brown** (0:27)
No, I think it's like, I don't know, honestly, I tried to look this morning in preparation for talking to you on what they're doing.

**Sam Ro** (0:32)
Yeah.

**Josh Brown** (0:33)
And there's not much, not much.

**Sam Ro** (0:35)
Yeah, it's always like, it's the kind of thing that you really want to do well. Like, when's the last time like a sequel or a reboot has done well outside of like Top Gun 2?

**Josh Brown** (0:50)
Yeah, I don't know. Like a full, oh, the new He-Man looks horrendous.

**Sam Ro** (0:54)
Yeah.

**Josh Brown** (0:55)
My God, that's an 80s movie.

**Sam Ro** (0:56)
You know what I'm actually kind of interested in? Have you seen like the trailers or the teasers for the new Street Fighter movie?

**Josh Brown** (1:03)
There's a new Street Fighter, no.

**Sam Ro** (1:04)
There's a new Street Fighter movie coming out. And it looks like it's pretty clear that they're not trying to take themselves too seriously, which I think is always the right move when it comes to stuff like this.

**Josh Brown** (1:16)
Speaking of Van Damme, he was in the Street Fighter movie. That was a shit.

**Sam Ro** (1:18)
Oh yeah, you're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was terrible. But yeah, that was another movie where they tried to make it serious. It's like an actual action movie with him doing this stuff, but it's like these are all cartoon characters.

**Josh Brown** (1:31)
So Steve, speaking of Not That, you've been working for Petter Fee for a long time.

**Steve Sosnick** (1:38)
It's a little over 30 years.

**Josh Brown** (1:40)
I feel like he is maybe underappreciated. I bet you our average listener viewer doesn't know who Thomas Petter Fee is.

**Steve Sosnick** (1:47)
I bet you a lot of people don't. I mean, I still get like, where do you work? I tell them like interactive what?

**Josh Brown** (1:53)
Interactive who?

**Steve Sosnick** (1:54)
Yeah, so it's just we've always kind of flown under the radar. And yeah, as multi billionaires go, I think he flies under the radar to a large extent. So people in the industry know him. People outside the industry, he's not a household name.

**Josh Brown** (2:08)
So Interactive Brokers is, how would you describe the company?

**Steve Sosnick** (2:11)
What we are now is we're strictly customer facing.
Our bones are as market makers and proprietary traders. We were the largest options market making firm. We exited that business just before COVID hit and changed the industry a bit. We sold the market making division to Sigma, the hedge fund. I stayed because at that point, even though I was still actively market making, I had become a public, a talking head for lack of a better word. So I stayed behind, which ended up being okay because the two Sigma sale did not work out so well for the market making group. But right now, it's really all about how to bring as many markets and opportunities to investors. And I would say our investor base, we're thought of as a retail brokerage firm, but I think we're a bit...

**Josh Brown** (3:05)
I think of you as more like hedge fund institutional.

**Steve Sosnick** (3:08)
That's the way we want to be thought of. I would say we have a lot of individual customers that might... I don't know if you ever met my friend Henry Schwartz at the CBO. He once came up with the term pro-tail to describe a lot of individual investors who are very sophisticated and highly engaged. I think that applies. That's not an official term we use.

**Josh Brown** (3:29)
Duncan uses interactive.

**Steve Sosnick** (3:30)
Right. All right. But yeah, so that's so it's it's you know, he's an intense guy. I mean, I've been I don't know, in the early days, in the early days, you know, I sat here and he sat there and I told him much later on that I had one of the reasons one of my little tricks was I had a picture frame with the family in it, but it was like the picture was like this big and the mirror was like this big. And I'm like, you know, but after all these years, I could tell you that's how I knew you were coming. And he's like, oh yeah, he goes, oh, I always wondered that. So, you know, so, but he was an intense guy. I mean, you know, yes, he's still very engaged. I don't see him very much. He's really based, he's not in Connecticut very often, if at all. He's really based out of Florida and wherever else he chooses to be. But, you know, I can get calls or emails from him at all hours of the day and night, knowing he's just his fingers on the pulse of business.