Why Canada’s Trading Market is Ready for Disruption with Michael Arbus of moomoo Canada

**Michael Arbus** (0:00)
If you sit down and say, I want to model out what I'm going to take home if I'm successful over the next few years. Can I live my life off of this? How long until this business can support a sustainable wage for me as the leader of it or as the investor in it? And if you do that math, most acquisitions or most startups do not work, and you can save yourself a lot of time. If you do that, just that one motion upfront, model out what you're going to make and see if you can actually pay for a life.
If you can do that upfront, you will save yourself years and years and years.

**Matt Cohen** (0:34)
Welcome back to Tank Talks. I'm your host, Matt Cohen, founder and managing partner of Ripple Ventures. And today we are joined by a person whom I've known for a very long time. They actually helped me get my very first job in finance. We're excited to be chatting with Michael Arbus, CEO of Moomoo Canada. Michael gave me my first real shot in business years ago as a young co-op student on the RBC Capital Markets trading floor, and spent years on the institutional side at major base street and Wall Street desks like RBC, TD, UBS, and Merrill Lynch, covering global hedge funds, M&A event-driven situations, and mining and energy stocks. He later made the leap into entrepreneurship, turning around industrial businesses in Brazil and scrap metal companies in Canada, before going deep into crypto as an early leader at Bitbuy, which he helped scale the company from nothing into a regulated marketplace before exiting to Wondrify. Today, Michael now leads Moomoo Canada as a subsidiary of the global financial platform for Futu Holdings, focused on tools and community for self-directed retail traders.
In this conversation, Michael shares what it's actually like to move from massive institutional trading floors to building and exiting fintech businesses, including how he handled the imposter syndrome that comes with those big pivots, the real lessons from scaling a crypto platform under regulatory pressure, to a successful exit in just under two years, and why he believes that AI and agentic tools are about to fundamentally change how everyday retail investors should approach today's public markets. We also get his unfiltered read on the current state of retail trading in Canada, and how investors should be leveraging AI tools when trading in today's markets. If you're someone who is considering a big career pivot from a corporate role into a startup, or just curious about what it really takes to build and scale a fintech in Canada, this episode is for you. Now, let's jump into the Tank for this week's episode with Michael Arbus.
Michael Arbus, thanks for joining us in the Tank today. But today we're not in the Tank. We're in the lovely Moomoo Yorkville, Toronto offices.

**Michael Arbus** (2:29)
We're so glad to have you here.

**Matt Cohen** (2:31)
I'm super excited to do this. But before we start, Michael, you and I have known each other for a very long time, and I want to start off by saying thank you. Thank you to you for giving me the shot to go into finance in the first place. I started my career at RBC Capital Markets because of you as a co-op student. They thought I was an MBA grad, but little did they know.

**Michael Arbus** (2:48)
You were smarter than MBA grads.

**Matt Cohen** (2:49)
I was smarter than MBA grads, and I was a co-op student because of you. You picked me up when I was down and gave me a kick in the ass when I needed lifting up to think I can compete in that world, and I'm still in finance today because of you.

**Michael Arbus** (3:00)
That's so kind, Matt.

**Matt Cohen** (3:01)
Thank you very much for that.

**Michael Arbus** (3:02)
But in all seriousness, you were the best hire we ever had in all seriousness.

**Matt Cohen** (3:05)
I appreciate that too. But in all seriousness, you did a bit of a tour of duty around Bay Street and Wall Street. You spent your time on many trading desk. You worked with some of the greatest hedge fund investors in the world.
Take us back a little bit into the day of Michael Arbus working on the biggest trading floor in the world at UBS, Greenwich, Connecticut, size of three football fields, I believe. Just so our listeners who are maybe 20, 30 years younger, to understand what it was like being in that room.

**Michael Arbus** (3:30)
That room was basically a casino with pumped oxygen and insanity, as you know from your background too. A typical day would involve waking up at 5.15 in the morning, newspapers delivered to your house, read all three, get to the office. In your head, you filled out every piece of content that you could possibly think of that was relevant. You show up to your desk and you start writing and reading and writing and reading, and then all of a sudden the morning meeting starts.