Modernizing Retail Brokerage, AI Investing Tools, and the Data Center Boom: Eric Chu of TradeDesk

Steven Weinstock (00:00) Hello. What if the biggest threat to your investment portfolio isn't inflation, market volatility, or interest rates, but your own emotional reaction to the daily news cycle? Today's guest spent over two decades in the trenches of Wall Street as an investment analyst, a hedge fund insider, and an engineer. He watched institutional pros use rigorous frameworks while retail investors were left to gamble on all the hype. He's built a platform designed to give regular people institutional guardrails. We're going to unpack all this chaos and see how he has become a radically consistent investor. Welcome back to another episode of the Wealth Clock. I'm Steven Weinstock. For more than twenty-five years I've been investing in real estate, raising capital, operating apartment buildings, making loans, and building businesses. On this show, I sit down with operators, founders, investors, and entrepreneurs who are actually doing the work. No theory, no fluff, just real conversations about business, investing, entrepreneurship, and building wealth. This is the Wealth Clock. Our guest today is Eric Chu, a CFA charterholder and the CEO and co-founder of TradeDesk — one word, TradeDesk. With 20 years of experience cutting through the complexities of the capital markets and engineering, Eric is on a mission to modernize retail brokerage. He's taking the high-level tools once reserved for the big boys — for the hedge funds — like insider trader tracking, thematic allocations, and advanced AI decision filters, and putting them into a calm, systemized interface built for everyone, from high net worth professionals to the next generation of investors. Before we jump in, I have a sponsor, CableNOI. NOI stands for net operating income. CableNOI is looking for apartment building owners who own any multifamily property with 20 units plus, and they will tell you how much money you could earn from the cable companies — Spectrum, Charter, Cox. You will get residual income. You'll also get an upfront bonus per door. It doesn't cost the building owners anything. There is no wiring, no bill back, nothing to do with the tenants. Tenants will call up their regular cable companies, order internet, phone, TV — and the landlord will get a cut of the action paid directly from the cable companies. CableNOI.com. Eric, thank you very much for coming on. Eric Chu (02:35) Hey Steven, thanks for inviting me on the show. Glad to be here. Steven Weinstock (02:39) Before we start, where are you based out of? Eric Chu (02:42) We are based out of Short Hills, New Jersey — not too far away from New York City, about a half hour to forty minute train ride depending on the day. Steven Weinstock (02:50) Sure, Short Hills, I know it well. I'm here in Brooklyn, New York, so I know the New Jersey market very well. Short Hills is a nice area, famous for a big mall, and I think you have some former basketball players who live there. So it's definitely a nice part of New Jersey. Tell me what TradeDesk is. What are you working on? Let's unpack it. Eric Chu (03:04) Sure. TradeDesk focuses on two parts of the business. One part is on retail investors. For retail investors we have built, leveraging decades of experience working on Wall Street, a platform with a few hand-picked tools that used to be available only to institutional investors — tools such as insider trading tracking, portfolio allocation, thematic trading, and AI insights and research. The goal is to help retail investors — whether you're an active trader or a busy working professional who wants a financial plan for your future, for your kids' education — to have a dedicated tool designed for that purpose. Separately, we also have an institutional practice. My background has been in the data center industry for about 15 years. We help data center operators as well as institutional capital investors navigate through the data center space, which has been one of the areas supporting a lot of the AI expansion — AI training, inference, application — so a lot of that technology advancement has been supported by data centers. Steven Weinstock (04:45) Got it. Your background is in engineering, but you also worked on Wall Street. When you worked on Wall Street, what industry? Most of our audience is in real estate — that's my background — but as most investors, we dabble in alts. Eric Chu (05:02) When I was an analyst I was a telecommunications coverage analyst, covering companies such as data centers, wireless carriers like AT&T and Verizon, and wireless towers like American Tower and SBA Communications. Data centers have been, for about the last 20 years, a crossover industry between real estate and technology. Twenty years ago, before I even started coverage, when some of what are now the largest data center companies first became publicly listed, data centers were pretty much a pure technology play — companies very good at networking equipment, computing, storage, and hosting services. But over the last 20 years, more and more of these technology-focused operators have taken over the real estate behind the data centers. They've taken over the assets, built them from the ground up, acquired the land, the power generation and backup, the network equipment, the shell, and now the GPUs in AI data centers. It's becoming a commercial real estate asset class by itself. Because these companies generate regular cash flow — dividends or share buybacks — they've become more and more attractive to commercial real estate investors. They get income plus capital appreciation as these companies grow with the demand and the waves of technology. Most of them have, over the last 10 to 15 years, converted to REITs. Steven Weinstock (07:50) Understood. So somebody listening to this podcast, they hear the TradeDesk name, they Google it, they download it or go to the website. Who is this targeted for? Eric Chu (08:07) We primarily target what we call busy working professionals. Most of them are not in financial services but in other professional industries — lawyers, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, marketing executives. These people are highly paid, they have the discretionary income to support investments. Our platform has selected a few key investment tools that can help them manage their portfolio, understand portfolio risk, do research on individual stocks, and help them build their financial future. Steven Weinstock (09:03) So this service is not necessarily pitching them certain deals or investment opportunities. It's more managing or analyzing what's out there. Eric Chu (09:22) That's absolutely correct. There's no pitching, no selling of certain securities or ideas. Our platform is a self-directed platform. We provide customers with these tools to set up recurring investments, pick thematic trading themes, and use Prism AI — our fully integrated AI engine. Investors can research specific stocks or do portfolio-level analysis: what's my portfolio concentration, what's driving my performance over the last six months or a year. Because Prism is fully integrated for each customer, you feel like you're working with an agent that's helping you analyze your portfolio along the way. Steven Weinstock (10:34) This service is fee or subscription based? Eric Chu (10:38) For now we are not charging a fee or subscription. It's commission-free for US-based investors. We're still in fairly early stages, working with a selective group of customers and building up the presence of the platform. Steven Weinstock (10:58) Is this invitation only, or can anybody apply and get approved? Eric Chu (11:05) Anyone can apply. It's available in the Apple Store, on Android, and on the web at TradeDesk.co. You can put in an application and start investing right away. Steven Weinstock (11:31) So since you're not charging a fee, you're building up to get enough numbers where it's feasible to charge. You're letting the early people in for free, vetting them, making sure they fit the kind of customer you want. Eventually this will be subscription based. Eric Chu (11:56) That is the idea. Ultimately we want to provide enough tools that add enough value to justify a subscription — hopefully a multiple of the value versus the subscription fee. But that's the model. Steven Weinstock (12:13) Your target customer is not a 28 year old making $140 grand a year. It's somebody making more than the average who has a background investing in something beyond a 401k match — splashing money around in different investments, looking for better ways of analyzing their current portfolio and new opportunities. Eric Chu (13:07) That's a fair assessment. There are tools in the marketplace more suitable for beginners — someone who's never invested and wants to put in $500 to start. That's not where we're targeting. We're targeting someone more experienced. In a school analogy, not an elementary school student, not necessarily a college student, but a middle schooler or high schooler — someone with a few years of investing experience looking for a good tool that cuts through the noise. Steven Weinstock (14:21) Do you need any licensing or certifications to have software like this? Eric Chu (14:52) Very good question. We are operating in a highly regulated industry. We are an SEC-registered broker dealer and a member of FINRA. We have to follow strict regulations and securities laws for everything we do — offering, servicing customers, opening accounts, maintaining records, providing confirmation statements, funding, margin loans. We work with household names as vendor and partner companies like AWS and Alpaca, and with the exchanges directly or indirectly for data services. We also have full-time compliance personnel on staff supervising activities daily, following FINRA and SEC rules. Steven Weinstock (16:08) So this isn't just some business started with a guy who knows how to use AI and prompts. We're talking legal bills, hundreds of thousands of dollars to be compliant. You spent a lot of money to start this. You either raised money, brought in partners, or paid for it out of your own pocket. Eric Chu (17:17) Good question. TradeDesk Securities is part of a global corporation. The US is one set of operations; we also have offices in Asia, specifically in Hong Kong, where we're also a registered broker dealer with the local Securities and Futures Commission. Through our Asian regulated entity we service Asian-based and other non-US customers. There's a lot of infrastructure we've invested in over the last three plus years, and that's part of our value proposition. We also work with other small businesses, enterprises, and fintech firms — because we've built the compliant infrastructure, other companies don't have to. That could be a high-frequency signal provider that wants to vertically integrate trading and execution services to their customers. That's what we call B2B or B2B2C. Steven Weinstock (19:09) Are the big retail brokerage guys, Schwab and Fidelity, your competitors? Are you competing for the same high net worth customers in terms of research and knowledge? Eric Chu (19:39) We compete with them in certain ways, but we're trying not to compete head to head. They focus on a wide range — millions of customers, a wide range of services and products. We serve a small segment with almost handpicked services that address certain pain points, especially for working professionals. We're not trying to be the jack of all trades. We're putting together a small toolset that serves a certain segment of customers. Steven Weinstock (20:37) Some of these brokerages own private wealth arms, high net worth arms — they make acquisitions to bring people in. If you scale up past the free phase and have quite a few paying high net worth subscribers, is this a buyout opportunity? Is this something one of the big Wall Street firms would buy to bring along your investors? Eric Chu (22:01) Not necessarily, but we'd like to keep all our options open. One area where we think we're special compared to traditional broker dealers is that we're more of a fintech firm than a traditional broker dealer. Across the financial markets it's becoming more and more fintech driven — 24/7 trading, tokenization, RWA. Those are not the traditional brick and mortar, high-touch, relationship-based services. We have more engineers on staff than the traditional registered broker dealer. They help us put together the platform and constantly add new features in line with market developments — 24/7 trading, tokenized securities, crypto with partners. These are more innovative, API-heavy, fintech-driven services. We don't compete with Charles Schwab or Fidelity head to head — their business model is very different from ours. Steven Weinstock (23:45) What are you doing to grow your user base besides podcasts and traditional marketing? How are you going after these high net worth individuals? Eric Chu (23:56) A lot of it is through offline events. We find that to be one of the more successful channels in terms of customer conversion. The customers we're going after rely on trust and on track record, so the offline channels are where we've spent a lot of time and effort, often in connection with our institutional business related to digital infrastructure and data center space. Steven Weinstock (24:33) What do you think are the best asset classes over the next couple of years? Eric Chu (24:37) Hard question, but I've mentioned data centers a few times already. That's one area I know, and it's an asset class that combines technology and hard asset real estate. For some audience members not familiar with data centers — I've covered the space for 15 years, all the way from the internet wave 20 years ago, to cloud computing, to AI today. Every technology wave in at least the last 20 years has revolved around data — storage, transmission, processing, and exchange. All four of those key functions cannot happen without data centers. Going forward, especially with AI everywhere you look, you need data centers to support the growth, expansion, speed, and reduced latency that customers require. So I think data centers continue to be a very interesting asset class. Steven Weinstock (26:17) I agree. Data centers have been a word for quite some time — it started with cloud computing, Facebook needs data centers, Google needs data centers. There are a couple of REITs that specialize in data centers — Digital Realty, I think is one. Eric Chu (26:35) Digital Realty is one. Equinix is another. Steven Weinstock (26:38) Right. The masses have been hearing more about it really in the last year or so because of AI, which puts a tremendous strain on data. Data centers are popping up left and right and have become a little controversial — "not in my backyard," same as cell phone towers. I need perfect 5G but I don't want the antenna near my house. Data centers are here to stay. As we rely more on these devices, the more data we need. Hopefully some of the electricity used can be optimized. Eric, tell everybody how they can reach out to you — website, LinkedIn, email — and we'll put it in the notes. Eric Chu (28:09) Sure. You can find us at our website, www.tradedesk.co. You can also find me personally on LinkedIn or our company's LinkedIn — Eric Chu. We're most active on LinkedIn for now. You can reach me on my work email, eric.chu@tradedesk.co. Happy to do a follow-up conversation as needed. Steven Weinstock (28:38) Eric, I think the major takeaway here is that successful investing isn't about outsmarting the market with a single lucky trade. It's about building a repeatable, unemotional system that allows you to out-discipline the chaos. Thank you for joining me, Eric. I appreciate it. Thank you to everybody for joining another episode of the Wealth Clock. Like us, share us, subscribe to us. Eric, thank you very much. Eric Chu (29:04) Thank you very much, Steven.