Co-founder and CEO of EToro Yoni Assia Talks TradeZero Deal | Bloomberg Talks
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>> I'm looking at shares of E Toro Group.
They're lower today, actually having the
biggest decline ever, down about 13%.
This after the fintech company reported
revenue from crypto assets for the
second quarter that missed the average
analyst estimate. Also big news, it
announced to buy Trade Zero based in
Brooklyn for up to $231 million. We've
got with us Yoni Assia, the CEO of E
Toro. He's back with us here in the
Bloomberg Business Week studio. So, the
numbers you were saying you had a good
quarter and this is an acquisition that
that you think is is a right the right
move obviously at the time. What's the
market getting wrong about this?
>> Well, uh you know, I can't control the
markets. I can control the business. Uh
Q2 was another beat quarter. Uh great 9%
uh growth year-over-year of both uh
topline and bottom line. 18% uh
exceeding actually market expectations
of funded accounts. Huge roadmap coming
in uh across AI in the company. We
actually released uh a new app which is
taking the old app and rewritten 100%
with AI with AI focus and center around
Tory AI agent which is the Gro frontier
model and uh we were talking now about
Denip Patone from Trade Zero and the
team a great team joining us here in the
US to lead it to Toro uh in the US with
the trade zero acquisition.
>> Yeah, let's talk about the trade zero
acquisition. Dan's been on our program.
I used to speak to him all the time just
a few years ago. Uh so certainly a
familiar name to our audience. Why buy
Trade Zero rather than build something
internally? Like what does bringing on
Trade Zero do for E Toro that you
couldn't offer US customers before?
>> So when you look at our business, the
vast majority of our business is outside
the US. We have a huge franchise Europe,
UK, uh Australia, Singapore, Abu Dhabi,
uh and the US a bit got left behind sort
of the rest of the world for us where
the big part of the business is. Uh what
this brings is one a great team based
here in Brooklyn uh uh in the US with a
significant also franchise $80 million
revenues uh and a lot of knowledge and
experience in US capital markets
infrastructure. So a lot of the great
products that we actually have outside
the US which include leverage stock
trading uh long short uh on top of long
short trading we actually created
quantitative smart portfolios which
create hedge fund like strategies uh
market neutral strategies outside the
US. So all of these products operate and
work for it outside the US. Uh and we
believe that together with trade zero we
can actually bring all of these products
including futures trading which is a lot
of our customers were trading oil, gold,
silver during Q1, Q uh during Q4 Q1. Uh
so all of these products will now be
enabled to our customers through the
integration with Trade Zero.
>> Yeah. How are you planning to kind of
differ your approach when it comes to
dealing with your international clients?
Because you know I lived in London for
almost 10 years and the average retail
investor there tends to be more
conservative. they tend to prefer
physical assets whereas US investors are
really just very much into this and so
yeah how would you kind of differ the
approach uh now that we're looking at a
broader base of international clients
>> so I I think this actually shows the
huge opportunity that we have right so
it has been hugely successful outside
the US and places like Germany Spanish
France Italy the UK uh across multiple
by the way both geographies and products
247 trading of both stocks from 26
different capital markets of
commodities, indices, currencies as well
as investing, copying the top trades all
around the world. We actually feel our
products have a huge untapped market
here in the US. uh but until 2025 until
the IPO basically we just took a step
back waited actually for also the crypto
environment to be the right environment
here in the US and together with a trade
zero acquisition we were going to double
down on the US market introducing our US
customers and US customers to basically
the global community and the collective
intelligence uh in it Toro
>> you mentioned AI and one thing that
we're increasingly hearing more about is
agentic trading uh there was a great
piece in Bloomberg just last week uh a
big take. Everybody should check it out
if they haven't already about the way
that some retail traders are are
harnessing this technology. ETO is
allowing customers to use AI agents to
trade autonomously, but that's within
certain defined parameters. Give us an
update on adoption and activity that
you're seeing thus far. So, uh first of
all, just yesterday uh we launched uh an
official connector to Grock. So, we have
a great partnership with SpaceX. You can
actually go now to Grock and click uh
search for it Toro connect your e Toro
account click uh it opens basically an e
Toro single signon and then Gro suddenly
has visibility into your entire
portfolio into the portfolio of all of
the rest of the traders in it Toro and
into the X feed. So you can ask
something like uh uh look at my port
look at my portfolio look at my expost
tell me what I'm missing uh in my
portfolio. Now we've launched Tori our
own AI agent uh a while back which is
also based on grock. We launched also
now claude MCPS and we are seeing more
and more users are actually connecting
AI. There was one missing piece which we
launched about two months ago which is
sub accounts or we called it agent
portfolios. A lot of people including
myself were afraid to connect their
entire account into AI. Uh now you can
actually connect it just to a sub
account to an agent portfolio and say
let's say I have $100,000 in my
portfolio. I want $5,000 invested and I
want this now AI agent to manage my
portfolio autonomously. Now the
beautiful thing about AI agent is they
never sleep. Uh you can train them
basically on everything. My, by the way,
AI agent uh goes every day to
universities across the globe, downloads
research papers on behavioral economics,
connects the data in it Toro and runs
back tests uh uh on on on actual
proprietary data of it Toro. So we're
seeing things that up until 2 years ago
only people in places like you know
Renaissance and Millennium could do.
Suddenly we're doing it with our own
quants and we're building those tools
for our customers to run basically
quantitative trading and agentic trading
as well. I I believe this is just the
beginning of that and that is going to
actually surpass the amount of trading
activity of people on it Toro by the end
of next year.
>> Wow. Okay.
>> Yeah. All right. Well, let's talk about
prediction markets as well because
that's another growth area for a lot of
companies like E Toro uh surging in
popularity. what sort of opportunity
does that present for your company
moving forward?
>> So, uh we announced another acquisition
uh in Q2 which is Zeno. It's a
non-custodial wallet uh outside in the
US. It's a it's a great opportunity.
It's a regulated market uh outside the
US. A lot of the prediction markets
actually operate in the DeFi world uh in
non-custodial wallets. Uh Zeno uh is a
firm actually run by a great founder
that uh was actually a VC that I pitched
DTORo to 20 years ago. Um and and now
sort of uh working together, we've
launched prediction markets in a DeFi
model uh in a non-custodial wallet. It
took us, by the way, 2 weeks from uh
closing the acquisition to actually
launch the SSO connector uh uh to
basically the non-custodial wallet. So
you can transfer money seamlessly from
basically your Toro account into a
non-custodial wallet and then actually
trade tens of thousands of crypto assets
through DeFi swaps versus only 200 on it
Toro. But 200 is actually a lot. Uh uh
and of course uh new markets such as
prediction markets and coming soon
perpetuals as well.
>> Uh how does it diff how do you
distinguish at least in the US between
what maybe KHI and poly market are doing
with prediction markets and I mean this
is a really crowded space.
>> Um first of all nothing is really
crowded when you think of the entire TAM
right. So the entire TAM were still very
very early stages of the largest
transformation of wealth in history. You
think we're talking about a hundred
trillion dollars moving from older
generations to younger generations.
>> Yeah. That's outside of just prediction
mark. I mean that's that's the whole
great wealth transfer.
>> I I think it's appetite. It's risk
appetite and type of new products. And
one of the reasons we did Zeno is we
noticed we have gen zeters who are
actually very interested in living on
chain and doing transaction on chain. I
think that's where a lot of the
ecosystem is. And when you look at the
different products that we've been
launching in it Toro, it's about making
sure that customers on it Toro can stay
on it Toro whether they want to trade
stocks uh or commodities or whether they
want to actually trade crypto or
actually copy somebody else or invest in
um Alpha Portfolios on Toro or spend
their money with a Visa that's connected
to the account. So, what we're building
is a financial super app that provides
you access to any type of financial
product that you want within the Toro
ecosystem.
>> All right. Well, speaking of crypto,
Yon, we got to talk about that uh since
that seems to be a little bit of a weak
spot uh for your most recent earnings,
but I mean, what's what's the outlook uh
in terms of the revenue from that market
and really just outlook for the market
directionally moving forward?
>> I I think uh we're seeing uh you know,
crypto yet in another super cycle.
Everybody's talking about the four-ear
cycles of crypto. We launched it in
2013. Boom. Crashed 85% in 14 that we
had huge amount of revenues in 2017
coming from crypto. A huge crypto rally,
boom, a crash in 218, 2021, 2022, now
2025, and 2026. So, it does seem it
works on a clock of a cycle, maybe a
self-fulfilling prophecy. Um, and I have
no doubt I'm a very big believer in
Bitcoin as digital gold that we are
going to see Bitcoin uh going way beyond
the all-time highs that we've seen in
October, but it might take time and
people to adopt to these technologies.
>> Uh, real time, what are you seeing as a
result of the cold card wallet hack made
by Canada based Coin Kite, the crypto
that was stolen?
>> Does it have any impact on it Toro? Are
you seeing more people invest in
>> we have bitcoin ETFs?
>> Uh we we no we're seeing actually more
people moving to non-custodial. Uh so we
actually have seen people coming into it
Toro depositing crypto in it Toro uh
into Zeno and then from Zeno into it
Toro. We actually are one of the unique
firms that uh are now introducing a
crypto buying power as well. So you can
actually come to it Toro, bring in your
crypto from basically, you know, either
non-custody or custodial wallet and then
get from us a margin or buying power to
buy stocks as well.
>> Are there a lot of people doing that?
It's kind of could be risky.
>> Um, you know, risk return. Uh, we
believe in educating people about the
markets.
>> Yonyi, always good to see you.
Appreciate the update on what the retail
investor is doing. and Yon AIA,
co-founder and global CEO of E Toro,
joining us here in the Bloomberg
Business Week studio.
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