Alec Beasley, Investa Co-founder and CEO, On Winning Best Options Trading App 2026

AI Generated Interview Transcript

Richard Berry (00:04.354)
Welcome to Good Money Guy. name is Richard Berry. And today we’re talking to Alex Beasley, who is co-founder and CEO from Investor, which has just been voted best options trading platform in our 2026 Trading Awards. So, Alex, thank you very much for joining us. And congratulations on the award. You’ve got some really, really good votes, actually. There’s a lot of customers that are quite happy with what you’re doing. How are things going at Investor?

Alec Beasley (00:18.904)
Thank you for having me.

Alec Beasley (00:22.808)
Thank you very much.

Alec Beasley (00:29.358)
Good, I’m pleased to hear that.

Good, good. Obviously every startup kind of has its ups and downs and on social media, of course, it looks great. New direct FCA authorization, record volumes month for month continuing to scale. But behind the posts are always the 10,000 blazing fires that you have to put out before you get there. So good and really excited for what’s ahead, to be honest. Excellent.

Richard Berry (00:56.654)
And I mean, you’re a relatively new firm. you one year.

Alec Beasley (01:00.942)
Yeah, we haven’t even been launched officially for a year. Our official launch date was in September and that kind of coincided with when we were running a crowdfunding campaign and just been trying to scale since then. So yeah, really nice to be honest.

Richard Berry (01:15.758)
And what’s the one thing you think that’s different about Investor that people in the UK aren’t getting? What’s your sort of USP? What makes you guys unique?

Alec Beasley (01:27.736)
So we are the first mobile based investment app in the UK where customers can trade both stocks and options without paying any commission. The thing is removing the commissions alone doesn’t make a product accessible. So we knew we had to build a product that actually caters for the market, a market that is new to options trading. So we wanted to ensure that before anyone makes a decision, they see all the information that they need to make an informed decision easily in a digestible manner.

the break even kind of how much the stock has to move until you start to break even your max loss, your maximum P and L and then you can execute it within just a few taps. So we have made the options trading experience, which people sometimes think options are a complex product as streamlined as possible. The only real difference in terms of the flow between buying an option and buying a stock on our platform is just that you see the contract specifications. So of the option.

So we really have tried to make it as easy to execute an option as it is a share.

Richard Berry (02:28.398)
Okay, let’s just go through the pros and cons of options trading because it’s big in the US. We’ve discussed this before when we were on a panel, haven’t we? The US have really embraced options trading as a way to speculate and invest. But in the UK, not so much. Everybody’s pushing it. ICE is pushing it. CME is pushing it. There’s new microcontracts on exchange. Just talk us through quickly.

key pros and the key cons of using options as part of your investment strategy.

Alec Beasley (03:04.238)
Yeah, so I guess the key pro to trading options is you get to do more with less. So what I mean by that is, let’s say you want to buy 100 shares of Nvidia, that’s going to cost you about $20,000 nowadays. Or if you think it’s going up, you might buy a cool instead. Now, usually a cool would cost you probably a fraction of that to get the exposure to 100 shares. So let’s say I buy a cool

that expires in December because I think Nvidia is going to go up and all else equal if the underlying goes up and the price of the call option will increase. If it gets above the strike price, I will exercise the option and then I will sell it the stock that is. So if I buy a strike price with 250 and I pay $5 for that premium and Nvidia is at $300 by the time December comes along.

I can just buy it for 250, sell it for 300. And because I’ve made, because I paid $5 in premium for that and made 50, I’ve made a 10 times return, which is great. And of course not all options actually play out like that, but your risk is limited. So if I buy a call option and just take another example here, instead of risking $20,000 for the same exposure, I could buy a different call option and pay $1,000. I could make $5,000.

make 10,000 in a good case, but I can only lose $1,000. That’s my risk compared to that $20,000. Now that sounds great. And yes, you may make four or five times. And usually with options, the amount the option would return in terms of percentages is far larger than if you own the underlying. But unlike a stock, you don’t just have to be right about the direction. You have to be right about the timing of it. So if I

bought $20,000 worth of Nvidia and I could hold it forever. That’s it. I can just hold it until it starts to make money. You can go up to $20,000 worth, $40,000, whatever. If I buy an option, that’s where the kicker comes in. Although yes, you may get a higher return in terms of percentages. If you’re not right about the direction of the travel before the expiration date, it will just expire worthless.

Alec Beasley (05:29.998)
So if it never trades past the strike price, the amount you paid for it is now worthless or could be worthless and you might sell out of it for a loss. Or if it never goes past the strike price or if it doesn’t go past the strike price by expiration, it will just expire worthless. And I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that you have to hold it to expiration. So if Tesla, if Nvidia, sorry, Tesla is always on my mind. Tesla or Nvidia.

Richard Berry (05:55.758)
little video. It’s one or the other, isn’t it? It’s all anybody trades.

Alec Beasley (06:00.346)
Absolutely. And that’s why I’m always thinking about it. If the underlying does move a lot quicker than you expect it to and your $1,000 sounds like there’s $2,000 or $3,000, you can just sell out of it. It’s like any other security. It has a buy price. It has a sell price. If it’s worth more than you bought for it and you don’t want to hold it to expiration, you can just trade out of it. And I think that is one of the biggest misconceptions when people think options are like, okay, I have to be right.

at like the 31st of December when that’s not the case because it trades like any other security. Anything that we offer on our platform is traded on the exchange. So the listed price can be seen not just from our app, but from a ton of other websites, whereas that very much differs to kind of trade in CFDs.

Richard Berry (06:48.59)
Well, let’s talk about actually, because obviously in the States, they don’t have CFTs, they don’t have financial spread betting. They have margin trading and options trading. And, you know, the main way to trade in the UK is financial spread betting or contracts for difference. What are the key differences or advantages over the traditional way we trade over here for options?

Alec Beasley (07:13.038)
Yeah, there are a few and I guess some of it comes down to alignment of customers interests. So what I mean by that is see if these are essentially banned in the US for retail investors. So really their recourse to trading leverage has been through options and the uptake has really been incredible. I mean, we were discussing before 30, I think the status 36 % of under 35 year old retail investors in the US have traded options.

Whereas in the UK and Europe, that’s more like 1%. And it’s never been down to risk appetite. It’s always been down to kind of accessibility and what has been pushed instead. So that is CFDs and spread bets. Now, the difference is retail have never really had an ability to hedge in the UK before because the payout of a CFD is linear. So if I go short and I leverage five times,

I can make five times on the way up or make five times on the way down. It’s a linear payout. So if you own the stock and you go short for a CFD, like the payout is the exact same. You’re not actually hedged. You’re just giving up your upside and not making anything on the downside. Whereas if you buy an option, the payout is convex. So if I buy a put option and let’s say I buy it for $5.

It could very much be worth $25 if the market goes down and the amount of value that basically appreciates compared to your stock falling can be significant. And that’s why the way people tend to compare put options is to very similar to insurance. Because if I own a put option, that gives me the right as a buyer of the option to sell my assets. Let’s call it Tesla shares.

for a pre-agreed price, let’s say Tesla is trading at $100, I can buy the right, but not the obligation, hence why it’s called an option, to sell my Tesla shares at a strike price of 90. And for that, again, I may pay $5, and I hold that until the end of the year. So now if Tesla goes down to zero, or under the 90, I will exercise my right to sell my stock for that $90.

Alec Beasley (09:36.046)
And then I paid a $5 premium for that. Whereas just like insurance, like if you buy, if you buy car insurance, you don’t necessarily want that to happen. Right. Because if Tesla goes up from a hundred to 200 and I paid $5 for my put option, I’m actually quite glad that that has expired worthless because I’ve just made from 100 to 200 on Tesla. And it’s like, I know if I drive a car and I’m insured that

If I crash unprotected, I just don’t want to crash to be honest. so that’s why they’re usually compared to, insurance contracts, whereas there’s, so that is definitely beneficial as compared to like CFDs and spread bets. And I also think the other thing is kind of the alignment of customers interests. Like you probably heard back in the day or still now, I think the statistic is 82 % of retail customers lose money trading CFDs.

And there certainly as we just found out, not using them to hedge. So it is pure speculation. Whereas the broker was able to take the other side of that trade. So if you buy from me, I’m taking the other side of the position. There’s a clear conflict of interest there. I want you to lose money because I make more money if you lose money. But on top of that, I’m also charging you overnight fees. I’m charging you a spread on the way in on the way out. I’m probably charging you on the FX as well.

Whereas on our platform, all options are traded commission free, you just pay on the FX. So if, and we charge in terms of a percentage point, so it’s 99 bits on the FX on the way in and out of premium. Why our interests are aligned with that of the customer is we simply just route the option to market and it is traded on the exchange. So we don’t take on any risk ourselves, the market does. And if you make more money than your initial capital, so 100.

dollars or a hundred pound goes to 500, we make more because we have charged it on as a percentage. The customers are long-term customers. So I think that’s important. And some of the key differences between options and CFDs and why we made an active decision not to push CFDs. We made an active decision to go down the options trading route for retail customers. wasn’t accessible before in the market and someone needed to make it accessible. And I thought who better than myself.

Richard Berry (11:37.6)
A is a long-term customer.

Richard Berry (12:01.23)
Great. And there’s a few other players in the market that offer options, but in a sort of fairly sophisticated way. What’s one thing if people are using Investor, what’s one feature of the app that you think people should be using to make more out of it?

Alec Beasley (12:24.524)
Yeah, absolutely. So I think there are two things on that in terms of what people can do with options. And we kind of discussed about doing more with less with your capital and then also how you can use our app. So again, it goes back to how we’ve built the app to cater for the current market. what we’ve tried to do is again, make it as easy to execute an option as it is a share, but just outright calls or outright puts.

So no, no spreads, no kind of complex strategies. And it’s super important because that was exactly what happened in the U S they had to get comfortable with just buying calls or buying puts and then covered calls, cash record puts come in and spreads came in. But if we jump straight to that, which some platforms already allow, of course, in a sophisticated manner, I don’t think you get people comfortable with a concept first. So on our kind of options card, if you like yourself.

looked at Snapchat and you go on to hate and have done very well on an unrealized basis so far and You can see instantly like this is the amount I’m gonna pay This is my break even this is how much the stock has to move until I break even on this trade and in your head you can make a decision like that and That is the kind of the simplicity of the app and then as soon as you’ve made a decision You set your limit price number of contracts that you want to buy click buy and you’re done

Richard Berry (13:23.776)
And I bought a putz out.

Richard Berry (13:50.998)
I’m a big fan of options trading. reckon I’ve traded them for 20 plus years. I think they’re a great way to take a position with a limited risk. think, as we were saying, you just like to be right one way or another. yeah, options have that benefit of you’re only paying the premium. That’s your outlay, unlike being short with a spread bet or a CFD.

your losses are limited and you don’t have those ongoing costs. We’ll a little chat about options strategy then. Obviously, all derivatives come with amplified risks because you’re using leverage and margin. What do you think is one of the main mistakes people make when they’re trading on leverage or trading options?

Alec Beasley (14:41.038)
The way we’ve introduced options is all through a cash account. So you can’t trade an option on margin, which means if you do pay the premium, that is the maximum you can lose. Again, 100 pounds, 200 pounds, whatever it is, that can essentially decay to zero. But you’re not going to get margin called on that. So you’re not going to be forced to close out that position if you didn’t want to. And I’ve seen many times where the position has been worth almost nothing. So if you were on a margin account, you would have had to close out that position.

I am also guilty of this mainly just trading in general is cutting your winners too soon and riding your losses too long and I Mean it’s kind of human nature. You see a bit of profit. You’re like, I don’t want to lose that profit So then you close out of the position that could have made you a lot more money or the market is going out of your direction and you keep holding because

You’re optimistic by nature. You think that the market is going to turn around and you hold on to it for too long or you keep averaging in and keep averaging and doubling down until you’re throwing good capital at bad capital. And again, it’s not a criticism of like retail traders themselves because professionals do it as well. Not any criticism of people on our app because I’m guilty of it as well. But that is just kind of a known mistake for most traders.

retail or professional but if you do have really good discipline the markets is a great place to be and you can make a lot of money by being right but being right in a disciplined manner.

Richard Berry (16:21.836)
Yeah, it’s really interesting. The stats are fascinating. There’s lots of stats about how the best investors in the world get it right less than half the time, but it’s the management of those positions. And I’ll be honest with you, everybody that comes in here is, you know, what’s the one mistake people make? And it’s always, they cut their wins too soon and they run their losses too long. And it’s a universal truth. Even when I was back in a broker, even when I was a broker and we’d speak to customers on the phone.

they would get emotionally attached to losing money, whereas they’d be too greedy and take profit too soon. Which is actually, again, one of the reasons I quite like options because you just, you you have an idea in your mind, like with that Snapchat trade I did when I was testing Investor. I don’t like the stock. I can’t see how it’s going to make any money. It’s bound to go down eventually. So you just buy a put and sit there and wait.

You know, it almost sort of forces you to be a little bit more patient than checking in with a leverage position where your profits are, you know, going up.

Alec Beasley (17:28.522)
And weight margins eating you up as well. Yeah. Because you’re like, okay, maybe I am making money. Why am I not making money? because of the fees I had to pay to maintain the position. So yeah, no, think it’s definitely helpful for that from that manner. And it is just as long as time has gone on. That has always been the same thing for probably the biggest mistake ever.

Richard Berry (17:46.766)
pretty sure I know what you’re going to say to this, but if you had one tip for options traders, what would it be? Other, I’ll answer for you and then you can give me another answer. Other than running your wins and cutting your losses, what would be your top tip for options traders?

Alec Beasley (17:59.244)
Yeah, and I guess that’s easier said than done, right? It’s easy to tell someone, just hold on to the position for longer and cut your loss sooner because I it’s kind of the opposite of the way that we think. I would say start simple. Like don’t go straight into cool sprayers, put sprayers, or everyone loves talking about iron condors and butterflies and it’s like you really don’t need.

to overcomplicate it. The best traders in the world, they keep it simple. And again, I was saying keep it simple, stupid, right? And our platform allows you to do that outright calls outright puts. you know, well, that’s currently and we are going to be introducing covered positions. So covered calls and cash equal put so investors can earn an additional yield on the stock they own or on the cash they own. But early days, it’s just okay, get them familiar. How does this work? Why did the option go up?

four times when the stock only went up 10%, why is the option worth less and less every single day because of the time value? And once you get people comfortable with that, then I think you can start introducing more complex strategies. So my tip is don’t run before you can walk.

Richard Berry (19:14.712)
Good, good, good tip. Is that just for customers that have positions on accounts? So if they want to sell a covered call, they would have to own Tesla on your, on your platform.

Alec Beasley (19:27.254)
Absolutely. Yeah. So there’s no kind of naked shorting. If you wanted to sell a call option on Tesla, you’d have to own 100 chairs on our platform because then it’s completely covered by selling that call. You are essentially given someone else to the right, but not the obligation to buy the stock from you at that set price. But the benefit for you is and in terms of risk of options trading, it’s considered one of the lowest risk strategies because

you can’t actually lose on the option itself. You can give up potential upside that you would have had if you didn’t sell the call and you didn’t give away your right to, well, didn’t give away the right for someone to acquire the shares from you. And you can earn an additional yield. So again, just taking Tesla as an example, I own Tesla at $100 and I’ve now sold a call at $110. And for that, I have made $5.

and this expires at the end of the year. Now, if Tesla doesn’t do anything and stays at 100, the option has expired worthless and you’ve kept that $5. So now you’re like, great, I’ve made an additional 5 % even though the stock didn’t move. If it goes up to 109.99, you’re like, this is fantastic. I’ve made that 9.99 and I haven’t had to give up my Tesla shares and I’ve kept that $5 as well. If it goes past it, you might be like, okay, ah.

Maybe I did give up some of my upside, but again, it still has got to 115 before you gave up any real upside. And the benefit of cupboard calls is that $5 you’ve just earned can also act as a hedge on the downside because well, you can think of it as either reduce your entry price by five. So now you actually own Tesla at 95 or

If it goes down to 95, that is offset by the amount that you’ve received for the option. So I do think that is a strategy and obviously this isn’t financial advice at all, but certainly a strategy that investors should get familiar with given the lower risk of it. And the fact that if you do have shares sitting in your portfolio that aren’t doing much or you want to hold, but you’re not too sure are going to continue to increase in value, you can sell a call on that.

Alec Beasley (21:52.116)
And we’re currently just building out the functionality now to enable customers to do that because it was one of the strategies that I wanted to do when I was unable to access the options market, despite being a professional, because I wanted to earn an additional yield on my, on my stock.

Richard Berry (22:08.728)
So we’ve been throwing around a bit of terminology here, which for the uninitiated, you know, might sound like golly gook. I mean, you and I have both been options brokers and option dealers in sort of some fairly large institutions. But for people in the UK who are just getting to grips with it, even puts and calls, you know, it’s terminology we’re not overly familiar with. Where should people go?

to learn how to trade options in the UK.

Alec Beasley (22:42.198)
Yeah, there’s a few places, our website being one of them. We have a number of options blogs, or if you just type in what are calls, what are perks, you’ve got the options Institute, which is owned by CBO email. They have options courses on there. They have like an options calculator as well. So you can put in some inputs and see kind of the price and how options would work. I do think education is important, obviously, because that’s how you grow a market. You don’t want people taking on.

uneducated trades because that is one way to ensure that they don’t return, especially if they don’t understand why it lost money. But there are plenty of resources available online, not so much in the UK right now. And that’s what we’re working on.

Richard Berry (23:28.286)
You should do an investor. Here’s how to trade options courses. We have a how to trade options course.

Alec Beasley (23:33.822)
There you go, go to the good money guy.

Richard Berry (23:36.654)
You’ve got to do one because you can do the sort practical steps of this is how you use it, this is how you do it.

Alec Beasley (23:45.42)
And I actually did, I finally mentioned that because I went to a talk or I hosted a talk before as well. And I kind of just went through, right? This is what happened. This is how you buy a call option. And then this is a scenario payouts. This is what would happen if you own the share. This is what would happen if you owned the option. This is the percentage of returns. And this is what would happen if the stock essentially done. I think you would have just lost a hundred percent of your capital.

I just laid it out nicely. And yeah, I think there’s something in making a video for everyone to see that as well.

Richard Berry (24:15.95)
You know what? I mean, I can’t believe we haven’t mentioned AI yet because I think AI, I mean, I’ve, I’ve used it when I think I was, I was testing one of your competitors and putting on some spreads on Tesla based on volatility. So I was like, give me an option strategy based on Musk putting out a crazy tweet about Tesla stock. So it was quite good. It was quite good with that. And it’s just nice having.

something to bounce off scenarios with. So has AI been particularly useful with educating people in how to trade options for you?

Alec Beasley (24:55.158)
I’m sure it has in the terms of like a news in another chat bot. don’t have an AI chat bot in our app yet. so I’m sure it’s been helpful for people and even myself, when you want to kind of find out what’s been going on in the options market, what other people are trading, what strategies you can do, as you say, build me a strategy. If Elon tweets something about Tesla going private or the share price is too high, my opinion.

But what we are building internally as well is a tool called option sidekick. Now, when we tell people about it, they think this is AI. It’s not quite AI. It’s more just a scenario analysis tool, essentially, which is what we’re talking about kind of showing the difference in payoffs. Essentially, what it will do is it will walk you through the steps of how to trade an option. So let’s say you haven’t traded options before, or you’re not too familiar with them.

You click on a stock, let’s keep it at Tesla, and you click on our option sidekick. Do you think Tesla is going up or down? Up. Great. We know you want to trade a call. Now other platforms, more of the sophisticated platforms, know, sell a put spread, sell a put, engage in this strategy. And it’s just overcomplicates it for the retail investor and most investors in fact, to be honest, you’ve picked a call. Great. How much do you think it’s going up by? 10%. When do you think it’s going up there by?

December 31st. Great. We will show you three options that you can trade as well as the expected payoff of each of those if your scenario does play out. The cooler thing or the coolest thing about the tool is it really does demonstrate and educate on time value of an option. The longer you have to expiration, the more expensive an option is. There’s a lot more what they call time value in it. So if you are right about

an option trade and you do get it right.

Alec Beasley (26:57.228)
What you are shown in terms of kind of or what you think about in terms of breakevens and if the stock gets to 200 from 150, you think about it in terms of at expiration. Now, if you are right, that is the minimum that you will be able to make from an options trade because if you are expiration, you have no time value left. Whereas if the scenario that you envision would happen before December,

happens tomorrow or next month or the month after it will essentially show you your expected P and L on that move. So you go actually I thought it looked okay this trade if I am right I thought maybe I’m going to make 30 to 50 percent on this but if I’m right about it a month earlier or two months earlier now it’s worth two or three or maybe even four times. I think that helps educate the audience because it’s like you can actually trade out of it you do not need to hold it.

And because you have that scenario analysis tool, starts helping you think about maybe I can buy a different option and even cheaper option where if the scenario doesn’t play out at expiration and it does play out before expiration, I can still make money on that and I can still monetize on that. So we think the tool is going to be incredibly helpful for not just an educational point of view, but to help people find other options that they can trade, even if they are familiar. I would certainly like that tool.

knowing kind of a different scenarios in what I’m right and without having to think about it or do some calculations in my own end. Absolutely.

Richard Berry (28:32.654)
great for trade discovery. What about risk? So obviously, you you hear nightmare stories of people having massive losses on the back of options positions. We’ve already spoken about how you don’t let people trade on margin or leverage. it’s a cash account. What about selling options? Do you allow people to sell naked options on the app?

Alec Beasley (29:02.766)
no. So that’s where I think options got their bad names from allowing people to sell naked options because the risk of loss technically unlimited if, it’s a call and although not unlimited in terms of a put because the stock can only go down to zero. It’s not like oil. it can still be enormous. So we, we will only allow covered positions. So you sell a call if you own the stock.

And then you are just giving up the upside if it does go higher, but you’re able to collect the money that you have or realize a potential profit along with collecting a premium and then cash-accured puts as well. What I like about cash-accured puts is you will essentially sell a put option and what that gives someone else the ability to do is to kind of force you to buy the stock at that strike price. If the stock goes below that or if the stock is below that expiration.

So if you want to get into a trade, let’s go back to Nvidia at $200. You’re like, I don’t want to buy Nvidia at $200. I want to buy Nvidia at $180 or I would be happy to buy Nvidia at $170. So instead of setting a limit price and going, just buy it for me when it gets to 170, 180, you can sell a pill option. And then you can collect the premium for that. Two, three, four dollars.

And you’re like, great. Now, if the market continues to rally, you just keep that two, three, four dollars. If not, you’re forced to buy the stock at that strike price, which is what you’ve set. And you’ve collected the premium as well. And now you’re in the trade. And you’re like, okay, now I’ve got exposure to the underlying shares that I really wanted to hold in like in cash. And it’s just essentially a way to earn yield. But obviously, like any kind of strategy you want to get involved in.

They’re not suitable for all investors and you definitely should do your research before engaging in these strategies. They’ll be launching on our platform soon. And yeah, people can definitely go and check them out. But I think they’re good strategies for, sorry, because it’s not financial advice and I probably can’t say good strategy for retail investors. But I do think they’re good strategies if you are looking to for yield enhancement and you have cash that you want to earn it on, you like a stock or you have the shares already and you…

Alec Beasley (31:31.7)
just want to earn additional yield through selling call-ups in as well.

Richard Berry (31:35.79)
what are going to do as options traders become more sophisticated on the platform? Are you going to put in a layer of professional accounts where people can execute more strategies and maybe have a little bit of leverage or maybe have some naked positions?

Alec Beasley (31:53.752)
To be honest, issue with people opting up to be a professional, and there’s been quite a lot of news from the FCA about this, and firms allowing people to opt up to be a professional and losing… Yes, exactly. And allowing the retail customers to opt up to be professionals because they pass a small quiz that they could Google the answers on, and then losing everything they have.

and kind of blowing up their accounts. And we want to keep it. We want to keep options on the safe side. And again, this is talking about the early days and never say never, but if you’re giving up the retail protections of no negative account balance, people do have to be sure that they really want to opt up to be a professional investor. So never say never, but it’s not on our immediate roadmap.

And our focus is really on offering options in kind of the safest format that they can be, which is in a cash-accord account or in a cash-funded account even, not offering margin, at least for the foreseeable, but introducing spreads over time. So call spreads, put spreads, very simple vanilla spreads, because if you do buy a call spread or a put spread, your probability of payout is higher because the amount you’re risking, given you’re selling an option further right after buying it.

is reduced because you get the premium received as opposed to just buying outright.

Richard Berry (33:21.998)
Do you remember your first options trade?

Alec Beasley (33:25.975)
on the app.

Richard Berry (33:26.894)
Best at just ever, your first option trade.

Alec Beasley (33:29.976)
I remember it on the app. Calls on Spy.

Richard Berry (33:31.714)
What was it on the app?

Alec Beasley (33:37.326)
A lot of it is, funnily enough, as you can imagine, the call put ratio, i.e. the amount of money that is spent on calls compared to puts kind of in the last quarter of last year after we launched, was about 0.3 to 1. So three calls traded for every one put.

Richard Berry (33:59.948)
Okay, so people are bullish.

Alec Beasley (34:02.23)
Naturally, naturally. In March, the amount that was spent on call options, actually, starting at the start of this year, even before the Iran, even before the Iran war kicked off.

The ratio didn’t just go positive. It was like three to one in January. So it shows that retail investors are positioning kind of like the institutional professionals where they’re hedging before an event has happened. And then in March, that average ratio on 0.3 to one flipped. was seven times the amount was spent on puts than on calls. And again, I think that just kind of shows the level of sophistication on retail. A lot of people

I think have a misconception on what retail means. I worked professionally in the options market, but I’d go home and trade from my phone. I’m a retail investor. I’m a professional at work, PMs at Millennium, any of the kind of big hedge funds or banks, traders, if they went home, they could trade as a retail investor. So the idea that retail investors aren’t sophisticated, completely untrue.

And I think that the fact that all the demand, not all the demand, because they were still upside by him, the demand for put options by retail investors that made it another record month for us and completely outperformed the other months because they were looking for protection really just shows that there is a real necessity to allow options here in the UK. And hopefully that’s evident as we just secured our full direct FCA authorization as well. Whereas before we were operating as an

appointed representative so yeah and it kind of goes back to winning that award too.

Richard Berry (35:49.358)
Do you think that’s speculation or people hedging their MagSev portfolio?

Alec Beasley (35:55.758)
Both. we have so we’ve seen investors where they have spent a few thousand on premium. So Palantir being the example for this. A few thousand on premium and it all expiring worthless. We know like some of these investors maybe there are crowdfunding investors, maybe they’re direct investors, maybe they’re our friends. Maybe we’ve just got familiar with them through speaking through the support channels. And it was pretty telling because

It was kind of like, look, we saw that you had this loss on your account. Were you using this for protection or were you using it for speculation? yeah, it’s fine. I have all my Palantir in another trading account and it just went up 20%. So I really don’t mind losing the premium. Whereas, of course, that’s hedging. that is what I think there’s going to, that’s why I think there’s going to be, it’s going to be really important on the regulatory front because

If, we discussed before, if you’re trading a CFD, you’re likely not using it for hedging. You’re using it for speculation. So 82 % of retail customers lose money speculating through CFDs. Let’s say that people were buying puts and they expire worthless. And it looks like a lot of people are losing money because they bought put options. We don’t see the other side of the trade.

we don’t see that they’ve got their 100 shares or 200 shares or all their shares held in other platforms, which I think is going to be like really crucial from a regulatory point of view, because it’s like, yes, they may have lost money buying put options on our platform, but they made money on the other side of the trade, which they held elsewhere. And so you can’t look at it just from like, okay, are people making or losing money on your platform? Because there’s also another angle to that. Now, some people are speculating, certainly.

thought war was going to kick off, thought it was going to exacerbate and they were buying options because exactly it’s speculation. The whole point of the markets is to speculate. So yeah, I do think it’s going to be interesting from the point of view on the regulation because obviously when now CFD platformers have to have a big kind of banner.

Richard Berry (37:58.392)
Cool.

Richard Berry (38:14.776)
Well, that’s because it’s, suppose, but you’re DMA, you’re sort of on exchange, aren’t you? There’s a difference between an on exchange product and an OTC, is what CFDs and spread bets are, isn’t it? people aren’t betting against you. They’re, you know, it’s a straight through transaction.

Alec Beasley (38:29.452)
because we’re not taking the other side of the track.

Alec Beasley (38:36.91)
That’s it. You can buy on our platform or sell. We literally route it straight to our execution, clear and assessment provider, straight onto the exchange, and then it’s traded on exchange. So no principal risk. And we don’t take the, well, principal risk being that we don’t take the other side of the trade.

Richard Berry (38:51.63)
I mean, I’m a big fan of spread betting and CFTs. I love it as a product. I think it’s great. But when it comes to B book brokers and non-hedged brokers, there’s a clear differentiation between the two. There are brokers that internalize orders and brokers that hedge their customer orders. And then there are brokers that just purely B book.

customers. And I think there’s a big difference between, you know, not all CFD brokers are evil. know, it’s whether or not you’re dealing with a good broker or a bad broker. And actually, the same is true as options as well, isn’t it? It’s that the key, and you’re right, what you’re saying is that starting people off slowly, not letting them leverage straight through transactions are the way to go.

Alec Beasley (39:44.108)
Yeah. And I also think another kind of point on, allowing customers to trade, of course there is appropriateness, like, you deemed appropriate to trade options? Now, the truth is sometimes people might have to have a year’s experience trading options before they can trade options. Sometimes they have to say that they, or not say have to prove and demonstrate that they have.

done a certain amount of trades before they can be deemed appropriate. And then you might be like, okay, they’ve never traded options before, but they want to trade options. They’ve traded crypto, they traded spread bets, they traded CFDs, but you’ve never traded options. So therefore you might be deemed not appropriate for it. So you can’t get your experience trading because people don’t let you trade them.

Richard Berry (40:33.454)
Do have to do that? Do you have to put people through suitability tests?

Alec Beasley (40:35.69)
Absolutely, yeah, an appropriateness assessment suitability is more for the advisory advisory aspect, whereas yeah, of course, absolutely. It’s considered a complex product derivative. So they do have to undertake appropriateness assessments. But again, like, I think people, humans learn best by doing.

Richard Berry (40:55.598)
Yeah, it’s a good way to educate people on the way in actually. It’s quite interesting because obviously I test a lot of very different platforms and they all have appropriateness tests. there’s, particularly if it’s a product I’m not particularly familiar with and you have to, you go through the stages and you know, oh, didn’t know that. That’s quite interesting. And it does, it does help highlight some of the risks actually that you’re. Yeah.

Alec Beasley (40:58.446)
That’s a good way to…

Alec Beasley (41:16.91)
It does, it does. But I do think, um, like people shouldn’t be prevented from trading a product just because they’ve never traded it before. I think people do learn best by doing. Now that could be allowing them to trade with £100 of their own money. I don’t think demo accounts help because

You probably know that if you get given a demo account, you’re not going to manage the risk as if it was your own money. Yeah. You just go all in on a trade and you’re like, okay, yeah, I made loads of money and I had a trade. Great. Or I lost it all when I haven’t had a good experience. But if you put your own money at risk, let’s say a hundred pounds or 0.05 % of your liquid net worth and you’re capped at doing that, it allows you to trade and you can actually learn by doing it.

You would never ask an electrician to go and wire your switchboard because they read a book on how to do it. They have to have the experience in doing it. have to have learned to do it and they could only learn to do that by doing it. So I do think it’s going to be important over time as regulation involves to still allow people who haven’t traded options before, trade it in a sensible format, learn by doing.

very very small limited amount of real capital that they’re allowed to trade until they’ve demonstrated that they know how to do it and then they should be allowed then they’re allowed to trade further I don’t think we should be prevented

Richard Berry (42:41.066)
Anything that allows people to cut their teeth on any sort of financial product in a fairly limited risk way is a great way to engage people in the market. think one of the biggest failures of this country over the years has been the almost sort of obnoxious hatred of risk in the financial markets. Everything from sort of risk warnings to…

over complicated things. think it’s all changing like a little bit now people have become, I honestly think people are more educated than they have ever have been. Oh, for sure. Because of there are a lot of crooks on social media. Yes. But there are also quite a few people that know what they’re talking about. I think it is it’s a good it’s a good time to understand the markets if you can find the right if you can find the right people to follow. Let’s talk about your option trading. So SPY your first trade on investor, I presume that went well. Yes.

Alec Beasley (43:28.622)
Absolutely.

Alec Beasley (43:34.83)
Yeah, know I traded out of it a couple of days later. We just testing the platform wanted to see how it did make a positive return. I think it was like up 40 % and I won’t say the market only goes up, but in this case it did. So yeah.

Richard Berry (43:35.434)
Yes, did you did you run your?

Richard Berry (43:50.71)
It is designed to go up, isn’t it? It’s full of companies that are profitable and doing well. And when they’re not profitable, they’re kicked out. Exactly. And they’re replaced with a profitable mechanism.

Alec Beasley (43:58.126)
The rebalance, right? And that’s what a lot of people don’t understand. The mechanism doesn’t force it to go up, but the mechanism is designed to give it the best probability of going up. Because as you say, low growth companies, they’re kicked out of it. High growth companies are pushed into it. And because of that, like natural kind of competition, want to grow. People are naturally there to want to make their share price increase.

drive initiatives for that. And therefore, as a result, the S and P has annualized 11, 12 % a year since the eighties.

Richard Berry (44:33.966)
What about your best and worst trades? Remember your best and worst options trades.

Alec Beasley (44:40.268)
So the best and worst investment of all time was in crypto. And it was particularly the best and worst. No, not on our platform. This was more of a personal experience. The reason why it was the best trade of all time is because I bought this random crypto coin. It was called Dogey Long Mars. Now, this was at the same time that

Richard Berry (44:46.721)
Okay.

Richard Berry (44:50.542)
Can you trade crypto on?

Alec Beasley (45:09.112)
Doge was all the hype. This was the same time that Elon was talking about Mars and he was talking all about Doge. And I thought, wow, it is a recently listed coin and they were all going up. Doge, Elon, Mars. was like, okay, maybe Elon tweets about this coin being named after him and the price of it explodes. And also there was maybe cross contamination. Like we’ve seen where people…

companies or coins share a similar name, other investors have bought them. And I thought, okay, this is kind of all the makings of something that could increase significantly and I will try and get out of it. A hundred pound in there. It went up to 40,000. And I was like, 40,000 pounds, 40,000 pounds in terms of Ethereum.

Richard Berry (45:56.642)
think I know where the story’s going.

Alec Beasley (45:58.83)
And I was trying to sell out of it. I had to pay the miners fees. So I was depositing money to get out of this trade. And I did confirmation sold out, transacted into Ethereum. Great Doja Loomas Ethereum done multiple transactions, some failed, some succeeded. I had done it like that because I was always skeptical. I’m like, okay, I’ll do multiple transactions. So then people can’t then the firms can’t just say, yeah, it was like a slippage or whatever. And then there was

cancelled transactions which kind of could disprove that the slippage mechanism didn’t work because it cancelled it. yeah, money, Ethereum never turned up. I was like, oh, maybe it’s T plus one settlement or T plus two. So I’ll give it a bit of time. Yeah, never, never arrived. And I guess a friend of mine also had the same position on we reached out to support. were telling me it was slippage and volatility and all this disproved everything they said. They told

Him it was going to that was rooted to someone else’s wallet my Lesson in that and that’s why it’s the best and worst all the time is Don’t get into a position If you don’t know that there’s gonna be a way to get out I had I had no idea how to get out of it at least with a public stock an option a Stock or an option exchange exchange traded There’s a price to buy there’s a price to sell you know that in the in all likely scenario, especially in the US

especially if you’re trading small size, you’re going to be able to get out of that position. With a startup, you invest in a startup, IPO, acquisition, maybe secondary, you know you can get out of that. But yeah, I had no idea I couldn’t get out of it. And then that theoretical 40,000 pounds just kind of vanished into thinner. So that was the personal investment side. And other options, I’ve done the exact same thing as what I was saying about cutting winners way too soon. And…

closing well, sorry, cutting winners way too soon and running losses way too long and averaging in all the way down. It’s like bought an option for a dollar, bought more at 80 cents, but more at 60 cents, 50,

Richard Berry (48:08.46)
Seems cheap, doesn’t it? If you liked it at a dollar, you’ll love it at fifty.

Alec Beasley (48:12.128)
It was on sale. It’s always on sale and to get going down and I was like, okay, I have done. I’ve created, I’ve committed the Cardinals and just kept throwing good capital at bad capital. I’ve done, I’ve done it a few times. I’ve learnt my lesson mostly, and I have had some very good trades as well. so we.

Richard Berry (48:32.834)
I’ll tell you what though, I mean it sounds like a nightmare story. It sounds like a sort of typical TikTok scam, you know, people, I mean, if I was a TikTok scammer, I’d be doing a video on Doge, Mars, Elon. mean, that’s going to get views, it’s going to get clicks, and it’s going to get people hyped about a crypto. it is bad. Regulations need to it out. The platforms need to be fined.

But silver lining is that you’ve cut your teeth on it and…

Alec Beasley (49:09.262)
couple of hundred quid I thought so I was I remember because I was out for my parents birthday at the time I remember saying look if this actually pays off like don’t worry like the whole night’s on me yeah don’t worry I’ll pay for all of it and it’s alright we’ll go out we’ll get some champagne and but I was like I’ve already priced it out in my head the maximum I’ve lost is that couple of hundred quid for me it was never real

Richard Berry (49:24.246)
Ellen’s bang for dinner.

Alec Beasley (49:36.67)
I when I saw it, I was like, this is too good to be true. Try to sell out of it. Still thought it too good to be true, but receive the confirmation. But at least I’ve learned. I learned my lesson.

Richard Berry (49:46.646)
They’re getting so sophisticated. I mean, we do so much on like scam checking and a lot of search to the site actually, thankfully, is people checking out scam brokers. Okay. Yeah. Because we can see a lot, you know, in our analytics, I don’t know if you, I mean, you will definitely see the ads on Instagram and LinkedIn. You know, there’s always a scam ad. and thankfully we’re seeing more traffic, you know, is XYZ legit.

Alec Beasley (50:08.297)
always

Richard Berry (50:16.398)
Okay, good. we try and get a page up for like, you know, if there’s a, if there’s a scam broker opened up, we’ll try and get a page up, you know, notifying it as an unauthorised broker. And it’s, it’s good, you know, it’s good for us because we get to see who’s looking at what. And yeah, I mean that, but that’s a great example of how everybody should be doing their due diligence all the time. You know, like never take anybody’s word for it. Just always, always check, check.

Alec Beasley (50:42.478)
I think that is dangerous as well. Like you see it online, um, signals, oh, they’ve got a screenshot that they made 5,000 and for people who haven’t seen it before, they’re like, Oh my God, like the signals are 97 % accurate. If anything was 97 % accurate, do you really think that person will be telling you how to do that?

Because if you’re 97 % accurate, you do not need to teach anyone. You just keep reinvesting and reinvesting and reinvesting and you’re ultimately going to make infinity money.

Richard Berry (51:13.794)
think you’d be terrified of somebody else finding out.

Alec Beasley (51:17.708)
Look how secretive hedge funds are. Like when their best traders leave, two year non-competes.

Richard Berry (51:22.478)
hedge funds make as well 20 % a year like on a good year and that’s the most intelligent people in the world and lots of them.

Alec Beasley (51:25.421)
On a good year.

Absolutely. Lots of them and they’re paid very, very well as well. But as you say, like sometimes, sometimes it can just be better to put your money in the S &P passively and then keep money aside where you do try and beat the market. You try and outperform. I think there’s the… is.

Richard Berry (51:48.12)
It’s nice to be engaged though. investment themes, trading themes for this year, there’s obviously been a few that are unavoidable. What do you think is going to be the biggest investment themes of this year and can people get exposure to them through Investor?

Alec Beasley (52:08.654)
Okay, I think the question really is, is the AI bubble going to burst this year or next year or the year after? knows? Buy puts on AI stocks. Not investment advice for sure. But that’s not the million pound question. That’s a multi trillion pound or trillion dollar, trillion pound, whatever question, because the market is notorious for

Richard Berry (52:19.864)
Should people do if they think it is?

investment

Alec Beasley (52:37.972)
overhyping and inflating valuations like a hot air balloon in the short term. And then it all comes crashing down. But for something like the internet in a dot com bubble, same thing happened. Same thing happened with crypto. And when it’s a real game changer, like AI is a real fundamental game changer. Over the longer term, the market does under price long term value over overhypes in the short term under prices in the long term.

done the same crypto, done the same with the internet as well. So AI is here to stay for sure, but it hasn’t gone through that cycle yet. It hasn’t gone through that boom and bust and people are now in the mindset that it can only keep going up. And that is when things end in tears. Now I have thought we were in a bubble already for a few years. I mean, look at kind of every new startup.

AI startup and if you look at kind of the backgrounds of people starting there, a lot have never had exposure or experience with AI. And that’s not to say that people with no experience in the sector can’t make very successful businesses. But when almost everyone is doing it, I think that’s a red flag completely. I positioned for it. I’ve been wrong many a time. I bought Pertz to kind of if Nvidia did start to sell off aggressively.

been wrong almost every time so far. The good news is you can buy puts to protect against this or speculate against the AI bubble crash. You can buy them across the ETFs. You can buy them on Nvidia. You can buy them on ASML, semiconductor stocks, whatever it is, quantum stocks even, whatever it is at best expresses format. But again, you just have to be right about the timing, is the kicker with options. But if you are right, you can reap a

probably a far larger reward than you could have done just by shortening the stocks in a limited loss format as well.

Richard Berry (54:39.154)
So if people want to take sector bets through Investor, they can do it through AI based ETFs or sector based ETFs. So they have that facility as well. So they don’t just have to bet on individual stocks, they can take a position.

Alec Beasley (54:51.918)
Absolutely and probably the most interesting thing I saw in March was kind of the levels of sophistication of hedging and what I mean by that is you could buy the options on spy or or QQQ but they were hedging a war and if you look at the XLE which is the energy sector at one point the S &P was down 8 % the XLE was up 40 %

the same war. And for the same vol points, so basically the same kind of expensiveness of calls on XLE or puts on spy, people are buying XLE because instead of having a put that where the market’s gone down 8%, you can have a call where the market’s gone up 40%. And in terms of kind of reward, you’d obviously get much more of a return by buying

energy calls as opposed to spy puts. And that again, it just goes to show the kind of level of sophistication of retail investors. They’re not just thinking markets going down. I’m going to buy spy. I’m going to buy QQQ puts. How else can I express this? XLE upside, same hedge ultimately and energy stocks, oil price going up, further escalation, oil price goes higher by XLE. And you can do the same if you think that the AI bubble is going to burst sometime soon.

Richard Berry (56:18.616)
Last question. We always ask this to everyone. Can we get a book recommendation that you think people should read to help them understand the markets better?

Alec Beasley (56:34.144)
Yes, I have read a lot of books in my time. I’ll highlight five, but I’ll tell you the favorites after that. some of these indirectly teach you about risk management and investing in money management. And some books indirectly teach you. Reminiscences of a stock operator.

Richard Berry (56:54.84)
brilliant. Like, I think I did want to quote when you were talking about demo accounts, I did want to quote that line about when they jewel at the beginning, you know, with a pistol, you know, it’s all very well doing target practice with an unloaded gun. But but would you be as confident with a bullet with a bullet in there? Yeah, that’s a fantastic, fantastic.

Alec Beasley (57:18.038)
And that teaches you about risk management. mean, you see he traded loads of different things, blew up the account multiple times and learn about risk management. teaches you patience of the virtue. teaches you that over trading is worse and just holding onto the position tries to teach you how to ride your winners and cut your losses. is a fun story. And then I would say on the flip side of that, you’ve got those that kind of indirectly teach you. So you’ve got.

Richard Berry (57:36.31)
story too.

Alec Beasley (57:47.412)
Lies Poker, which is good, very entertaining read. You’ve got The Man Who Solved Markets, which is about Renaissance technologies. Again, a brilliant book. You’ve got like the little book of value investing, which I was sent to read when I was before I intended a hedge fund as like how to kind of understand the values of value investing. But the I think my favorite favorite book of all is When Genius Failed.

And for those that aren’t familiar with this, the principle of that I got from the book is it really does not matter how smart you are. Now, the people that run the fund were like PhDs, physicists, mathematicians, super, super sophisticated and smart people. They took on Excessive Risk to the point where they weren’t just going to blow up their own fund. They were going to take down the entire

financial ecosystem. Banks couldn’t bail, sorry, the government couldn’t bail them out because they were a non-bank institute. So the banks had to bail them out, but they made enemies of all the banks as well. And then the banks would see how they ran their sophisticated models and then start pushing the trades against them even more. And it does go to show kind of like, it does not matter how smart you are. If you do take excessive risks, eventually you will blow up. I think the most ironic point of this

conversation and the chat about options is two of the partners there were the guys who founded the Black Shields model, which is what all options are priced off of. And they just took excessive risk using essentially their own model to price it better than anyone else. And they still managed to blow up. So risk management is super key, to be honest, and they’re the books I’d recommend.

Richard Berry (59:33.236)
Excellent. Well, Alex, look, thank you very much for coming in to see us. Congratulations again on the award. was well deserved. There’s fantastic feedback on your review page. If you’ve used Investor or if you go on to use Investor after this, please do come to the Good Money Guide Investor page and tell us what you think. Thanks for watching. Pleasure.

Alec Beasley (59:53.912)
Thanks for having me.