Host: Welcome back to Market Movers, the opening bell. Today's capital markets segment is brought to you by Alpaca, and today we are coming to you live from Stocktoberfest here in New York City. Now artificial intelligence is driving a shift from manual trading apps to autonomous agentic investing. And as AI agents execute trades directly, brokerage API infrastructure is seeing a surge in demand. And where will value be captured across AI models, data, and brokerage trails? Joining us ahead of her panel here at today's event on Agentic trading is Nadia Asoyan, CFO at Alpaca. Nadia, good morning. Thank you so much for joining us.
Nadia Asoyan: Good morning.
Host: Well, first and foremost, tell us about what's happening with the retail investor and the role that Agentic AI is playing.
Nadia Asoyan: Uh yes, absolutely. Yeah, definitely something very exciting happening last, I would say 12 months, uh, as we see actually now, a lot more agents uh starting to participate in the trading. So the usage is now that actually a lot of um professional uh traders could actually connect through MCP. Uh, to the way how they can trade and using alpaca's infrastructure really, they are becoming smarter and a lot better at, uh, how they can actually apply different strategies faster and, uh, uh, move a lot better on the strategies and outcomes that they actually see through trading.
Host: Mhm. And Nadia, I know that you pay attention to metrics as well as data. So when it comes to what you're seeing with API usage data, what is the demand telling you?
Nadia Asoyan: Uh, it's, uh, it's telling us that it's growing, uh, quite, um, fast, and, um, we see definitely a very big uptick in the way how it's been utilized. So that's all I can speak to in terms of metrics. It's not public knowledge, but substantial, uh, growth in the past, uh, few months, and, uh, definitely. Uh, driven by agentic AI, mhm, yeah.
Host: And I do wanna ask you about the agentic trading stack. So when it comes to the value capture, where do you see this?
Nadia Asoyan: Yeah, I think the value right now is in having access to the actual infrastructure and data. So that's kind of what you, uh, utilize to be faster and more efficient. So I think also what we see is now that data is getting utilized in a more sophisticated way and actually. Also, uh, those that have access, uh, to infrastructure that moves faster and allows you to, uh, process it, uh, yeah, definitely benefiting from that.
Host: So, mhm, and yeah, Nadia, you're here at the Stocktoberfest event and you're set to take the stage for a panel. So can you give us a sneak peek into this panel?
Nadia Asoyan: Yes, absolutely. I think for us at Alpaca we really believe, uh, to open financial access to everyone on the planet. So for us this is another. Opportunity just how we uh see that uh the new trends will allow um retailers or professionals or even in our case uh could be agents themselves right having um uh access to uh faster uh move on the way how actually trading works and we just really providing them through open APIs uh that are possibility by building the best in class product. What we really see though is definitely big uptick in the way how uh a lot of uh technology gets utilized in the space and uh the trend is upward and that's what we're planning to talk about today.
Host: And Nadia, of course, when it comes to agentic AI and trading, for viewers out there who may not be familiar with alpaca or perhaps they're not entrenched in the stock twits community, what are some myths that you would like to dispel when it comes to the role of artificial intelligence, in particular, agentic and trading?
Nadia Asoyan: Yes, um, I would say, I think for a lot of, um, uh, the, the myth is, first of all, the entry point is difficult, and I would say it's not. And um today, you can definitely use cloud OpenAI and actually learn how uh to connect and that's kind of why we also started the product. It's so easy to start with your first uh paper trading account and then actually your first trading account, and the myth is just how difficult it gets, and I spent a lot of time educating people actually on how, uh, today we can move to utilizing um AI to actually uh set up your account and how you can build the agent on top of it and how you can use different agents for different strategies and it seems like wow it was only accessible to institutional. Uh, big players before and now you literally can actually do that and it doesn't take, uh, days, it takes hours to do that, right? And of course you'll have to, uh, be, uh, learning about, uh, how to do that, uh, but there is so much information now available and I would say that's one of the myths for sure that I'm spending my time to make sure that the entry point is easy for everyone.
Host: And of course, uh, here in the US we have kicked off the final quarter of 2026, and we are counting down to earnings season, and people are looking at growth. So when it comes to the growth that you're seeing at alpaca, not just in the US but also around the globe, tell us what you're seeing and any surprises?
Nadia Asoyan: Yeah, I would say, uh, not so much a surprise, but for sure markets are great right now, right, and, uh, the biggest, uh, probably, uh, focus for us is giving access to actually US markets, uh, to the rest of the, uh, to the rest of the world. So probably, um, very intuitive but big surprises that there is a A lot of demand uh for what we have to offer here in the US markets uh to the rest of the world and someone wants to have a SpaceX share or someone wants to have uh next um open the eye on topic share as one of the uh biggest investments in life and that's not a trend just here but it's everywhere right so. And that's what we're also trying to build here and give everyone access to. Mhm.
Host: And Nadia, finally, before I let you go, in 2026, Alpaca has made plenty of announcements, but as you look ahead to 2027, give us your vision and what you're most excited about, especially as CFO.
Nadia Asoyan: Yeah, I think we just reached a really pivotal point where we, uh, can offer a lot more to everyone now. We started as a small company focusing on, uh, developer community, and now we focus on a big segment related to enterprise customers, really enabling some big players as well as, uh, enabling professional developers to a lot more advanced. So I'm just really excited for the growth that we'll see next um few years and a lot of AI enablement is actually also accelerating that growth. So just excited to see the growth and support it. Mhm.
Host: Nadia, well, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule and good luck with your upcoming panel at Stocktoberfest.
Nadia Asoyan: Awesome. Thank you so much.
Host: Thank you very much.
