Godfather Of Stock Trading: Retail Traders Are Now Becoming Smart Money, Here's How.

This man has been on the New York Stock Exchange every single day for over 41 years, trading over $1.5 billion dollars in stock per day. Retail suddenly became smart money. 2025 selloff that February, March, and April that we sold off around the tariffs. My analysis showed that this was retail buying and institutions selling, not the other way around, which you would have thought. A lot of these young people, they don't know enough to buy the dip. It turned out it was the other way around. When the market turned, if you'll remember, all those institutions were playing catch-up for the rest of the year. They were underinvested.

Introducing Peter Tuckman, known as the Einstein of Wall Street, the most photographed trader on the planet with an edge that has survived every crash and rally since 1985. In this episode, Peter reveals the truth on what market makers actually do. Why retail traders are surprisingly becoming smart money that institutions have to react towards and the insider games and edges he's learned from being on the trading floor every single day watching institutional order flow.

People who trade and lose money love to blame somebody for that. And they rarely will accept the loss as their own loss. It's the big whales. It's the institutions. It's the market maker. Everybody's out to get them. A market maker's job by definition is I've lived through more crashes than anybody alive today who's trading the stock market. The only thing that is similar about all the crashes is that the day before they happened, the market was trading at record highs. It wasn't like the market started to erode and then there was a crash. Each time you go back February 12th over COVID, February 19th over the tariffs, everything looked rosy and beautiful. Everyone's portfolios were robust and wonderful. The consumer was in great financial condition until it wasn't.

Right now, we're in a similar situation. The only difference is bad things have happened, but the market's been resilient. I wonder what the next bad thing is going to happen to test the markets. And I'm curious to know what kind of ramifications multi-trillion dollar back-to-back IPOs with SpaceX and the AI companies could have on the near future on the markets.

>> So, let's think about this for a minute. So, ladies and gents, welcome back to another episode. Peter, good to have you back, my friend.

>> So thrilled to see you, man. It's been years, I think. Well, the years that we've had a friendship. We've been in Dubai. We've been in the New York Stock Exchange. We've had dinners together. We've conquered and triumphed. You've given me a private tour around the exchange. It's been a lot of fun. It's great to have you back on set. I think the combined views of the things we've done together is in the hundreds of thousands. And you gave us the most unique opportunity, which is to film inside the New York Stock Exchange. Always ever grateful because that's something magical. Yes.

>> But yeah, for people that may be tuning in for the first time because we've grown as a show too. Who is Peter Tuckman? Outside of Wall Street. So, Peter Tuckman is a New Yorker who has been working on the floor of the exchange for 41 years. I had sort of an extraordinary upbringing before that, but I came to the stock exchange on March 28th, 1985. Turns out it was the day that Ronald Reagan rang the opening bell and gave a speech. We actually just got a copy of the speech recently. I did not even know that that was that day. And I got a summer job as a teletypist. I had been working in Africa in West Africa for a year and a half doing some accounting for a Norwegian oil company and I was 25 and my parents said, you know, it's time to get a real job. Put on your big boy pants and let's get busy. And I had an older brother who my father had adopted during the war when he was in concentration camp who's was always been my mentor. He's much older. He just passed away. He was 95 years old. He's, you know, decades older than I, but he was a big Wall Street guy. And he always said that Wall Street was going to be a place for me. And so, I ended up coming back from Africa. My father had a friend who had was a partner in a brokerage firm, Cowan & Company, which later was bought out by associate general. And they got me down to the floor and I knew the minute I walked on the floor that this was for me. It was sort of chaotic. I sort of th Everybody has their different, you know, secret sauce. I love the sort of the chaos, the adrenaline, the energy. And that's what the floor in the 80s was. 7,000 people screaming and yelling, you know, open outcry, real auction market, paper, all all paper. I still don't even own a computer, so I'm sort of resistant to any technology. I do have this, right? But clearly, but um so anyway, summer job as a teletype, teletypist was so back in the day, orders were generated upstairs, sent down through a clerk. The clerk would beep a broker. Broker would go out to a crowd. He would engage with other traders or the market maker. He would buy the stock based on on instructions. The order would come back to the booth, reported to the customer. Then a piece of paper was handed to me. I was inputting it into a computer to because in the old days it took seven days for the transaction to be cleared, right? It was called T+7, right? So the money has to be transacted eventually, right? So the bank contacts the bank, the customer contact. That's the old school. Now it's done in hypers seconds. But so I would input it and you know who bought, who sold, the price, the time, what broker, what badge number, all it's kind of like the original blockchain because there needed to be a ledger of every single trade to be able to go back seven days later and make that transaction happen where the money was transacted. So I would input into a computer. September came and I knew I loved what I was doing and I said, "May I get a real job here?" Right? Summer internship is over. They said, "Pete, we love you. You know, you've got the energy, you've got the the look, it's all great." So, they gave me a job as an option clerk. Now, back in the old days, these trading desks used to have retail, institutional, and options. Basically, the firms upstairs were doing option trading, and they needed to hedge the options. So, they would do some equities against it, right? Buy 500 Johnson Johnson, cancel two leaves three, sell five, all day long, and it sort of really cut my teeth on the floor and um and then I moved my way up. Back in the old days, there was no training to be a broker. Everybody's dream was to be a broker, you know, in the early part of the century, they issued 1300 somewhat seats on the stock exchange, the right to trade. And so there was they never added to it, never subtracted to it. So basically, you needed somebody needed to die to quit to be fired in order for you to move up the ranks. And it took about 13 to 15 years to happen. I did it in three and a half. I was lucky. I was in the right place at the right time. I was good at what I did. And one guy quit, one guy retired, one guy died. And I got my first seat on April 17th, 1988 after the crash of 87.

>> And uh and so I've been a broker ever since. My job has changed a lot. Obviously, it's been something I've always loved every day. I've had, you know, great times. I've had bad times. I've had times during the financial crisis where I, you know, three years where I didn't make any money. I was sort of really struggling. I didn't tell anybody about it. I had a wife, I had children. So, there have been great times on Wall Street. There have been struggles on Wall Street. My life has had good times and hard times. And over the last number of years, I've pivoted a little bit to social media when technology sort of took over a lot of our industry, as it did many industries. And so, you know, Peter Tuckman has morphed into a social media influencer and celebrity in a way. I mean, you know, the the change from my October life, which was a solid social media influencer, to now being literally I can barely walk down the street anymore, which is wonderful. These are luxury problems. You know, my demographic is from 8 to 80. I had a show on CNN now for the last year. And so, you know, I'm building a media mega mega business. I'm traveling around the world. I do a lot of speaking. I have educational platforms. I'm working with a lot of big companies like Robin Hood and State Street and some of the bigger firms.

>> You're a busy man. Full of life and always pushing, which is something I noticed since I met you years ago. You went from stage talking, you know, had a long presentation mingling, and then we got you in a van, got you to a studio, and you were still alive and going, and yeah, it was very impressive to see. Hey Titans, let's take a quick break from the episode to talk about a sponsor and partner of the show that is Ola Prime. Now, a lot of traders have been talking about Ola Prime because they were recently the winner of the fastest payout prop award in the IFX Expo here in Dubai. And something that you don't see so often is that they are backed by their own brokerage firm, Ola Prime Markets. And a few things that I love about Ola Prime is that they have offers for futures, forex, and crypto traders. And most importantly, they allow you to trade on over eight platforms. And further, they do a 95% profit split, basically unheard of, which means whatever profit you make, you keep 95% of it. And most importantly, because of their reward, they're one of the only prop firms that offer a 1-hour payout through a structured 10-point 1-hour payout system. Your payouts are practically on demand, which means you can spend more time on the charts trading, withdraw your profits, and go back to the markets. With all these steps, measures, and awards in place, they are truly redefining transparency and trust in the prop space. So, if you want to work with a prop firm that you can trust and a partner of the show, click the link in the description or use the code TOOT for Titans of Tomorrow to get the best prices and discounts that I've personally negotiated for you guys, our Titans of Tomorrow audience. With that being said, let's get back into today's episode.

I want to walk through the floor itself because you mentioned here the digitalization and the pictures you showed me in the galleries. You know, you see people full on the floor on the phone screaming and shouting as it was, and now it's, you know, half empty. How has that transition been? And the people that are there, what is their purpose now? Is it kind of symbolic roles or legacy roles, or is there a reason for that?

>> It's not half empty, it's half full.

>> Nice. Secondly, look, any business, every business, to be perfectly honest, has had to make transitions and pivot with technology now, obviously with AI as well. Okay. And so we went from a basically an open outcry auction market, paper, human element marketplace. One person to another, a crowd situation where people were buying and selling, screaming and yelling, just like you'd see in the movies. That was the way it was with a huge support staff, right, to make everything happen because it was being done manually, right? You had a squad, a runner, you had a clerk, you had a reporter who put on every trade, you know, filling in in the midst of an active crowd. You had to know who bought, who sold, as I described, because the clearing happened days later. So, you needed someone to set up the ledger so that you because millions and millions of shares are trading, hundreds of millions are trading every day. I mean, now we trade over 1.5 billion on the floor of the stock exchange shares every day. You need to have every transaction logged because it just has to be okay. And so, you know, obviously, I think probably around the mid-2000s, we went from all straight paper, human inter. We are still the only human interactive market in the world next to Amsterdam. Amsterdam has a small human presence, but London, the Midwest, Pacific, around the world, there used to be Tokyo, there used to be a lot of live human markets. We are the last of it. And I'm a firm believer that we are more relevant than ever before. The stock exchange has built us a platform where we are able to offer our customers an edge even in this electronic marketplace. However, you know, like any industry, we've seen it with advertising, we've seen it with publishing, we've seen it with all businesses that technology comes in and there's a it speeds up the process and humans are a little bit outsourced.

When we did a video of the tour, I posted it online and then I got a lot of comments because you introduced me to a lot of all the market makers there. We shook hands, we had a chat with all of them, and a lot of the comments were very conspiratorial, like they're just saying that because they don't want you to know and that's not really their job. So if you can give some clarity of absolutely the reality of the job of a market maker, because it is a big misconception.

>> There, look, there's a lot of misconceptions and I don't understand. There's a part of it's like there are always haters. There are people who don't like the floor, they think it's a museum. You know, they've done. There was an article written by a guy named Jeremy Olsen, CEO of MarketWatch, is one of those platforms everybody reads. It's about it, you know, it's probably posted every day, and he wrote an article one day and he had my picture and he said, "This is the last time you're going to see this clown." Uh uh uh uh. It's the last time I'm going to post a picture of this clown who is all over the internet as the this famous broker. And basically, the floor is nothing more than a bunch of people playing fantasy football and they've been replaced by computers. It couldn't be farther from the truth. So, I don't know where the haters come in. And now there's also a new movement of these young new young traders who claim that market makers are out to screw them over, that they see their stop orders. There's this new thing called the liquidity event called ICT, I believe it's called, where they believe that the market makers can see their stop orders and they take the order, they take the stock down to the stop orders, they take them out on their stop orders and they run the stock up. Also, couldn't be farther enough from the truth because first of all, I've traded with market makers for my whole career, right, for 38 years, and they are not allowed to see the stop orders. They're not allowed to sell stock on straight minus ticks. They're not allowed to buy stock on straight plus ticks. So anybody who believes people who trade and lose money love to blame somebody for that, and they rarely will accept the loss as their own loss. So they find somebody. It's the man. It's the big whales. It's the institutions. It's the market maker. Everybody's out to get them, which none of which are true. So, a market maker's job by definition is to create a smooth and active market, to inject liquidity into the marketplace, to make the spread as tight as possible, to make it an attractive market for people to come to. Think about it. If I'm a day trader and the spread is a dollar wide, if I'm trading Visa and it's a $100 plus stock and the market's $132, $133, and I'm a day trader looking to make 25 cents, 50 cents on a trade, hitting singles and doubles, and I have to pay up a dollar for that, then I'm already out of the game. I've already missed my big. So that's their job. They are there to fly the plane. For I am a broker. I am one of the passengers on the plane. And the market maker is first of all, the market maker, one of their job descriptions is when the public no longer wants to buy or sell the stock, they have to step in and do it during a crash or a crisis.

>> That's what you mean when you said injecting liquidity.

>> Exactly. So at all times in today's market, which is a little bit electronic, at all times, the market maker is on both sides of the market. They are bidding and they are offering. They are trying to inject liquidity into it. If you go to NASDAQ, okay, our differentiator from NASDAQ to the NYSE is NASDAQ doesn't have market makers. They don't have guardrails. They are strictly electronic. And that's why you'll see a stock open at three, go to 50, and back to one because there's nobody there injecting liquidity. There are no guidelines. One of the other things that the New York Stock Exchange has is circuit breakers, which means that if a stock dislocates 7% from the last sale, the market, the systems slow down and we try and identify what's going on. Is there news? Is there a war? Is there a fat finger? What is the problem? If it dislocates more than 10%, we stop trading. You guys saw it with GameStop. You saw it with COVID. We actually opened down and immediately closed. 10% dislocation, the market shuts down for 15 minutes and we try and identify what the situation is because for us, it's our fiduciary responsibility for the customer to basically create a smooth and active market. Nobody benefits except the rats. We call them the rats. If somebody who's trading a stock that goes from three to 483 and back to three, right? It just, you know, there are. I know everybody claims when these events happened, whether it was the meme phenomenon or whether it was, you know, these wild moves or these flash crashes or whatever it was, everybody claims they made all this money. But trust me, I've analyzed every day that we had GameStop and Rivian and and Blackberry and and, you know, all those stocks that were trading in these wild moves going from 3 to 483 and back to three, that most people lost money on those trades. I know everybody, the Roaring Kitties of the world were posting that they made millions and millions of dollars. My belief is it's not correct. I analyze where the majority of the volume on those days in those stocks was at the highs of the price. If you notice the way GameStop traded, right, it was bankrupt. It was $2, it was $20, and it ran to 483. Then it ran down to 150 and three-quarters of a dollar, and then it traded down even lower. The biggest volume events in that on those days, first of all, GameStop, we trade stopped trading at 29 times that day because it dislocated more than 10% so many times.

>> Secondly, the majority of the highest volume were at the highest prices. And I remember being on Instagram Live with the retail community, which I'm very close with, and everybody telling me, Pete, it's going to the moon, blah, blah, blah. I said, 'Well, it may go to the moon, but that's not what's happening now. Nobody got broke taking a profit. You know, you bought AMC, remember AMC was another one of the stocks that got memeified. You know, you bought that at five and at 20, and it's at 74. I beg you to make a sale, right? No, you're an old man. You're a suit. Go to the, you know, go to the grave. It's going to to 500. Well, sure enough, the next day they issued a secondary. It went to 40 and it's trading now at 10. Right.

>> So, I wanted to get back to the market maker. So, you're saying they're injecting liquidity. For example, when the market is dropping significantly before it dislocates the 10% and we go offline, their job is to prop up price and they're it's not to prop up price. It's to create. So if there are gaps in the price when the public stops buying it and the market maker steps in, right, then you're going to have this dislocation. So they're not propping it up. They're just making a market.

>> And whose money are they using?

>> Okay. So when I got down on Wall Street in 1985, there were 70 market-making firms. They were all Irish, Italian, and Jews who came down there in the early part of the century who had they are for profit. They're there to buy low, sell high. Doesn't always happen that way. Sometimes they buy low and sell lower, right? Because you have to realize that when the public is no longer wanting to, but the day of the crash of 87, okay, Digital Equipment was a stock that the company I worked for, I was a clerk, a deck, it was one of the first computers, it opened at $147. It closed at $40 that day.

>> Wow.

>> When we got around in the $80 level, the public just stopped buying it. They they couldn't they couldn't buy anymore, and the stock kept coming down. One of the market makers' jobs is to buy the stock in the absence of the public. So at the end of that day, the last $40 or $50 was just the market maker buying it. And what ended up happening that night was many of these market-making firms, which were smaller family-owned companies, okay, went out of business. They were forced to merge because they needed to. There was a call to the bank at the end of that day. They needed to have cash in the bank to support whatever they had bought. And if they didn't have that money, they either needed to borrow it, they needed to merge with another company, they needed to go bankrupt, or they needed to get bailed out by another firm. And so over these many years of the market and these crises, the necessity. So, think about this. 70 market-making firms, family-owned businesses, they came down to Wall Street. They had some money and they were given one stock. They were allocated a stock and they traded it. So they work independently of the stock company, like Nike is traded by a company, right? And that market maker was chosen by Nike because they liked the way they did business, and they buy it and sell it and buy it and sell it all day long, right? At some point, those companies are allocated more stocks and more stock. This is how it's gone since 1903 when the stock NYC opened, right? But at one point, it became a little bigger than a family-owned business could handle because the amount of shares and dollars that were necessary to keep this game going became bigger than a small family office could do. So they ended up, the first move was some mergers and acquisitions. Firms took over other firms. Bear Stearns bought a few of the firms after the crash of 87. Then the banks came in. Barclays bought one of the market makers. Goldman Sachs bought one of the market makers because they needed big money behind them because the stock market was growing at such a fast pace. You know, at one point we had 50 stocks, then we had a thousand stocks, now we have 30-something, we have 3,000 stocks.

>> Okay. So then banks took over because they had unlimited funds to be able to support the trading. And now after in '85, there were 70 firms. Now there are three: Citadel, GTS, and Virtu. Virtu was owned by Vinnie Biola, who is a very wealthy man. That's one firm. Citadel is owned by Ken Griffin, also, it's the largest hedge fund in the world. And GTS is owned by another gentleman, Ari, who another wealthy company. So, there are three of them. Now this is a function of all the years of mergers, acquisitions, takeovers from family-owned to the banks to the hedge funds.

>> So do you think this is where the conspiracy angle comes in? Because the market maker on the floor, their job is to step in when the public doesn't. So usually they're buying at times when people don't want to. So it's not favorable, but that's a fiduciary responsibility. But at the time they are trying to make a profit in other situations. Correct? So when they are making decisions that are against their benefit to buy when it's not favorable, that's a cost. But then they have the other ways to balance the books. But maybe it's because they do this because this is not their main business. Their main business is we're Citadel. We're here to be a real market maker and we use this as a vehicle. Is there anything here?

>> So be aware that there's a wall, a Chinese wall, no disrespect, between what Citadel does as a hedge fund and what Citadel does as a market maker. Okay? And so while you know if someone's out there putting their money at risk and somebody's out there um trading, as I said, when people are struggling making money in the market, they love to blame somebody. And I can stand here and tell you that for 40 years, I've known the market makers. I've stood in there. I've taken young traders to the market maker and I've said, "Okay, Patty or Dave or Joe or Bob, these young traders believe that you guys see their stop orders and you take them out on their stops and you're here to screw them and mess them up and all that." And they will explain to them verbatim that we first of all cannot see your stop orders. We cannot sell stock on straight minus. We cannot buy. So whatever you're accusing us of is erroneous on a hundred fronts. And so there's always somebody who's going to sort of be a hater or whatnot. So a market maker's job is pivotal. It's so necessary. And if you watch the way NASDAQ trades versus the NYSE, the differentiator is the market maker. And when you see a stock trade in insane volatility from two to 60 to two on NASDAQ, you understand that that will never happen on the NYSE. And not because they're doing it, putting the public at disadvantage ever. They are making they are adding advantage to the public because of the spread, because of the injection of liquidity, because of all those reasons.

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So why does it happen where we see a very obvious support level, we see a very obvious trend line, which a lot of people expect to respect. They buy upon it, and then price just shoots lower, seems to grab the stop loss and go the other way. When it happens once or twice, you say it's a coincidence. When you see it for your whole career, you start to think this is targeted. So, not to get into the same topic again of okay, what's going on? Because you've clarified market makers are not intensively doing it. But I'm trying to understand, for example, as a broker or a market maker, your job is to pair orders off, buyers meet sellers, that's an auction. Correct? But you can imagine that at the level of the support where everyone's bought, who's selling? So maybe there is a depletion, but just below where people are getting kicked out of trades, you're introducing sellers that can be matched off. So it's just healthier or more efficiency in your job. That's the way I've kind of digested it.

>> Okay. So think about this. Think about technical analysis. Okay. Why is it so if you've ever traded using technical analysis, using exponential moving averages, you know, I have my partner David Green, who was a market maker right back in Bank of America. Some of the great stocks back, he started with me in '85. He retired at 39 when there was a big takeover. He's been trading and teaching. One of the great teachers in the space. He is the only guy out there teaching who's got 41 years of experience like me. Okay, we use at Wall Street Global Trading Academy, we use technical analysis to trade, right? And many people do. Okay, and what does that mean? That means you're using charts to basically identify support and resistance, right? We use exponential moving averages, we use pivot points, we use the RSI, relative strength index, we use Fibonacci, we use any number of things. You will watch a stock come down all the way, okay, from from 90 to 30, right? And there's a moving average. We use the nine, the 15, the 30, the 65, and the 200. Each one of the moving averages represents certain levels of support. We always say that the 200-day moving average is the wall of China. It's basically it's like if it's broken down to that point, right, then that shows real support and there's a trade there. But we always are amazed because there always the people go, "Oh, technical analysis doesn't work and blah blah blah." It's amazing. How does the stock know to stop going down and start going up? Is it that everyone's using the same indicators? Possibly. Is it that there is support and resistance are actually significant? Yes, it is. But it's amazing to think, you know, I know when people don't understand something, they love to immediately conspiritize it, if that's a word. You know, blame it on a conspiracy.

We saw yesterday, right, yesterday the market was rolled over. It was up in the morning, up 60.64% as a bounce back from Friday's big sell-off. We had a nice little rally, and then all afternoon the market started to sell off, and it kept breaking. It broke the nine, it broke the 15, it broke it, even broke the 200-day moving average. Now, you're implying that while, you know, when you see that happening, it almost feels like you know it's being forced so that the market maker can buy some cheaper stock, right? You have to realize that so a plus tick is when a stock's trading at $32 and it goes straight to $32 and a penny. I mean, now we trade in pennies. Back in the old days, we traded in eighths and quarters. Okay. Um, I'm allowed to go out and buy stock on a straight plus tick. I can walk in, and it's trading at $32. I can say $33 for 100,000. I can pay a straight plus tick. I'm a broker. A market maker cannot pay a straight plus tick. They can only pay a zero plus tick. So, they cannot force a stock to go higher and they cannot force a stock to go lower. They cannot sell on a straight minus. They so, this is how it works. If I walk into a stock, it's trading at $32 and I say $32.50 for 5,000 shares, and there's a seller in the crowd. He says, "Sold, the last sale was $32.50." Then and only then can the market maker pay $32.50. He cannot pay $32.50 if the stock's trading at $32.

>> So that's the difference between retail and institutional that we are allowed to. They are not.

>> No, retail and institutional. Anybody except a market maker can play a straight plus tick and can sell on a straight minus tick, except if it's a short-exempt stock, right? You know that there are certain rules that if a stock is down more than 10%, you cannot keep whacking it. It can only be sold on zero minus. So a market maker has restrictions on what he's allowed to do. So what the implications are that they're forcing it to go lower, forcing it to go higher by rule, by nature, by definition of a market maker, right? And we are regulated incredibly. They know everything we do. They see every trade I do, and if I do anything that's slightly deviated from the rule, they don't let that happen. So just by nature, you know, what stocks trade on technical analysis, amazingly enough, I've seen it day after day where a stock will go down hundreds of points and it will get to that support, whether it's the nine, the 15, the 200, and it will stop, and you'll look at it and go, "How did it know to stop and turn around and go up?" I knew it was because it had hit one of my support levels, but just as many more, I would say more times than not, it does stop and turn around and go back up, but there are times where it breaks through those. Now, you have to realize there are lots of extenuating circumstances that make a market trade, right? Right now, we've. You know, I say we're one tweet away from crazy town. Mr. Trump can say something and it can break through all. Look, the market, you can be in a trade for all the right reasons. All the setups set up, right? You're the moving averages pulled back if you're in a trend trade. A trend trade is a stock that's going up for a certain period of time. It pulls back to the nine and the 15 exponential moving average. These are all my my David Green, who's taught me everything about technical analysis. These are his IP on how to trade. We haven't invented technical analysis. It's been there forever. But there are certain trades that have certain components that work, right? But at the end of the day, it can. There are extenuating circumstances. You can be in the trade for all the right reasons. It hit my levels. It hit my thing. And then a tweet comes out about a war, about Mr. Trump, about any number of things, and it drops 70 handles on the S&P, and everybody's holding, holding Herman here, right? And there's nothing we can do about it.

>> And then a V-shaped recovery right after.

>> And then look, it can be parabolic. It can be this, it can be that. We look over the last five years, we've seen every possible thing thrown at this market.

And yet the market continues to go higher. I mean, think about it. This market is up over 140% since COVID. Think about what has happened in the world and in the markets since COVID. I can go back. I have a photographic memory. I can tell you how in the crash of 2008, right, we the market went down whatever it was, 15, 20%. Okay, they threw $800 million into stimulus, right? Back then, it took nine years to get back to even. They put $800 million into AIG and General Motors and backstopping all these companies, right, over an 18-month period of time, and it took nine years for the market to get back to even. During COVID, we sold off from February 19th to March 23rd. Okay, they had learned their lesson from the prior crash and they put $3 trillion into the market over three months, and we were back to even by August 18th. COVID, March 23rd, August 18th, we were back to even. We were up 20% for the rest of that year, 2020. We were up 23% for 2021. 2022, we were down because of the interest rates, because of all this money being pumped into the system. It was a normal economic move. 2023, 2024, and 2025, we were up 20% plus each year.

So, and we've seen multiple wars, Ukraine, Iran, whatever. We've seen tariffs. We've seen oil go from negative $25 to $120. We've seen every possible thing. We've seen the inverse yield curve. We've seen all of those things. And yet, even in the midst of this new confrontation with Iran, where oil went from 63 and a half to 120, and we've sustained the price of oil over $95 now for eight, nine weeks, which is incredibly inflationary. The market went from 6,300 S&P to 7,600, and we're trading at record highs.

So the market, everyone needs to understand that the resilience of the market is powerful. There are extenuating circumstances that the market will. The market can handle virtually anything except uncertainty and the unknowns.

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How do you differentiate? Let's you mentioned the bullish years and then 2022 was a healthy economic portion, just a pullback. How do you differentiate a pullback, which is just a correction, versus a crash, which is something pretty dire?

>> Okay, so a crash is something, it's a word I don't use lightly at all. We've only had a handful of them in history. Okay, I mean, you had one, the crash of 1929. If you're a book reader, you should read the book that was just written by Andrew Ross Sorkin, who is on Squawkbox. He's a CNBC contributor. He co-wrote Billions. He's an incredibly smart guy. Researched for many years about the crash of '29, which is a fascinating story in its own right. We don't have time to tell it now. It's the only real crash that related to actual stocks. What was going on back then? I'll tell it quickly is that in 1928, the market was very exclusive, not inclusive. It was only the wealthy people trading the stock market, but people were starting to make money, businesses were happening, the industrial revolution was happening, and the bankers and the wealthier people said, "You know what? Let's democratize this Wall Street game. Let's let everybody have a little bit of taste of it." So, they set up these little kiosks all over New York, and everybody could walk up and give a dollar, and you would get $10 in return as long as you gave it back to them to invest in the stock market.

>> That's what happened.

>> Huge injection.

>> A huge injection on heavy margin. And so they did this for about a year. The stock market was up 100% that year in 1928 until somebody who was one of the people who did that $1, $10 exchange said, "Wait a minute. I'm up 100%. Maybe I should make a sale." They tried to sell it. They couldn't find the stock. There was a little bit. They could. There was not a lot of regulation and blah blah. And once that word got around that maybe this was a little bit smoke and mirrors and whatnot, and I can't sell my stock. The worst thing you can ever have is when someone goes to the bank and you're told you can't take your money out, or you want to go sell stock and you're told you can't sell your stock. We don't know where it lives. And so that caused that anxiety and fear, and there was a run on the market and a run on the banks. That was the crash of '29. Then you had, obviously, there was, I think there was somewhat of a crash during World War II. I don't really know. Then you had the crash of '87. So I've lived through more crashes than anybody alive today who's trading the stock market. We had a crash of '87, the bubble of 2000, the '07, the '08, '09 financial crisis, COVID, the mini crash last year around the tariffs, which was a 20.8% crash, and the most recent pullback, 14% from the Iran war. Those are all the crashes that have ever happened. What was your question?

>> How do you differentiate that from just a pullback?

>> From a pullback? The only thing, the only component that is similar about all the crashes, every look, COVID was a global health crisis. '08 was a predatory lending crisis. '87 was kind of a technology insurance crisis. The 2025 crash was a tariff crisis. This past recent one was an Iran war crisis. Those are the different differentiating components. The only thing that's similar about every crash is that the day before they happened, the market was trading at record highs. It wasn't like the market started to erode and then there was a crash. Each time you go back February 12th over COVID, February 19th over the tariffs, the markets were trading at the highest they had ever been the day before there was a crash. So something, everything looked rosy and beautiful. Everyone's portfolios were robust and wonderful. The consumer was in great financial condition, and then until it wasn't, and suddenly something happened. So a pullback, a consolidation, a sell-off, are healthy, right? We've seen that happen over and over again. Pullbacks are healthy, right? Those are caused by. It can be caused by a tweet. It can be caused by a tariff. It can be caused by the way information is disseminated. Right? If Mr. Trump had come to us in 2025 and said, "Guys, I'm the new president. I'm the new sheriff in town. I'm a fan of tariffs. This is the way it's going to play out. Bear with me. It's going to be a little bit painful, but we're going to work it out." The market could have handled it much better than the way he did it. He disseminated information in a way, 185% here, and we're going to shut down Mexico. The way it was handled, the market could not assimilate that information, and it caused that kind of a crash. So there's what precipitates a pullback are certain things that can be economic, they can be social, they can be social media, it can be any number of things. A crash is obviously caused by something that's fast and furious and very immediate, right? We went down in COVID for. I mean, and it's not maybe very often, they've been a day basically, right? So the sell-off in 1929 happened on a Thursday. It there was a little reprieve Friday, and then the Monday was the day that the market completely crashed. People were jumping out of windows. In '87, it happened on a Thursday, a slight reprieve on a Friday, and then we had Black Monday. COVID, right? There was it started on around February 12th, which was a record high for the market, and it was a bit of a. We went down a little bit, and then it careened off a cliff around March 23rd. The sell-off that we had in 2025 over the tariff happened over a 7-week period. We sold off 20.8%. So a crash is really a fast and furious sell-off that was initiated by.

a market being at a record high, 87, as well. It was at the high, high, and then suddenly, every all, it's kind of like a perfect storm. I said, markets can handle anything except that uncertainty. Markets can, you know, understand and assimilate so much to a point where suddenly it's just, it's like, "What was the experience like when you're seeing this chaos unfold on these four or five occasions on the floor?"

"It was quite something. I mean, each one was a little bit different. So, I was a clerk in 1987. I had only been on Wall Street for a couple of years. Uh, I remember we had just developed this thing, it was called a dot system, where the orders were coming on through a machine, um, on paper, and and they were just spitting out. Retail orders were not called down by phone. They were being sent by a little paper machine. And I just remember coming in that morning, and the machine was spitting out orders like crazy. I was grabbing and ripping and grabbing and ripping and beeping a broker. And this, my crew of brokers were just like circulating. I'd hand them a hundred orders, and they would run out to the crowd and just sell, sell 500, sell a thousand. There was no, it was almost organized chaos to a point.

Um, the, the, I remember incredibly well the, the crash of COVID, where we came into work, and uh, the market was already trading down more than 10%. So we had already initiated our circuit breakers before the market even opened.

"So, at 9:30, the bell rang, we opened for one second, and then all the screens went black. It was one of the most extraordinary things. And also, it was, we knew that that everybody was sick, and everyone was dying, and so there was that health component, too. We were worried, everybody was worried about their parents and their grandparents and all that. I mean, you know me, I mean, I, I got COVID March 15th, I was patient zero, and I was given three months to live. So, I, I had my own experience. But, you know, these, these selloffs can be, uh, you know, one thing about, someone asked me the other day, how I have navigated the stress of all James de Mulan, school of hard knocks, a few days ago.

"How have I been able to navigate all these major selloffs and not and not get, uh, uh, thrown by them?" And so, one of the, one of the things I said was that I've, up until recently, I've never owned a share of stock in my life. Right? So, I, you know, I made a decision many, many years ago that my understanding was, I'm not allowed to own a stock for myself and a customer in a 30-day period. 28 years ago, I built a strategy around the S&P 500, where I'm in every stock that's in the S&P every day.

"That's by definition. There's no days that are different. And so, if I'm going to trade any of the stocks, most of them would be in the S&P. And so, I kind of just made a deal. Why am I going to like, try and navigate? I know money is a funny thing. If I have a thousand shares of XYZ in my portfolio, and my customer gives me a million shares of it to sell, it's not, there's going to be a little voice in my head, which I don't want to hear. So, I just made a deal with myself. I'd put my kids through college and high school in good places. I'll pay for it. They'll graduate without any debt, and, you know, and I, I make a good enough living on Wall Street. And so, that's, that's it. But those, each one of those crashes was absolute chaos on the floor. I mean, the '87 was probably the biggest in my memory, just because of, there was no technology back then. It was really, as I said, digital equipment opened at 145 and closed at 40.

"The moves in stocks were the biggest, I think we, we had ever seen percentage-wise. Right. I think the Dow was trading at, Dow was maybe 6,000. I don't really remember. The percentage move, I think, was bigger than any other of the crashes. Um, and, uh, it was, it was chaotic. Last year's selloff took a little bit longer, so it was a little bit different, but each component, each one of the crashes has had different components to it. And, you know, like COVID, there was, everyone was walking around stunned and worried, and the selloff was, was aggressive and quick, you know. So, each crash has been different. But the floor, being on the floor through those things, you have to realize that we are, I'm not comparing myself to a soldier at war, uh, deep respect for anybody who, who, who fights for their country. Um, but, you know, I'm at the point of execution of stock. I'm, I have to represent my customer from a fiduciary point of view. I can't crumble at those moments. I need to go in there and irrespective of what's happening around me, whether there's a war going on or in a crash going on or whatever, and I still need to focus on doing the best job for my customers. So, it's not like I can waver.

Uh, we just went through a period, so, uh, the, I guess the confrontation, the war with Iran is maybe 12 weeks old. Okay. And so suddenly, out of nowhere, the, uh, US and Israel decided to attack Iran, and that was after we had attacked, uh, we had gone into Venezuela. And so, oil was trading at 63 and a half a barrel. The economy was at three and a half, 4% GDP. For every $10 move in, in, in the price of a barrel of oil, it's equivalent to 1% GDP. So, we went from 63 and a half in oil to 120. Okay. That's equivalent to taking the economy from three and a half, 4% healthy economy to zero to flat or almost negative, no growth, slow growth. And that, that, and then sustained levels above 95, which we are still in, in the oil is incredibly, uh, inflationary. It's, it's causing a lot of problems with job creation and all these other things. Okay. Uh, in the middle of this thing, the market sold off, kind of quietly, around 13, 14%. And tech started getting whacked. Software got decimated. The chipper, the chips got really hurt badly, kind of quietly, slowly over this. We're, we've been in this war now for about 12 weeks. About four, five, six weeks into it, AI was being called a bubble, and, and they were really hitting these names hard. And then suddenly, the next thing we know, the S&P was trading at 6,300. We had ticked at 7,000 for a minute, and Dow had ticked at 50,000, and then suddenly we imploded a little bit during the war, and then suddenly, from one day to the next, we came in on a Friday, and the, the S&P was back at 7,000, almost quietly, almost without my permission. It was like, "Whoa, wait a minute. I didn't see that coming." And, and, you know, I'm there every day. I'm aware of what's going on. And, and then we continued to go higher. So, we went from 63 in the S&P to 76 in the S&P. What do I think happened? While because we were still in the middle of the confrontation, my gut was that people who had, what I just described happened in 2025, where all those institutions sold, institutions sold, and it was retail buying the dip. I think they were suffering from a little bit of PTSD. They said, "You know what? Wait a minute. The info we're getting around the war is not giving us any edge, and we don't want to get caught off guard because when this war is over, we know what's going to happen. This is going to turn. Mr. Trump's going to say, 'Buy the market,' and it's going to be off to the races, and we don't want that." So, they, they said, "This is my interpretation." I think they all sat around and said, "You know what? We're the lifeblood of this market is is earnings. The earnings have been spectacular this quarter, right? More than 80% of the S&P have beat. And the way the market is trading, it's like, watch what happened. You know, when they like stocks, they're not up $5, $10, they're up $50. We're seeing these insane moves. And when they don't like it, like Broadcom the other day, they sold the stock down that didn't miss on earnings. It was a slightly light guidance. They took it down 18%. So, a few weeks ago, I think the, the market and the economy and, and the war disengaged from each other. The institutions said, "You know what? The war is going to be over eventually, three weeks or two months. We want to be positioned long this market because that's what the market seems like it's telling us." And so, they just started buying the market. And we quietly went from 6,300 to 7600. We went back up to 50,000 on the Dow, and we went higher to 51 and 51,500. And so, right now, we are in a market that is, you ask me, what is the next bad thing that's going to happen? And, um, it's curious. We don't know. We really never know. We, it's either going to be a war, it's going to be a this, or it's, you know, hopefully it's not that the Knicks are going to lose the, uh, the championship. But, you know, we are in there, in, in 1980, uh, the Berlin Wall ca, the, the Soviet Union was a, a union, and the Berlin Wall was up, and Europe was at odds with each other, and the stock market was trading at 3,000, the Dow. And then there was a move to break down the Soviet Union. They took down the, uh, Berlin Wall, and there was this massive global peace initiative, and the stock market went from 3,000 Dow, 3,000 to now almost 5,000. It was a major move, like a global peace. The world started to get along with each other. My gut is that I think we're in, we're in store for a, a more positive thing that's going to happen before something really negative is going to happen. Right. The market seems almost to be dislocated from, from, uh, so many different things that it's, it's moving on its own.

"What about the trillions that are going to flow towards the?"

"You asked me about the SpaceX thing, right? So, so let's think about this for a minute. So, we've watched bit. So, over the last few weeks, it's almost as if they're just buying everything that's not locked down, right? We, you know, there's this rational enthusiasm around SpaceX. A lot's going on around that. Everybody seems like they're trying to get into cash to buy the SpaceX deal. Most, most people who are, are smart money, who have been in the markets for a long time, bought a piece of SpaceX five years ago.

"And those people are positioned just fine. Uh, everyone else. I mean, you, there's always that joke that when you're, you know, the guy who's, uh, you know, giving you a pedicure or selling you as a bread hot dog on the street for a dollar is asking you about SpaceX, then maybe things are a little bit crazy, right? You know, when it's that, it's gotten down to that crazy level. No disrespect to the hot dog salesman. Um, $1.8 trillion dollars is, uh, is is a little bit crazy, but it's not that crazy if you look at some of the other things. So, their biggest competition, Blue Oyster Cult, Jeff Bezos's company, just blew up the other day, if you, if you did you see that? So, SpaceX had one competitor, right? Was it's called Blue Oyster or something, was Jeff Bezos's space company.

"They had a launch of a of a spaceship the other day, and it, it exploded out of the, out of the gate and decimated the landing strip and everything. So, their basic only major competitor is no longer in existence. They couldn't have said that. You know, people were hurt. So, I, I don't want to say it was a good thing, but they couldn't have set up a better scenario for a company setting up for an IPO. They have 20 billion in in revenue. They just signed a $4 billion deal with the US, uh, uh, army for satellites and whatnot. They've got, uh, the, the competitor is no longer there. But still, you're trading at like a hundred times, uh, earnings, which seems a little. But it, stock market is funny. We have a 100 million new retail traders involved. Everybody's trying to get a piece of everything. There's that irrational enthusiasm around the market. We're seeing what's happening on the downside is what's happening in Bitcoin, for instance. So, in 2025, around this 65,000 level, Black Rockck and, and a lot of this new people came into to Bitcoin and started buying it at crazy margins, 50 to 100x margin. You can go out and buy Bitcoin for, you know, 50x or whatever it is. And so, and then it ran up to 95. Now, it's gotten back down to the price where all these people got in it. And so, what you're seeing here is a huge margin call, right? While people are trying to raise cash, they're selling everything they can. I think that's why we saw a couple of big sell-off days over the last week is people are starting to take a little profits. This market is a little bit on the frothy side,

"Right? That's what it feels like. And why wouldn't I? Why wouldn't I? You know, markets so high up, and the moves in this market are crazy. Software, they got it down to 25 cents on the dollar. We bought that all the way up. You know, they're selling the chips and buying software, and then they're buying chips and selling. So, I mean, there's, there all these sort of paired trades going on, and yet the market still trading at record highs, like off the charts, right?

"To wrap up pizza, I want to ask, in your four-decade career, what is a moment you're most proud of?"

"I will tell you, one of the most proud moments I've had is that recently. So, I have a gallery on the stock exchange of, you know, when I got into social media, I became, uh, aware of all these young artists who."

"You walked me through the whole corridor. I, my favorite one, I've been thinking how to replicate it, is the periodic, uh, table, but the elements are just perks of a trader. So, you have a Ferrari key and a this. I want to have that in my office. That's."

"We, I can have him custom make you a few small ones. We have one in Benny, has one. My son has one in his apartment that just says Wall Street.

"Um, I became familiar with all these young artists whose art relates to money and finance. And I created this gallery. One of the people who is a galler, gallerist, and an artist, uh, who I met, who, who put on loan a piece of art into the gallery that we ended up selling. It's not a selling show, but a CEO of one of the publicly traded companies saw it, fell in love with it, and we had to sell it to her because she wouldn't take no for an answer. Uh, he is a huge fan of Einstein. He actually believes that that Jesus has has sent me to him. He's a very religious man. And he made a statue of me. It's a full-size, 5'7 statue out of bronze that is an exact replica of me. And he, uh, offered it to the New York Stock Exchange as a gift. And I didn't know what to do with it. I was just like, I was a little embarrassed. It would seem like like it was a little egotistical or whatnot, but it wasn't me. And we, he offered it to the stock exchange, and the stock exchange accepted it as the gift, and they are going to put it in the main VIP lobby of the stock exchange. So, there will be a statue of me. And, you know, what, and I, I got incredibly emotional about it because, you know, I, I know I'm sort of the ambassador of the stock exchange, and, you know, I've been there for 41 years, and it's what I love to do, and I, I represent it to the best of my ability. And my father, my son, and I are the last father and son team. But when they sort of accepted it, it was sort of an acknowledgment of the, the role I've played, that I've, I've done some good things with with my time there, and that I've educated and inspired people, you know, and that people come down there, they want to see me, right? And so, the work I've done is paid off by inspiring and motivating the next generation. And that it was noticed by the stock exchange to the point where they were willing to accept this gift, and they're going to put it there. So, like my grandchildren will be able to go to the stock exchange and see a statue of their of old grandpa Einstein in, in, in a hundred years. And so, my legacy, I hope to be that if I have inspired and changed somebody's life in a positive way, uh, uh, to find something they love to do, get really good at it, and have some fun, uh, then, then I've done my job, you know. And that, and this moment of the acknowledgment of the hard work I've put in, uh, by them, and so the statue itself is literally a tribute to the broker, right? So, our differentiator between us and all the other markets is the stock exchange has brokers like me. I happen to be the most well-known one. But that, that human element, to me, it's something I learned from my father, right? My father was a Holocaust survivor, came to America, was an amazing doctor, and he always talked about the human element, what, what you and I do. That relationship of one human to another, and what goes on between us as friends, as business partners, as just people who shake hands and, and, and have a relationship, is so special. I mean, it seems like that's why we're all here, right? Nobody gets out of here alive, you know, like, you know, and so that human element, to me, is the most important. And that sort of acknowledgment, uh, was really moving to me, more than I thought. And so, um."

"No, definitely, definitely proud of you to see that you're cementing your legacy permanently in the place you made a career called home. That's that's epic to see, just as a friend."

"Oh, yeah. There's only one Peter Tugman, one that I started on Wall Street. So, a pleasure to have you back on the show again. And thank you for all you do for us as well."

"My pleasure."

"There we go."

"Thank you, my brother. Yes."

"There we go."