金融精英圈不能說的秘密！誰決定全球能源和油價？世界商品定價機制大公開！【邦妮區塊鏈】

0:00 One retail broker once told me that retail traders are like grass. Grass goes up. You have to get all these new retail traders and at that time they might blow up. So basically you're cutting the lawn and then you have to find new retail traders. Retail traders look to where there's volatility and so they'll move. A lot of people are saying that you're they're seeing retail traders move into gold because there's more volatility than gold or they're seeing more volatility in copper so they're moving into copper. So they're very finicky. they don't care as much about what the underlying. They care more about what they're going to get out of the contract. Whereas, I think our traders, because they're institutional, they're doing a lot of hedging as opposed to just pure speculation. This fall in retail volume on the crypto markets over the last year, year and a half, and they're sort of guessing, could this be because I announced that

0:46 January was the strongest trading month in the company's history? You get lots more volume when there's volatility. If you have too much volatility, people will pull back. If things are falling too fast or moving up too high, people will start to hold their positions. Are you seeing an energy constraint or shortage that in the crypto winter instead of 2021, institutions started to come in but pulled back whereas now the belief is really that they're here, they've already started to put more funds towards crypto and they're not going to be pulling back. How do you see risk versus uncertainty? Tariffs, fire. What about war? As a risk manager, I would stop people doing something.

1:31 I have Jennifer Ilq with me. She is such an amazing person. The president of Ice Futures US. Probably one of the most successful people I've ever talked to. >> Oh, well, thanks Bonnie. But I don't think so. I really appreciate that. I'm really happy to be here. You talked about living in Asia for a bit just earlier. >> Yeah. I lived in Singapore for 20 years. So when I was first in university, I really wanted to try to move to Asia in basically expand my career. My first university, I went to my MBA, there was a lot of students from China there and it felt like if I went there, China was opening up, everything was going to change. So I did an exchange program to Singapore and I just never left.

2:18 >> So you loved it there. I loved it. I loved it. I really I enjoy I love the heat. So, I do like the heat. That helped. But I also really like the people. I had gone to National University of Singapore for 4 months and it just felt right. >> So, I ended up um I'd been married at the time. My husband came over. He was a teacher and I just looked for a job and eventually found something. First with the Singapore government, then I went to the NYX and then I joined ICE not long after that. So I've been with ICE 18 years now and 14 of them in Singapore. >> You guys do a lot of very interesting stuff. So we were just talking about different futures. This is a whole a whole different not crypto world not completely opposite to crypto. So yeah. So the the part of the exchange that I run the exchange I run Ice Futures US

3:04 originally started in 1870 with a cotton exchange. So these are long long-term contracts and they sort of change and adjust over time. But our big soft contracts are coffee, sugar, cocoa, cotton, and orange juice. And we price the world's cotton and coffee. And we have grading facilities in our New York Stock Exchange where cocoa pods come in and there's somebody who will sit there. We have cocoa graders that come and they open it up and they check how much mold, how much slate there is in each of the cocoa. They and determine whether or not it can be delivered to the exchange. And on the coffee side, green coffee beans come in. They check the color and the size of the coffee beans. They roast it in roasters that are backed from the early 1900s and then they take the roasted coffee, they grind it and they cup it and taste it. So it's it's abs

3:51 and we price the world's coffee. So it's a really incredible very physical. It's it's a beautiful thing because crypto doesn't you don't see crypto. >> Yeah. >> Right. It's sort of Sarah very much in your head in in the new ways but this is very very physical and it's a fantastic thing to see. That is so different from how I pictured it. I thought it was just like a platform with all numbers. Nope. You actually see the products. >> We actually see the products coming in. And when we work with the cotton guys, I've gone down to like Memphis and see where they're growing the cotton and how the jinning works and everything. It's a f it is really interesting because it's much more hands-on and >> everything we do. >> Cocoa, coffee, they're from different parts of the world. >> Different parts of the world. So a lot of coffee that comes in is from Brazil and you get a lot of cocoa from Ivory Coast, from Ghana. Yeah. Um Venezuela

4:36 and every all over the place. It's a fantastic really interesting market. How do you uh quantify let's say weather effect or the possibility of different things happening in that region? Um so a lot of the so the traders basically come on and they trade. So they're the ones that are looking at where the prices of it's going to go. For example, cocoa prices were very volatile over the last year and a half and it was just supply issues. So it's very much supply and demand though tariffs with and trade also impacted as well. So with tariffs coming on there was concern of is cocoa going to be included in the tariffs coming into the US is coffee going to be included how do the different traders manage it? So they go on and there's full transparency because they can see what people are buying and selling it at. Um, so it gives them a it's it's the

5:23 best way for them to have price discovery and we have actual farmers and stuff trading these products and coming on and they'll look at the prices and determine what they're going to sell their coffee or sugar or cocoa for. It's really it's it's a really fun part of them exchange. I would I understand if farmers or let's say people that works in the food industry related industry they want to trade these products but what about you know average traders how do they just decide one day I'm going to trade orange juice futures >> um it's like on the retail side of it yeah so we don't have a huge amount of retail traders we tend to have it's predominantly institutional traders that end up trading on our market so you do get the odd in retail that guy that comes in and I think they look at the volatility It's almost the same as in

6:09 crypto. People look at the volatility in Bitcoin and they want to be able to get some edge and that's where you get the retail traders sometimes coming in, but mostly it's probably it's largely institutional that we end up serving in these markets. >> What type of decisions do you make every day? >> So a lot of my stuff is regulatory at the moment. Um so we work for example a lot with the CFTC. That's our main regulator. So, we'll do things from trying to understand what types of rules they're putting in place, trying to meet with the new chairman of the CFTC, understand what his strategy is. Um, we do things where we work with different clients. We'll call up and they'll be happy or not happy as the case may be and we try to solve their problems. We do a lot of business development as well. So this is where we're doing sort of our crypto side of it was clients are

6:55 actually speaking to our product side on the asset management side and they're sort of saying you know you're doing a bunch of equity derivatives are you guys looking at crypto? So then we start looking at different crypto contracts and what people want to do. So, it's a it's sometimes there's the days where you have meeting by meeting and you don't know what the next meeting is and you kind of turn on your Zoom and you kind of flip from talking about Coco to talking about equity derivatives or going into a regulatory conversation. >> Yeah. >> But it's really it's it's fun. It's challenging and fun and it makes me think every day >> similar to kind of what you do because you go from >> speaker to speaker doing talking about different things. >> They do amazing things but very different. Yeah. very different. Um I had Michael Turpin on. He was talking about Bitcoin and now we're talking

7:42 about um cocoa and orange juice and coffee. That's amazing. Why do we need >> help me understand >> orange juice futures? >> Yes. >> Why do we need that? >> So people are trying to figure out what the price of orange juice and how they're going to sell the actual raw concentrate orange juice. It's kind of like if you also it might be easier to think about it in the terms of coffee. If you're going to be a large coffee producer and you want to go out and sell your coffee, you want to have an idea of what you're going to sell it at. And you can look on our markets and say this is where this certain grade of coffee is going to sell at. And you might have a better type of coffee. So you might have a higher grade, but you know, okay, this coffee is selling at this price, this grade, which is the one that is on the exchange. And then you might add a basis, so you're adding a little extra on top of that. Or your coffee might be

8:29 a little bit worse, so you're taking off and selling it a little bit less. But it helps you understand where the world price is going and how you can be able to sell that price. And also you can look forward and say I'm selling this coffee now but look the forward prices are higher. I might actually store it and choose to sell it in the future. Intercontinental exchange Ice. Okay.

9:16 But okay. Fire in Brazil. How do you quantify that? That's my question. Well, we So, we don't quantify or the traders quantify it. Quantify it. >> But do you do you have an idea how they do it? Cuz I I have no idea. >> Um I just want to know roughly. >> Yeah. So I'm I'm guessing what they do is they figure what the supply is and if there's a lot of supply they know the prices are going to go down but if there's fires there's clearly going to be less supply and there's going to be problems so prices are going to go up. >> So then if you're going to have less amount of something it's kind of like the idea of Bitcoin the whole idea is that Bitcoin is going to stop and the price will go up. And this is the same thing. It just it changes over time where we kind of know when there's when Bitcoin is going to stop being produced. Whereas with coffee sometimes you have more and sometimes you have less. So you have a much more volatile market. >> But what I'm trying to understand is

10:02 okay with Bitcoin you can see the numbers on chain right you can see there's a rule but with things like weather or fire how do you even know okay there's fire but does that mean we have 10% less supply or does that mean 50? >> Okay. Well sometimes so depending on the market they'll have people on the ground seeing exactly what's happening. There's GPS locators that can look at what's happening with regards to how many coffee plantations and how much is actually growing. And in the cocoa markets, you see that quite a bit. There will be people that write reports on how the pods of the co of or the cocoa pods are. Are they good cocoa pods? Is there enough fertilizer going in to the ground to be able to create better um cocoa pods? So, so yeah. So, there are people that actually go down and look at the

10:48 bean the bean count and they they check everything. They sell that information. Traders look at that information, make a determination. Different traders will probably have more physical understanding. Either they'll go down there or their own company will have different farms down there where they can look at it and then they decide what the price is going to be. >> That is fascinating. >> It's really sounds like when we say say trader in crypto, it's like a single single trader, but that's a big group. >> This is what it would would be a big group. So often you're looking at trading groups that that will have multiple traders going in. So when we talk to a company that will have multiple traders trading the same product where you're right sometime crypto is just one lone person trying to figure out what they're what they're going to do and they just look at different things like these guys would look at what's happening in the weather are there fires are there droughts and like I'll get reports of how much um

11:36 water how much rainfall there is in India and if that's going to imp impact sugar for example you you have to be very knowledgeable >> I well I don't have to I get it and I get like a high a high view because we look because we do this we also price the world or US natural gas and power. So when we had a big winter storm coming through in the US we had to sort of check to see what's happening in different parts of the US. Are there brownouts? Are there going to be concerns? What is happening to the price? So we really had to sort of look at that as well. >> Since we're talking about energy, are you seeing an energy constraint or shortage because of AI? >> So it's interesting. I don't think I'm seeing because I'm a little bit more removed from the energy space in in some ways certainly in the oil space and

12:21 there's a lot of people talking about how do you going to look at data centers and how much is is being used. Um I don't think we're seeing that in the US at the moment and I'm hearing everything from different people's theories different people some of them is we expect prices to go down because there's going to be more more ways of developing energy in certain states so that the the total price will go down. They'll have >> do you see what I there's going to be more energy for the data center. So overall price should go down and then people turn around and say actually all the energy is going to be used towards data center. It's going to drive people's prices up. So I think there's probably a lot of people with different incentives on how they're going to develop that story and nobody really knows at the moment. >> Interesting. >> But it's Elon Musk is talking about sending solar panels to >> to I know I was reading about that.

13:08 Yeah, I know. >> Because you know he's expecting we will need a lot more energy. >> Yep. So he goes in and it's and if you're closer to the sun, >> you should get more energy. >> There's no weather. >> Yep. >> There is it's more efficient. Yeah. >> Um February the 3rd, ICE announced that January was the strongest trading month in the company's history. Congratulations. >> Yeah, we've we've done very well. Volume has increased across all of our markets. Um some of the things when you look at ICE, we're over we've been in the the business for over about two and a half decades now. When we really focus on things, we believe that there's it should be very simple. We should be looking at infrastructure that is neutral, that is trusted, and that works no matter what the market is. So, you know, you have a lot of exchanges where there's always concerns if the market's

13:53 going to go down, especially when things are volatile. We invest a huge amount into infrastructure and into everything related to technology that we put in for our own technology so that we know that we can manage it and make sure that the exchange stays up. So when you have events like when COVID and prices fell or you have the great financial crisis and you have all these different liquidity problems um and the market moves quickly, our exchange stays up. So people have to trust it and know that no matter what when they get there, they can find out what the price is. So there's full price transparency, there's full price discovery, um and that their capital is well used as well. >> When you look at numbers go up, that means a lot of people are trading. Yeah, when you have more and more volume, we have more and more traders,

14:38 >> right? What does that mean? Is that the market is about to turn is that >> it depends. So, we don't really look at where the market is going from our side. We have to be very neutral. We just provide the platform. So, we have no part of our company that has an incentive to drive market prices up or down. We just provide the platform and that's what traders make their decisions. So crypto exchanges see big volume when the price is shooting up or dropping very drastically and so any volatility will cause volumes to go up and down. Correct. Yeah. So it's the same way in our market. So for if you're going to start seeing prices start to go up a lot and prices in commodities tend to they go up but there's not a sort of shoot up. It's still sort of what do

15:25 they say? Um the prices go up on a escalator and down in a lift, right? So you always see a huge amount of price movement on the way down and a lot of volatile volatility and more trading on the way down. Whereas if prices are solely prices tend to go up a little bit more solely. >> But yeah, but it's the same idea. You get lots more volume when there's volatility. >> If you have too much volatility, people will pull back because they get a little bit traders get a little bit scared. It's probably the same in the crypto markets. I would think that if things are falling too fast or moving up too high, people will start to hold their positions as well. >> And I'm I'm just wondering like when people retail investors or investors in general see that news that you guys have really high trading volume, I'm just wondering what are they thinking now?

16:11 >> Um they probably realize how broad and diverse an offering we have. So like we have everything from we have a great interest rate um portfolio all the way to our energy complex and Brent is where the world prices or every the world prices is oil at ice. Yeah. >> And so they look at Brent and that's the world's prices oil. They price all of their softs. They price all of the gas and power at ice. So I think they start to realize that we become a bigger and bigger force in the markets with regards to pricing um various commodities all the way across all the asset classes. What are some really strange things that has futures >> that I would never expect and not and not in on our markets? I always thought China has an Apple futures contract that

16:58 does very well from what I understand and that to me is always a little bit sort of esoteric where people >> only in China. >> Only in China >> do not know do not know but they have an Apple futures contract. I always thought that was a pretty amazing thing. But then we have things for battery metals and lithium all the way through our oil complex has thousands of different contracts. So while people will trade Brent Dubai, we also have Singapore fuel oil and we have gas oil and jet fuel all the way down to very it's not really esoteric but very specific energy contracts that that different trading companies will want to trade. What are some things you think should have futures? That is a good question. Um, we have often have requests for sort of nuts and

17:45 seeds. Sometimes we get requests for almonds. >> Um, it's a little bit more, some markets are difficult to price because they're not transparent. >> So, you often have to find a market that has some transparency. A lot of people, some people have asked for diamond futures, which has always been a bit difficult. Um, also not transparent. Tea seems like an obvious one because you could sort of have but there's no futures contract in tea >> sometimes I think and like there's rice people used to have a lot of rice contracts in Japan and that's more or less disappeared but I think these things are sometimes it sort of comes and goes but also I think the way people trade starts to change and some people like a lack of transparency in some trading >> right because if there's an opaque market some people can make more money off of an opaque market when you say transparency are we talking about you

18:31 know price transparency the ability Like if you know where prices are, some people really a a very commoditized market is very good because you have a lot of price transparency and it's easier to discover the price whereas some markets that are smaller don't have that same price discovery. It's probably the same as if you're looking at some altcoins. >> Where's the transparency in those prices with altcoins? Well, there are a few whales that owns a lot and the founders and the team probably owns a lot. Is that what you're saying? Well, I guess when you look at I sort of sometimes think of altcoins, there's less people in there to necessarily always understand exactly how the founders make decisions and they probably have a lot of >> I don't know as much about the market, but I'm guessing that there's a little bit opakqueness because they want to sort of protect some things as well. If there's a little bit of opakqueness,

19:17 you're not sure how to price something, then there might be less people getting into that market. >> Do you have people coming up to you and say, "Hey, I think we should have this futures." And do you look into it >> always? Yeah, we always look and try to decide if we're going to do that. And that's how it started with the crypto contracts and people said we need to have these crypto contracts and that's why we decided to do it. But we also sometimes people suggest and there's just no market for it or we can't find a price. So we have with our sauce contracts, we do the physical delivery like I explained with the cocoa and coffee, but a lot of our energy contracts, they're cash settled and so a P is same same idea as Coindesk. So they're almost a index provider and then you have MSCI and then in the energy markets you have plat or fast markets.

20:02 So a P will provide they will get that price discovery and there'll be a number you can settle off of but sometimes it's impossible to find the number and because people will sit down and basically in some commodities they'll sit at a coffee table and decide what the price is going to be. There's no way of getting all of those numbers putting it together and figuring out a settlement price. But firms will look into it. We're seeing more into rare earths now. Um, so what usually happens is these price reporting agencies find new avenues of where people want to find out numbers and they go out and do what they get they start calling around the market or they get what they call herds. So they hear different numbers. They put these numbers together and then try to figure out where the price should be. And when that gets a little bit more consistent and people start to trust it, then we can launch a futures contract off of that. You talk about delivery. So

20:48 you can actually see these products. What about, you know, let's say oil and natural gas? >> Um, yeah. Yeah. So there's no physical delivery in in those contracts. So those contracts are cash settle contracts. So we don't see the oil. I mean CME, which is another exchange, they have physical delivery in WTI. So they will actually have the physical delivery on that, but we don't have that. And so usually if you've got smaller players that don't want to go into physical delivery, our clearing members, so how our world works in the margin sense is you have the exchange and you have a client and they have a clearing member that sits in between. So, if it's a client that might not be someone who should take delivery into Coco, the clearing member will basically close off their position if they've forgotten to beforehand. Because I remember years ago when I had worked in um in the markets with NYX, we would

21:36 get clients calling up and saying, "I forgot to close out my position. I'm supposed to get WTI delivered, but I am not a refiner. What do we do?" And then you have to get them to somebody has to go and take the opposite side of that position to close it out. >> Who is that somebody? It used to be somebody on the floor in the past or another oil trader will go in and and take the opposite position for someone. So then you're closing off that that trade. >> What if nobody wants to take it? >> Is it is it >> generally there's always a price somebody on the other side will take. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. So if you're long if you were going to get it and I know that I can take the other side of it, I would just charge you a lot more money to close out that position. cuz it's you'll take the you'll you'll spend the money because it is probably better than having to deal with oil barrels showing up at your at your door

22:21 >> forgetting to close. It's devastating. >> Yeah. Yeah. It just ends up costing you more money. >> We have perpetual contracts in crypto. It's a unique thing we have in crypto. exchanges are doing this thing and they're controlling well not controlling they're maintaining the price with funding rate and that is very different >> than how we do because we have monthly contracts that end um and that's really how the CFTC regulates things at the moment >> currently perpetuals in the same sense you see in crypto is not allowed in well it's it's allowed but it's considered a swap it's not considered a futures contract so it has different regulatory requirements and you'd end up having larger margin So some players are coming in and they're offering uh perpetuals but in a slightly different way. There

23:07 is still a final settlement date. >> Oh that's they have to put in because of the way that the US regulations work at the moment you can have a contract that never ends. >> Oh interesting. Okay. Well in the rest of the world we can have >> you can you can in the perpetuals in in your space you guys have contracts that never end. But my question is why can't this system be in place with other products like for for example the cash settlement >> uh category if there's no delivery technically. >> Yeah. So I guess yeah in theory it probably could potentially make more sense in like equity markets like if you're doing equity derivative contracts and you could have sort of that funding rate because the underlying cash equities will change quite a bit. I think when it comes to the agricultural

23:53 markets, it's a little bit more difficult because of that need to come to a physical delivery that so that part's a little bit different. >> Um, but I do see that there could be value though there hasn't nobody's asked for it in the equity derivative space. >> Interesting. Um, >> so I think we're still getting to the point where the institutional and the crypto markets are coming together. So crypto traders are often just crypto traders and very much in the perpetual space where the institutional are still institutional. So we're starting to see that convergence and you'll see that with some players where exchanges are now starting to look at how can they offer a near perp so you have a per that still has the funding rate but it usually settles only it settles twice a day.

24:38 >> That makes sense. So you know how you have often a per will settle every eight hours. >> Yeah. >> So these will settle usually and we looked at doing it. You can settle at 1:00 in the afternoon. That's sort of in the US standard time where we always take intraday margin calls. And then you would settle at T+1 the following day. And that is just a way because futures markets really only collect margins twice a day. Okay? So they collect margins at 1:00 p.m. So if there's a margin call that needs to be made because there's been a big move in the markets, we will collect margin early just to protect the clearing house and then we collect margin the following day. So we have a settlement and then we collect margin t plus one. >> So what are the things that you think could happen with this perpetual contract? >> Yeah. So I think if there's perpetuals in more in our more traditional markets,

25:25 we have to get demand probably from the equity derivatives guys. That's where I could sort of see it happening. But at this point it's also seems to be a lot of retail want to focus on the perpetual contracts and because we're predominantly institutional that we're I think that's why we got a little bit less demand for anything like that. Whereas I would suspect other exchanges that have a much bigger retail base would probably be getting people who are trading on crypto doing that. And the actually the interesting thing we were talking about in some of the panels and with people here is the sort of this fall in retail volume on the crypto markets over the last year year and a half and they're sort of guessing could this be because you've got more event markets coming in. Are there other places where retail traders can go and trade which you didn't even have a year ago? And people, you know, if you're

26:10 looking at event markets, how are we seeing those different movements in retail preferences? >> Would you like to elaborate on that? >> One retail broker once told me that retail traders are like grass, right? So the retail the grass goes up, you have to get all these new retails, retail traders, and at that time they might blow up. So basically, you're cutting the lawn and then you have to find new retail traders. >> Yeah. >> Right. And somebody else liken it to a box of Kleenex >> or tissues. So you pull out one and there's always another one there and you have to keep getting more retail traders and so they and they're also very they're retail traders look to where there's volatility and so they'll move a lot of people saying that you're they're seeing retail traders move into gold because there's more volatility in gold or they're seeing more volatility in copper so they're moving into copper. We

26:56 had a lot of retail so companies asking about doing retail trading in cocoa because there was a lot of volatility. So they're very finicky. they don't care as much about what the underlying they care more about the the what they're going to get out of the contract. Whereas I think our traders because they're institutional, they're doing a lot of hedging as opposed to just pure speculation. So for them, it's much more we are they're always going to trade oil because they need to trade oil and they got to hedge their they have risk management needs or cocoa or coffee or sugar. And I think with the retail markets now, you've got more products for them to trade. So there was crypto and they're purchasing crypto. Now there's event markets and so it's like the pie is still here with all the retail traders but the amount of things that they can do the pie of retail traders hasn't grown but the amount of things they can do has grown

27:43 significantly and just ways I think the binary option seems to be a very easy way for like you can be a retail trader you can say the price goes up or what's going to happen to you know is Trump going to be elected yes or no it's a very yes and no answer that is a very easy way for traders to come in and we're hearing a lot of younger people just sort of antidotally are coming in and starting to trade those markets. >> What is your view on different cryptocurrencies? I understand that institutions are more comfortable with Bitcoin. What about the smaller cap uh tokens? Yeah. So, what we're starting to hear through more like family offices and some asset managers we're talking to is clients are coming in and said, "Listen, I've done Bitcoin. Great. I've got that. And now I'm hearing about ETH and I'm hearing about Salon or I'm

28:29 hearing about Ripple. I want to get access to that. But the asset managers don't have the depth of knowledge in the other products. So rather than going and asking this is why we've created these sort of this is why CoinDesk has created indices and they're working with ETF providers and we're creating the futures. So anybody can basically say yes well you don't really have to >> worry about doing all these individuals. We can give you an index just like if you think of it, nobody with our Msei emerging markets, nobody knows every single equity contract that is listed under MSEI emerging markets, but they go in they're like, I want to get access to emerging market, so I'm going to go to an index provider I trust. I'm going to trade the futures or the ETF based on that. And that's basically where Coindesk is thinking this with their Coindesk 20. And that's we've got a lot of the same views with them on that.

29:16 People want to have something that they can use as a benchmark. >> They really have to trust whoever that's providing that information though. >> Yes. Yeah. And because CoinDesk, they one of the reasons we work with work with CoinDesk is because people trust them. They're IOSco compliant. They've got regulation out of Europe. They're regulated in all these different jurisdictions. They look at the data and they're very conscious about making sure that's right data that comes in and then the right data comes in and they don't manipulate it to try to change anything. Your panel is titled the next chapter in digital asset futures. >> Yeah, we had that yesterday. It was really good. >> You were in the red dress. >> Uh, yes. I wasn't I figured the light Yeah. the the brighter the colors, the more people can see you. >> It was beautiful. >> Thank you. >> What was the main message? I was doing a live stream so I couldn't I I couldn't

30:02 listen to him. >> Yeah. So, our main message when we had our announcement was all the futures contracts that we are listing. So, that was So, there are two things I did yesterday. One was the announcement which was the futures contracts we're doing in line with CoinDesk and really the relationship the strong relationship that ICE and Coindesk have and then we were on a second panel which was derivatives and that was myself we had Falcon X was on that Arc Invest was on that and then Coindesk was the moderator and it was really talking about where are we seeing crypto derivatives in both the institutional and the more crypto worlds going and that a lot of it discussion was really that convergence between and a lot of it is US administration and their changes and focusing on getting more clarity in. >> What is one main takeaway from that

30:47 panel discussion? >> Institutions are coming in to trade these markets. It is not going to be an overnight, you know, in the next three weeks, we're going to have tons of institutions coming in. But over the next 5 to 10 years, this is a place where institutions are here. I think Jason on the on our panel yesterday said that in the crypto winter in sort of 2021 institutions started to come in but pulled back whereas now the belief is really that they're here they've already started to put more funds towards crypto and they're not going to be pulling back and part of it is regulatory change. There's not that fear anymore of potentially doing something wrong and that risk of potentially doing something wrong. There's a lot more clarity there. So I think institutionals will stay as opposed to pull back.

31:33 you've um lived in Asia and obviously the US. Have you seen that the market, you know, differ because of culture, because of different >> It feels to me that Asia is still looking a lot more at the traditional crypto exchanges, whereas I'm feeling in the US and Europe, they're looking more toward regulated venues. And I think a lot of it is the US has been very clear that we want to take all that unregulated markets that people are trading on and make it regulated and bring that volume internally back into the US. So that's probably what I'm seeing the most at the moment. People here don't talk about trying to trade trade and pay margin. They're still happy in sort of the the more

32:19 traditional space. >> How do you see risk versus uncertainty? If there's risk out there, you have banks that will say there's too much risk in crypto. There's too much unregul like regulatory risk in it. We don't understand it. There's there is no clarity, so we're not even going to go in there. When there's uncertainty in the market, it's prices could go up or prices could go down. I have an opportunity to make some money. >> So, as a as a risk manager, I would stop people doing something when there's when it's risky. But if there's uncertainty and there's potential to make money, I would let them do it. >> Tariffs. >> Okay. So tariffs will provide trading opportunities for people. >> Okay. >> So that's uncertainty and there's trading opportunities that come from

33:05 there and potential to make money. >> What about fire? >> Fire in the sense. So that would give you a potential trading opportunity >> because you don't know how big the fire is going to be and you could expect the prices in co or in coffee to potentially go up because the fire is really big but they could manage to keep the fire at bay and then the prices will not go as high. of administration >> depends on where they stand and it's not clear if you move from a Republican to a Democrat um >> where they stand at the moment right with regards to crypto and I think also with the regulation once the CFTC and SEC puts the regulation in we're going to have quite strong regulation it's going to be hard to pull that back so I

33:51 think even if you have a change administration in two years it feels like Atkins and Cel are really trying to say we want to have this Well, before that happens, >> what about war? >> War. Um, I think it depending on the trader you're talking to, they could see opportunity to make money off of that. But then you're going to look at different banks are going to be depending on what a bank is going to do. Some people might not do things because there's a risk of being involved. So then they'll pull back on what they're doing. I think it probably depends what you're looking at doing. if you're sitting there and just trading the product versus if you are a financial institution that also has or owns oil >> tankers. Do you see what I mean? Then they're going to look at it very differently. So

34:37 probably even different parts of a financial institutional will look at it differently. So I think there's a lot of things that are happening in these markets in markets in general and across different products. So one of their examples was self-driving cars which I thought this part was fascinating. nothing to do with our market, but as you have more self-driving cars, you decrease the number of accidents you're having. >> And most of the accidents that go end up in the ER are due to car accidents. So then you've got less >> you got two things. One, you have less accidents and less less full ERS. And then insurance companies have to decide how they're going to charge you for insurance for your car because if you've got a very tiny risk of having a car accident, do you need to pay as much insurance anymore? And also more people live because a lot of people die in car accidents. So all these different

35:22 things. And how do you >> that could and you might buy less cars because you buy because less people have accidents. You're buying less cars. So then how does that impact how much steel people are buying >> to make cars and is that going to impact Ford and all these other car companies because now they don't have to make as many cars. It's fascinating to see to try to figure out these permutations and what potential opportunities there are there. Do you do you just experience life and then see different events and be like, "Oh, this product is going to go down." >> It's really and it's Well, it's it's interesting. You start looking at all these these different permutations what can actually happen. So, I think a lot of people are trying to see more disruptions in the market and how that's going to impact what they do. >> It's so crazy. >> AI is going to have crazy disruptions,

36:08 right? Everybody talks about that. I would love to hear your story and how you get into this fascinating world. So for me when I moved to Singapore my first job ended up being in the Singapore government with the MAS >> and while I was there I had met some people who had come from the New York Merkantile Exchange the NYX >> SGX which is the exchange in Singapore. They were looking at um moving into clearing of commodities. Yeah. So MAS, I was on the development side. So we were working with SGX to help them. And then I met people at the NYX. And when I met the people at the NYX, it was this gentleman, Tom McMahon, who actually I just saw a couple days ago. He's still my mentor. And he had

36:54 brought me into work at the NYX. And he was one guy who was sitting in Tokyo and he hired me to open our Singapore office at the NYX. And there were two of us in Asia. I basically went out and I got a office space like what would be considered sort of a wei work office space type thing. I went I bought a computer. I figured out how to set it up. Didn't know anything about the oil market. So I went out and started meeting all the oil traders and the oil brokers asking them questions how do they do and then started learning about the oil markets that way. I spent about two and a half years with them. Um and then I started meeting some people from ICE. They had offered me a job opportunity. Uh Nyx was then being sold to the CME. So there's a little bit disruption in at the NYX and there wasn't clarity. This is where where's

37:40 your risk? You have you have uncertainty. So what do you do? So I went to a place that felt a little bit more certain. So I ended up joining ICE and that was 2007, August of 2007. And I it started we were tiny 300 people at the time the company and it really felt like a family >> like it was it just felt like a place that worked for me. And we are now I think 12 or 13,000 people. So, we've grown a huge amount and but it still feels like a family to me. >> They're wonderful and it's just and it's grown from there and part of it is >> I think when you love something like I love my job. I love what I do. I love the people I work with. We are not this sort of company that doesn't work together as a team. We are a company that works 100% as a team and it feels like we're always trying to do best for everybody else and trying to encourage

38:29 like I know my boss encourages me. I try to encourage anyone who's either my peer or who's working for me to try to continue to do better and just giving people opportunities. Um, our CEOs always said it's important to take risks. You might fail, but you learn from those failures and then you take all that knowledge and then you keep going. So, and Jeff really does that. He's a fantastic person. Um, >> did you have mentors? >> Yeah, I did have a few mentors along the way. One was this gentleman Tom McMahon from the NYAX and then actually my father. He was in the finance business. He he intro introduced me to someone. It was his boss at the time and I remember >> I'd always call him if I wasn't sure what I was going to do with my career. >> I love that. >> Yeah. And it was and I'd call him and I talked to him and I remember at one

39:15 point I was looking at working at two banks in the NYX and I said, "I don't know what to do." And he said, "You have to choose a job that is important to you. Not that is going to make your father proud, not that is going to make your MBA MBA cohort proud. It's going to make you happy and excited and money and that feeling of success will come." And I chose Nymex because at the time it really felt like it was it was almost an entrepreneurial job. It was me setting everything up in Singapore and doing it all by myself. >> And it just Yeah. And if I hadn't done that, I never would have ended up at ICE and I never would have had what I had now. And even I remember and I was telling someone the other day when I looked, I always like people run exchanges. I would love to do that one day. And then all of a sudden I got offered the job to sort of run the

40:00 exchange and it's just been it's it's fantastic. >> What about it that fascinates you? So you every day something is different and every like on I love the regulatory stuff more than I expected and the personalities and trying to understand the motivations behind everything for me coming into this job. I'm Canadian so I didn't know that much about the US um regulatory space and so it was a huge amount of learning the first year year and a half in this role was a huge amount of learning but it's also the people like my COO who works for me is fantastic the product heads who work are all fantastic and we just we talk about everything's new and exciting and the people like the the clients and everyone are smart and intelligent and I get to meet people like you and have great

40:47 conversations but it's sort of that It's it makes you happy and excited. Like I go home and I tell my kids I love my job. And you sort of get those days where you go home and you're just so energized. >> So I feel always more energized for my job than exhausted from my job. >> Before um I started doing interview yesterday. So I was prepping all night. So I didn't really sleep. I was dead inside. But after a full day of talking to people, I was like, "Oh my god, >> I can keep going." >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. And that's >> of course like three red bulls in. But I understand what you're saying. >> Yeah, cuz I was even seeing as I was walking by just earlier to make sure I knew where I was going. And I was seeing you, I'm like, that's probably her second day. She must be really tired on this. But you do, but you get energized

41:32 because you learn things from everyone. It's the same thing we learn. I learn every day. >> What happens when futures market stop working for a week? What happens to the world? >> Well, I think for a lot of traders, they don't know how to price anything. And I think the prices for everything for coffee, sugar, cocoa, oil markets, all of that, like even during COVID, yeah, none of that stopped, >> right? >> Like the markets did not stop. Like people either went in or they traded from home or they shrank ours down to maybe three or four hours. So, you made sure that you were pricing because if people don't know how they're going to figure out what the price of cocoa is going to be, if you're a cocoa company or you're a chocolate company and you don't know where the price, how are you going to decide what the price of your chocolate bar is going to be, what you're selling? If you are a company

42:18 that buys and sells oil or uses oil as a tanker or you're an airplane, like you're a you run aviation, >> you're aviation and you've running all these planes and you don't know what the price of fuel is going to be. How do you determine what you're going to charge anybody for this? like you everybody there's so many parts of these markets that are so intertwined in how you are going to price what's going to happen going forward how you're pricing airline tickets how you're pricing chocolate bars or your next cup of coffee it gets very intricate so I think having a week off people would very much struggle and you would not be able to know how to manage their risk >> do you think retail investors everyday people will know that's happening I think it takes a while to work through the markets it's like when we saw that

43:04 we knew that there were were issues in the cocoa markets because of supply issues that took a while to feed in and we sort of knew in sort of 6 months chocolate bars are going to get smaller and you could see there was sort of shrinkage in the chocolate bars they're going to add more nuts for example in a Mars bar if you start adding more nuts and caramel there's less chocolate so it takes time and just like it's going to take time to move back where people are going to start adding more chocolate in and taking nuts out and out and adding different products So it doesn't happen immediately. I'm not sure if the ga at the gas pump it does. It feels like in the US things the gas pump seems to change quite quickly. Um but I think it would take a while for the retail markets >> to even understand >> to understand. Yeah. >> You're obviously very successful. Uh

43:50 what are some of the you know personal habits that contributes to the success? I am very organized about what I do. So I every morning I get up at quarter to 5. I exercise every morning for an hour because for me I need to be able to have that. I ended up building a gym in my house to make it easier to be able to do that. And then I have two young daughters who are 12 and 15. I have a very organized routine of what the morning looks like. It does feel like chaos sometimes when we're trying to get out the door and get them to to school. I'm almost on the same train every day to be able to get to the office. And for me, I think I need to have those sort of routines to make sure that I can once

44:38 you have the routines, then there's less things to think about. I don't have to think about all those things. So then I can focus on work when I'm at work. And then when I get home, I sleep I do sleep early. I'm usually in bed at like 9:15. So >> Wow. >> Yeah. So I'm I'm my oldest daughter probably goes to bed at 11 11:30 and she laughs at me but I'm in I'm in bed quite early. >> Is this trained or is this does it come natural to you? >> I am a morning person so I think that that's always helped with me but I >> I need to with the exercise I always need know I needed to exercise and so when I was in Asia it was different. We started exercise at lunch hour because the work world was different where we worked until 10:00 at night whereas now I'm only working till 5:00 p.m. >> Getting up and making myself get up at quarter to 5 is a lot of not thinking

45:25 about it. I have my exercise clothes that are sitting there waiting. I know exactly what I'm doing. I get on I have use Pelaton. So I get on my Pelaton app the night before. I decide what classes I'm going to take so I don't even have to think about it in the morning. I wake up, I roll out, and I'm not even probably really awake until I get down to my gym. >> So, there aren't days when you're like, I just don't feel like doing anything. >> The odd time I've done that, and then I kind of lie in bed and think, well, that was a waste of an hour to be, >> wow. >> Wow. >> So, then I just lie there and I'm like, that was just dumb. That was just dumb. So, then I I just don't do it. Is that like a common thing about su really really successful people or high performing people? >> I don't know. That's what works for me. That's what that's what I need to be

46:10 able to do. >> Do you need people around you to be the same? >> No. No. >> They can be >> I They can do whatever they want. I don't I'm not fussing. >> It doesn't bother you. >> No. No. I might I No. No. It doesn't. And my kids are certainly not like that. >> Yeah. >> So, I can't make them do that. My oldest daughter, she does it. She plays rugby. My youngest plays basketball. I like them to to play team sports. And I have I encourage them to do that so that they know what it's like to be in a team and and grow those. There's a lot of dynamics and things you learn from being in a team. Um but I think they need to do things. They take the garbage out and they have to empty the dishwasher. My oldest often cooks for us at night. Um she can cook on her own and she likes that. So >> how would your daughters describe you >> 12 and 15? How would they describe me?

46:56 >> Well, they watch me on the Coindesk live and they're really proud of me and they're Yeah. which is really nice. Um, my youngest daughter, she had a friend who in class, she's 12 years old, he was talking about all, it was all the fathers that are working and she was very upset and she was like, "My mother has a big job. It's not just fathers that do well." I love it. >> So, yeah, she's they it's it's been lovely to be able to get to show them that there are trade-offs because when I'm working, it means I'm not with them. Mhm. >> So, it's not like you can do everything >> and you know you can't do everything, but it's tradeoffs that that do work and I'm proud to that they know that I can support them and take care of them >> and they're proud of you. >> Yeah. They're they're it's really it's really

47:42 nice they get to see that and hopefully that they sort of look at the all the different things that they can achieve. They don't have to do the same thing that I do, but for them to be able to see what they can achieve >> in the future is important to me. They should be really proud because >> I'm super inspired. I appreciate your time. Thank you for being here. >> This has been so much fun. This has been a great conversation. I really do. I love it.

48:39 Byebye.