When Stocktwits gathered traders, executives, and financial creators at City Winery in New York City on October 7 for the programming day of Stocktoberfest presented by Tradr ETFs, the agenda was built around two forces the company sees defining how traders find an edge next: agentic trading and social relative strength. Across more than a dozen panels and fireside chats, those two ideas surfaced again and again, alongside sessions on the changing brokerage model, new trading products, and the growing pull of private markets.
Stocktwits Founder and CEO Howard Lindzon opened the programming with a keynote built around a live walkthrough of real historical crowd calls, revealed before the market knew how they would turn out. Lindzon followed with a fireside chat alongside Barry Ritholtz, Chairman and CIO of Ritholtz Wealth Management.
The agentic theme came into focus in the Agentic Trading & Investing panel, where Lindzon was joined by Jack Keating, CEO of Webull Tech US, and Nadia Asoyan, CFO of Alpaca. The session focused on how AI agents source signal and why community-generated sentiment data matters to them.
That shift reaches public companies too. The IR in the Age of AI panel, featuring Anne Marie Gianutsos, CCO of Stocktwits; Phil De Sousa, CFO of Voyager Technologies; and Paul Prager, Co-Founder and CEO of TeraWulf Inc., looked at how companies now communicate with both human investors and those investors’ AI agents.
Later in the day, Ted Seides of Capital Allocators joined Lindzon for a fireside chat on capital allocation in an AI world, and the closing panel, The World of Narratives & AI Trends, brought Ben Hunt and Michael Parekh to the stage to discuss why institutions increasingly treat the history of retail sentiment as a leading indicator.
The second theme, social relative strength, ran through sessions on how individual investors and creators build an advantage. In Social Arbitrage and the Democratization of Investing, Chris Camillo, Investor and Co-Host of DumbMoney.TV, sat down with Lindzon to explore how social arbitrage has given individual investors a real analytical edge over Wall Street’s traditional information advantages, what that edge is made of, and where it goes from here.
The Building an Audience the Algorithm Can’t Fake panel, with Katie Perry, CMO of zerohash; Douglas Boneparth, President of Bone Fide Wealth; Gautam Shah, CEO of Eras Capital; and Samantha LaDuc, Founder of LaDucTrading.com, brought leading retail voices together on building genuine communities and the kind of trust that cannot be manufactured.
The Brokerage 1.0 → 2.0 panel, with Marisa Ricciardi of The Ricciardi Group, Jack Newhouse of Rothschild Wealth Partners, and Hootie Rashidifard of Hash3, examined why data, sentiment, and distribution, rather than the trading interface itself, are becoming the next competitive moat. Lindzon continued the thread in a fireside chat on the future of brokerage with Anthony Denier, US CEO of Webull.
On the product side, the Leveraged & Inverse ETFs panel featured Michael Eschmann of REX Shares, Bilal Little of Direxion, and Matt Markiewicz of Tradr ETFs discussing tools that let high-conviction traders express a view without margin or options complexity. The Degenerate Economy panel, with Serge Kassardjian of 6th Man Ventures, Dan Kang of DeFi Development Corp., and Ethan Silver, took on why prediction markets and brokers are racing to become each other while crypto exchanges sit caught in the middle.
Private markets drew two sessions. Andrew Krochulick, COO of Nasdaq Private Market, joined Lindzon to discuss the rise of private markets and where they fit in modern portfolios, and Frederik Mijnhardt, CEO and Founder of Secfi, joined him for Valuation Madness: Making Sense of Late-Stage Privates and How to Profit.
For public companies at the smaller end of the market, the Shareholder Strategy for Emerging Tech & Small Caps panel, with Shannon Devine, Linda Montgomery of ZenaTech, Anupam Ghildyal of REalloys, and Katie Perry, focused on how small-cap companies can deliberately build and manage a retail shareholder base as a strategic asset.
The day concluded with closing remarks and a closing reception. Stocktoberfest 2026 was presented by Title Partner Tradr ETFs.
To learn more about Stocktoberfest and stay tuned for next year’s agenda, visit stocktoberfest.stocktwits.com.
