Earnings surprises will likely be to downside: tastylive CEO

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Is now truly the most exciting time to be an investor? tastylive Founder and CEO Tom Sosnoff joins Yahoo Finance in-studio to weigh in on the retail investor environment, gauging commodity price trends forming around gold futures (GC=F), the crypto space, and expectations for the first-quarter earnings season.

"The last earnings cycle surprised I think everybody to the upside. Every earnings cycle is incredibly random. When you break down the numbers afterward, you're essentially talking 50-50," Sosnoff explains, expecting surprises "to the downside" this earnings season.

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Market Domination.

This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.

Video Transcript

JARED BLIKRE: So you have a unique perspective on the markets because you're in the brokerage industry. I'm just wondering what kind of retail trends you've seen change over the years. Anything that sticks out to you? Because you get to see the order flow of your own customers. How are things different than they were a few years ago?

TOM SOSNOFF: Well, I have actually-- I come from the market making side. So I spent half of my career 20 years as a market maker. And then the last 23 or 24 years building front-end software. For retail investors, we built ThinkOrSwim then Tasty.

And so what I've really watched investors do has become very capital efficient. Like the swing has been towards capital efficiency. So they use a different kind of the technology is so much better today. And they use a different set of products.

So they're more open to being product agnostic. I think if you ask people 10 years ago or 20 years ago, what do you do as an investor or trader? They'd tell you I trade stocks. I trade options. I trade futures.

Today, everybody is agnostic to everything. So it doesn't matter what you do. Like product indifferent we like to call it.

So I think today's retail investor is just as happy trading gold today or crude oil because they were in play as they are trading in NVIDIA or AMD.

JARED BLIKRE: Interesting.

TOM SOSNOFF: And so I think that is the biggest shift in the last really in the last two decades is the move towards product indifference and the move towards a little bit more towards strategy and a little bit away from, hey, I think I know what's going to happen next.

JOSH LIPTON: And Tom, you mentioned gold there. That's another big story. It hit another fresh record, right? What do you think gold is trying to tell us?

TOM SOSNOFF: Well, first of all, gold had an amazing turnaround today. It was up almost I think $65. I mean, I was flying out here today.