Gust Kepler: We have seen a larger churn rate when the markets get choppy or volatile, as I described, most of our — in my earlier narrative — most of our traders are directional options traders and it’s been a difficult market for them to navigate. Our more experienced traders, not only stay with us, but a lot of them upgrade to annual memberships, and that’s part of our strategy when we did this Black Friday/Cyber Monday promotion. So to be 100% transparent, the market does affect our member base, but we have maintained a stable member base, and we expect to grow our member base with these new products that are not entirely reliant on day traders that make a living trading every day. The new products are focused on either professional traders that have to have tools, because they don’t have the luxury of deciding they’re going to sit out the market for a quarter or a year until it comes back.
They have to trade. So they need the advantage that our products provide. Stock manning is a different type of product as well, because most people that are investors a lot of times find value in market decrease and come in and buy what they consider undervalued stocks. They still need to monitor their positions. And by — the stock manning product is a portfolio monitoring rather than a day trading tool. So we believe it will be very valuable to portfolio holders or self-directed investors, which again, I’ll repeat, is a much larger demographic than the day trader market that we currently serve.
Joshua Zoepfel: Okay. Great. Yes. Thank you for answering my questions and good job on the quarter, guys.
Gust Kepler: Thank you.
Bob Winspear: Thank you.
Operator: And our next question today will come from Ed Woo of Ascendiant Capital. Please go ahead.
Ed Woo: Yes. Thank you for answering my question. You said that, this market is not good for the directional option traders, but obviously, it’s very good for short — people who are short to market. Have you been putting more focus on products that will make money during down markets and get that out to your customer base?
Gust Kepler: Our marketing message to new subscribers or potential new members is that, you can make money betting against the market. But to be more specific, directional options traders find it difficult, premiums on options are much higher when volatility is high. So it’s harder to be profitable. So while there is benefit to people that know how to bet against the market or short the market, be it stock traders or options traders, it’s still a difficult market for the majority of our user base, which is 80% directional options traders.
Ed Woo: Great. And then, talk about international opportunities. Are you able to focus on getting more international customers, or is that also still very challenging?
Gust Kepler: We haven’t seen a rise or decline in international users. We’re currently in approximately 32 countries. We’re not seeing a large concentration of new users in a particular region. The US stock market tends to be the leading market in the world and the international members that we currently have are affected in the same way that our domestic members are affected. So to answer your question, we don’t see — we haven’t seen a large rise in any particular sector in the international markets. But we are — we do have future plans to add additional exchanges, and we are adding features to our platform which will provide a new avenue for traders outside of just the options and stock trading that we currently offer.