Public co-founder Leif Abraham: millennials are buying the dip, retail investors cycling out of yield accounts into stocks at record pace
Apr 8, 2025 with Leif Abraham
Key Points
- Public co-founder Leif Abraham says millennials conditioned by past market crashes are buying the dip, with the platform recording one of its best deposit days during the recent selloff.
- Retail investors are using Public's yield accounts as temporary parking lots, cycling cash into stocks when prices fall rather than holding fixed-income allocations long-term.
- Public's AI research tool now automatically surfaces a 'why is it moving' card when stocks spike sharply, cross-referencing multiple news sources to reduce single-source bias and misinformation risk.
Summary
Leif Abraham, co-founder of Public, observes that millennials have been conditioned to buy market dips. Having lived through March 2020 and other sharp selloffs, they profited by holding or buying in during downturns. That pattern is now visible in Public's data. During the recent market drop, the platform recorded one of its best days for deposits, with more buyers than sellers at key moments.
A deeper structural shift is how younger investors use Public's yield accounts. High-yield cash, corporate bond baskets, and Treasury accounts function not as long-term fixed-income holdings but as waiting rooms. Many held back from equities after Trump's election pushed markets to all-time highs, believing they would be buying the top. When prices fell sharply, they moved that cash out of yield accounts and into stocks and ETFs.
Overnight trading and liquidity
Public plans to offer 24/7 equities trading but has not yet launched it. Current hours run 4 a.m. to 8 p.m. Overnight sessions carry a real risk: a single dominant liquidity provider creates concentrated, unilateral flow and produces the dramatic single-stock moves that circulate on X before normalizing at the 9:30 open. Retail investors treating those moves as signals are reading a thin, distorted market.
AI research tools
Public's Alpha product began as a swipe-down Q&A layer on any stock, built on structured data assembled after the company acquired a tool that parsed SEC filings into machine-readable KPIs such as subscriber counts and units shipped. The product has shifted from pull to push. A "why is it moving" card now surfaces automatically when a stock moves sharply, with a tap opening a fuller AI-driven breakdown. For news, the model cross-references multiple sources before summarizing, which reduces single-source bias.
Platform design as investor behavior
Abraham argues that misinformation risk is secondary to platform design risk. Investors introduced to markets through products that resemble gambling will trade like gamblers regardless of the news environment. Public's design choices, including fixed-income products and long-term portfolio framing, rest on a bet that product mechanics shape investor behavior more than any individual news event.