JUST 32-years-old, Duke Pollard has global ambitions for Capital Markets Elite Group, the online brokerage and independent asset management firm he formed eight years ago.
With its headquarters on Victoria Avenue in Port of Spain, Pollard says his company has 126 employees in total, 105 of whom work in Trinidad and Tobago.
“We are considered a global company” says Pollard, noting that along with the T&T operations, Capital Markets Elite Group is licensed to operate as a broker-dealer and securities advisor in the Cayman Islands.
Sister companies, Mondeum Capital and Mondeum Wealth are licensed to provide financial services in the US and are regulated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission and FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.
Pollard has applied for a licence to operate in Canada and, he told Express Business in an interview earlier this month, his company is in the process of acquiring a broker dealer in the United Kingdom. That transaction is pending the approval of the UK regulators.
Pollard owns 72.31 per cent of the parent company of his burgeoning investment empire, Mondeum Investment Group Ltd, which is a company registered in St Lucia as an International Business Company (IBC) under that island’s IBC legislation. His business partner, Rory Ellis owns 11.92 per cent of the parent company.
“Strategically, the group’s plan is to be licensed in reputable jurisdiction, globally. We are looking to compete with the Interactive Brokers of this world,” said Pollard.
Capital Markets Elite Group was established in 2013, when he was 24. Pollard says he got bitten by investment bug at 16.
“I was interested in investing in the financial markets at 16 because of my father, who told me he purchased his first house in Guyana by trading a particular stock named Teleprompter back in the day,” said Pollard. His father is also named Duke Pollard, a retired judge of the Caribbean Court of Justice, who is currently professor of law at the University of Guyana.
Intrigued by the fact that stock ownership can build wealth quickly, the younger Pollard did numerous online course that taught him the basics of online trading.
“Initially, my objective was to manage the funds of people, but when you are young, at that time I was 18 or 19, people say you do not have the experience to manage money.” The feedback he got from his peers and friends led Pollard to establish a business to teach people how to trade on the international markets. That business was called Global Financial Traders.
“I was doing seminars educating the public how to invest and trade on the international financial markets. That led me to establish Capital Markets Elite Group, which became a broker-dealer to facilitate the people who I was teaching in the past.”
In between teaching people how to trade and setting up two companies, Pollard got a degree in law from The University of the West Indies
The main strength of Capital Markets Elite is its online trading arm. It provides access to the international financial markets to investors worldwide.
Although it operates in T&T, the Capital Markets Elite Group’s clientele is mostly international. Pollard says the group has over 20,000 clients in 120 countries around the world—in Europe, Latin America and the Far East. The group has about 200 local clients, he said.
“We specialise currently in the active online trading space where investors would trade various assets classes, through us, from US equities to foreign exchange and contract for differences, Pollard said.
Asked to define the advantage that his company brings to investors compared to global firms like Interactive Brokers and Charles Schwab, the financial executive said: “We are pretty much similar to Interactive Brokers in that online trading space. So if you want as an individual to open an account with us, and you would like to trade US equities, you would be able to do so through us via our online platforms”
He said the difference bwteeen his company and a company like Interactive Brokers is that the latter is tailored for sophisticated traders, whereas Capital Markets Elite Group caters to active retail traders as well as buy-and-hold investors.
Pollard said his company’s pricing is competitive with the global players. The company has two types of accounts: active traders who pay US$2.95 per trade; buy-and-hold investors pay no money per trade. In terms of the fee structure, the difference between the active trader and the buy-and-hold investor is determined by the number of trades per quarter.
Speaking about the international markets, Pollard describes as “unprecedented” the US$1.9 trillion stimulus package unleashed by US President Joe Bid this year and the billions of dollars pumped into the American economy by the US Federal Reserve, which had lowered US interest rates last year.
The stimulus has led investors to stay away from bonds and pile into the US equity markets, driving them to record highs.
“What would scare me is if I see that inflation, after all of this fiscal stimulus has take place, gets out of control. That would pretty much send signals to the US Federal Reserve that it has to increase interest rates to curb that increase in inflation in the US economy.
“Until then, we do forecast that equity prices would continue to rise.”
Questioned on how long he thinks US stocks can continue to rise and if the US markets are now in a bubble phase, Pollard said: “It is very hard to comment on whether the US market is in a bubble phase. I do believe that we are in a very sensitive place because we have seen that assets prices are pretty much extended.
“But that extension will only continue once monetary policy remains as is. What would burst that ‘bubble’ is if we a significant uptick in inflation, which would signal the Fed increasing interest rates much sooner than participants would expect.”
He said he sees US equity prices continuing to increase, “unless there is an indication of inflation being out of control or increasing well above the 2 per cent inflation target by the US Fed....Only until then would we see prices being affected negatively.”
Pollard said the company is looking to grow in the various jurisdictions it would like to offer its services in as well as deepening its product offerings via its online trading platforms.
