Kyle Wool, chief executive officer of Dominari Securities, spoke with Quartz for the latest installment of our “Smart Investing” video series.
Watch the interview above and check out the transcript below. The transcript of this conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
ANDY MILLS (AM): You are seeing cybersecurity being a big trend in 2024 with firms like CrowdStrike, Palo Alto and Zscaler. Why these names? Why now?
KYLE WOOL (KW): First of all, I’ll go close to home because I’m the CEO of an investment bank, right? We have requirements every day that get stricter and stricter from our different regulators, whether it’s the SEC or whether it’s finra, making sure that we’re protecting the most important thing, which is our customer data, right? So it’s not just us as an investment bank, it’s the large banks. It’s every large company out there that has customer information and you have a lot of bad actors. I mean, could it be North Korea or Russia, like people talk about? No, it’s probably somebody who’s just trying to ransom people for money. Like we’ve seen happen with a lot of these Fortune 500 companies recently. You saw what happened to the insurance companies with the medical records recently there’s like $22 million they extorted from them that needs to be protected. Do I think they can protect it perfectly? Right now I don’t, but I think they can probably catch 90 to 95% of the attacks. So I think most people like myself are really paying attention to that. And the names that you mentioned, those are the public companies that you can invest to take advantage. Are there other private companies? Of course, but that’s not for everyone.
AM: Yeah. I got an email a couple months ago that was from 23andMe that said, like, ‘Oops, we lost all your DNA data. Somebody has it now on the black market. Peace! Bye!’ We live in a world where things like that are happening all the time and it seems like these companies are the only ones we can kind of turn to. Our data is out there and somebody needs to to protect it.
KW: It is. And I think Microsoft, they’re making a large effort to protect your data, right? They have their own cybersecurity. You and I probably go back long enough to remember Symantec and Nortel and things of that nature. Now you don’t see that so much on your computers anymore. You see these other cyber cybersecurity companies. But Apple has also done a really good job with their own cybersecurity, but they’re gonna keep coming. When there’s an opportunity to get data and to make money and to extort, people are gonna try to take advantage. And our job is to invest in the companies that we think are gonna do the best at protecting that data.
Read more: A timeline of Apple’s rough 2024 (so far)
AM: It seems like the bloom is off the rose with Apple. It’s a great company, but it’s no longer being considered like a high growth company. What are your thoughts about that?
KW: I’ve been a Mac user since I was young. I love the Mac. The new [Vision] Pro came out. It was a little ambitious. But one thing I’ve noticed with Apple over the years, when they do get ambitious, they go back to the drawing board. They usually come out with something quite interesting. I was watching the other day, Steve Jobs, when he first launched the iPhone, and you remember how Blackberry had absolute dominance. At the time and within a few years, Research In Motion was gone. I wouldn’t quite bet against Apple. But if I did look at the chart, like on a technical chart, I would say that I wouldn’t be afraid to buy Apple on a dip.
AM: Well, thanks Kyle.
KW: Thank you.
