2/29/20 - Weekend Listening from Intercontinental Exchange

Trading weeks like the one that ended yesterday at four o’clock don’t happen every week, thank God.

Emblematic of the last five days was this piece of color from this morning’s Wall Street Journal, written by Akane Otani and Peter Santilli, under the headline, “The Week That Wiped $3.6 Trillion Off the Stock Market”:

“Andrew Freedman, a 31-year-old finance professional, was in an Uber in Connecticut on Monday morning when he noticed his driver fiddling with his phone. When he asked his driver to pay attention to the road, he was stunned by his response: ‘Do you mind if I pull over for a minute”? The market’s open, I have to sell some things.”

At the end of the week that was, NYSE President Stacey Cunningham emailed her troops. “The activity this week in the market has been extraordinary,” she wrote. “While we cannot control where the market goes, the world counts on us for resiliency during times of stress and we delivered… The prior messaging record for OPRA [our options messaging platform] was 45 billion messages in a day and this week we set a new record of over 90 billion messages without any issues.”

As we rise this Saturday morning, I think back on all of the NYSE-listed and pre-IPO companies engaged in the work of medicine and health care, and the leaders we’ve had on our show, from firms including Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson , Teladoc, QIAGEN, and Freenome.

Our latest medical-related show was released just this week. David Fischel is CEO of Stereotaxis (NYSE American: STXS), a firm helping doctors and patients achieve better outcomes assisted by robots in the operating room. The work that STXS is doing is extraordinary. Speaking for us all, I can’t wait for the episode with the CEO of the firm that helps stop COVID-19 in it tracks.

The view from the front lines of modern medicine:

• David Fischel is leading a robot revolution in the O.R. Get the robot in here, STAT! Surgery is going digital by leveraging artificial intelligence, telemedicine, and big data to bring cutting edge care to patients across the globe. David Fischel is CEO of Stereotaxis, one of the companies leading this sea change. He told us of the company’s advancements, including bringing Genesis, a new robotic magnetic navigation technology, to market. David also forecasts the future of machine-augmented medicine and how Stereotaxis providse the tools that surgeons will need in the operating rooms of the future.

If you’re on a smart phone, all of our podcast episodes are available wherever you get your podcasts, including the iPhone Podcast app, Spotify, Stitcher, and other audio platforms. Feel free to reach out to me with any feedback about our show, or suggest any guests for future episodes.