Behind the Ticker

Hosted by Brad Roth

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131

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Oct 2026

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About the show

Behind the Ticker is hosted by Brad Roth, Founder & CIO of THOR Financial Technologies, a systematic investment firm with ETFs listed on the NYSE. Each week, Brad sits down with the sharpest minds in ETFs, asset management, and wealth technology — fund managers, CIOs, and the entrepreneurs building the next generation of investment products. From managed futures to structured credit, from factor investing to full downside mitigation — no topic is off limits. Brad also publishes The Signal, a daily market research brief for advisors and allocators. New episodes every week.

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October 25, 202622 min

Private Credit Exposure Without the Lockups | Mike O'Brien, Hilton Capital

Mike O'Brien started his career in Chapter 11 restructuring at FTI Consulting, moved to sell-side equity research at Wolfe Research covering spin-offs and special situations, and joined Hilton Capital Management in 2024, where he co-manages the firm's tactical income and dividend strategies alongside HBDC. Hilton has doubled to roughly $4 billion in assets since he joined, and in June 2025 it launched HBDC, the Hilton BDC Corporate Bond ETF — the first and only pure-play BDC bond ETF on the market. In this episode, Mike explains what business development companies are (banks without deposits, created in 1980 to lend to small and mid-sized US businesses), why they grew rapidly after post-2008 bank regulation, and why the bonds they issue have been overlooked while BDC equity gets most of the attention. The investment case rests on structure: BDCs are legally capped at 2-to-1 leverage, most run closer to 1-to-1, and a BDC's NAV would need to fall 50% before its bonds were impaired. Mike notes there hasn't been a BDC bond impairment since the vehicle was created in 1980. He walks through the index Hilton built with Solactive, including issuer caps that deliberately overweight smaller BDCs for extra spread, a $250 million minimum issue size to protect liquidity, and the decision not to impose an investment grade mandate. At recording, the fund was about 95% investment grade with a yield to maturity around 6.7% and a spread of roughly 175 basis points over Treasuries. Mike also covers what advisors have taught him since launch: the BIZD question that comes up in nearly every meeting, the negative press cycle around private credit, and why BDC transparency (every loan disclosed in SEC filings) is underappreciated. He's direct that HBDC is not a substitute for core bonds, with a spread beta of about 1.4 to investment grade, and makes the case for it instead as a replacement for interval funds and non-traded BDCs that carry lockups, quarterly redemption limits, and much higher fees. HBDC charges 39 basis points and recently received an NAIC 2C designation.

October 18, 202622 min

The $7 Trillion Market Most Advisors Can't Actually Access | Chris Getter, Simplify

Chris Getter started his career in US high yield at Fidelity in the mid-1990s before transitioning into emerging markets just in time for the Asia currency crisis and the Russian default. He spent a decade at PIMCO, briefly moved to Lazard, and after what he thought was retirement found his way to Simplify, where he's now a managing director and portfolio manager. Simplify was founded in 2020 by Dave Burns and Paul Kim specifically to take advantage of the SEC's 2019 rule refresh — the regulatory change that effectively opened the ETF wrapper to the derivatives-based, convex, and institutional strategies that had previously been limited to mutual funds. The firm's calling card is alternatives, and FOXY — the Simplify Currency Strategy ETF, launched in February 2025 — is the firm's dedicated expression of currency as an alternatives sleeve exposure. In this episode, Chris walks through why currency exposure is almost always encountered embedded inside something else (European stocks come with euro exposure whether you want it or not), why most retail investors have never had meaningful direct access to the asset class, and why forward contracts — the primary instrument of the global FX market — don't appear on any retail brokerage platform. He explains carry trades in plain English using a Brazilian real / Swiss franc example, and lays out the specific Achilles heel every carry strategy faces: the sudden violent unwind. FOXY is designed around that failure mode. The emerging markets side of the strategy runs eight currency pairs against the US dollar, going long high-yielding EM currencies and shorting lower-yielding funding currencies. The G10 side runs on implied yield momentum, long accelerating-yield currencies and short weakening ones. Implied volatility itself is used as a signal — when EM currencies signal higher future volatility, exposure scales back and shifts into the G10 cushion. A critical structural feature of FOXY is that it's dollar-neutral: every long position is matched by an equally sized short. The fund is not making a directional bet on the dollar. Chris walks through the T-bill sleeve that collateralizes the forward positions and funds the monthly distribution, the fund's first-year performance through the tariff tantrum (a genuine stress test for a systematic strategy), and the correlation case: FOXY's correlation to a 60/40 portfolio since inception is approximately 0.4, with correlation to other alternatives running below 0.2 and in some cases below 0.1. He also lays out how FOXY fits inside Simplify's broader alternatives lineup — complementing rather than duplicating the firm's managed futures, private credit, and other strategies.

October 11, 202628 min

Why Producers Fell From 35% of the S&P to 5% — And What It Means for Portfolios | Doug Daly, Core Commodity

Doug Daly joined Core Commodity Management straight out of Johns Hopkins, where he studied physics and applied mathematics, and is now a managing director and portfolio manager at the firm. Core Commodity is dedicated entirely to commodities asset management, founded in 2003 by some of the most senior innovators in commodities futures — including the firm's CIO, who co-created what is now the Bloomberg Commodity Index. The firm's flagship natural resource equity strategy has been running since 2012, giving the ETF wrapper that launched in 2024 — CCNR, the ALPS Core Commodity Natural Resources ETF — a 12-plus year track record in its underlying approach. In this episode, Doug walks through why CCNR is designed around upstream producers rather than large integrated energy companies, and why that distinction materially changes the fund's commodity price sensitivity relative to passive natural resources indices. He makes the structural case for commodities exposure with a specific data point most advisors haven't heard: in the late 1970s, companies producing energy, materials, and food represented roughly 35% of the S&P 500. Today that number is approximately 5%, with the bulk concentrated in just a couple of names. Most investors assume they have real exposure to companies that produce the physical goods the economy runs on simply because they own broad-based equities — and Doug walks through why they genuinely don't. He also lays out the supply-side case: a new copper mine takes 15 years from planning to production, producers have shifted to a mentality of capital restraint rather than growth capex, and demand from AI data centers, electrification, nearshoring, and military rearmament is accelerating against a backdrop where supply simply cannot respond at the same pace. The episode gets into specific portfolio mechanics: why the fund holds roughly 300 names across energy, agriculture, base metals, and precious metals; the Freeport-McMoRan mudslide event last year that illustrates why diversifying across 12 copper miners rather than relying on one proxy matters; why CCNR includes uranium, lithium, specialty metals, renewable and alternative energy exposure, agricultural inputs and timber in ways that passive indices typically don't; and why the 40% US / 60% international split is both an accurate reflection of global commodity production and an enhancer of the fund's commodity-like characteristics through the inverse correlation between commodity prices and the dollar. Doug also walks through the systematic-fundamental investment process (roughly 25 factor drivers operating at sector, industry, and single-name levels), and lays out the strategic case for commodities exposure as the highest inflation-sensitivity option in a portfolio alongside the tactical case for the current moment given producer capex restraint and the AI-driven demand tailwinds.

October 4, 202629 min

The Only ETF Holding Kalshi and Polymarket | Paisley Nardini, Tema ETFs

Paisley Nardini is back on Behind the Ticker for her second appearance, this time in a new role. At the beginning of September 2026, she joined Tema ETFs as Head of Investment Strategy — a firm founded in 2022 that has doubled its assets in 2026 to roughly $4 billion and now ranks as the second fastest-growing active ETF issuer year to date, driven largely by NASA (space) and VOLT (electrification). Paisley's career started in fixed income trading and portfolio management before shifting into multi-asset investment strategy across liquid alternatives and derivative income, giving her the macro and cross-asset foundation she now applies to Tema's thematic equity lineup. In this episode, Paisley walks through DICE — the Tema Trading and Prediction Markets ETF — which launched on September 9, 2026 on CBOE at 75 basis points. The episode starts with the distinction that matters most: DICE is not an event contract ETF. It does not trade the binary outcome contracts themselves. It invests in the infrastructure, platforms, and ecosystem powering prediction markets, which currently see approximately $50 billion in monthly volume — roughly double where the year started — and are forecasted to grow 20x to $1 trillion in annual volume by 2030. The September launch was deliberately timed to coincide with the NFL season and the runway into the 2026 midterms, both major catalysts for prediction market activity. The construction of the fund is roughly 85% publicly listed companies — Interactive Brokers (which is integrating prediction market contracts directly into its trading interface), Coinbase, Intercontinental Exchange, Robinhood, Circle, and others — plus a 15% sleeve of pre-IPO exposure to Kalshi and Polymarket through an SPV, held at approximately 7.5% each. Paisley walks through how the private positions are priced in the fund's daily NAV, why Tema acquired them at 10-13% discounts to their most recent private valuations, and why these are strategic long-term positions rather than pre-IPO trades — the same discipline Tema applied to SpaceX inside NASA, which they've kept even as the position appreciated substantially. She also explains Tema's "systematic sandwich" investment process, which pairs an upfront quantitative screen with fundamental bottom-up analysis to ensure purity of exposure in a concentrated portfolio, and gives her framework for how advisors should size DICE inside a thematic sleeve at 5 to 10% of a portfolio.

September 27, 202634 min

Why 80% of US Startups Are Now Running on Chinese AI Models | Kevin T. Carter, EMX ETFs

Kevin T. Carter is back on Behind the Ticker for his second appearance. He started his career at Robertson Stevens in 1992, has collaborated with Princeton economist Burt Malkiel for more than 25 years, built the first fractional-share brokerage (eInvesting, sold to E*Trade) and the first direct indexing platform (Active Index Advisors, sold to Natixis), and has spent the last 20 years building emerging markets ETFs including CQQQ (the first China tech ETF, launched with Guggenheim in 2010) and EMQQ (the emerging markets internet ETF, launched in 2014). This year he created a new brand, EMX ETFs, in partnership with Tidal Financial, and launched TGRZ — the China AI Tigers ETF — on August 26. In this episode, Kevin uses Jensen Huang's five-layer AI stack framework to walk through where TGRZ sits and why it matters. The fund targets Chinese large language models — the fourth layer of the stack — and specifically the six companies known as the Tigers, all of which came out of the Tsinghua University computer science lab in Beijing. Kevin explains why open-weight Chinese models like Z.ai, MiniMax, Moonshot's Kimi K3, and DeepSeek have become the infrastructure of choice for an estimated 80% of US startups, including Airbnb and the Cursor business that SpaceX recently acquired — customizable, on-premises, controllable, and roughly 90% cheaper than the closed US alternatives. He walks through the DeepSeek origin story (a Chinese math prodigy running a quantitative hedge fund who built the model on the side), how the fund is exploring private pre-IPO exposure through relationships Kevin has built over 20 years in the region, and why he's genuinely honest that TGRZ is thematic and speculative rather than a core value holding. The most substantive investment argument in the episode comes when Kevin steps back to talk about where he does see Buffett-style value: TSMC, Samsung, and SK Hynix — what he calls the Mag 3, now 33% of the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, responsible for 80% of the last 20 months of emerging markets returns, and expected to collectively earn $965 billion across 2026 and 2027. Kevin notes SK Hynix trades at a P/E of 3.5. The full Mag 3 trades at a collective multiple under five. He also gets into where the bottlenecks in the AI build-out really sit — memory shortages already killing small players, power constraints likely to define the next several years, and why China's three-times-larger power capacity is a competitive edge most US investors haven't priced.

September 20, 202620 min

Values-Based Investing Isn't ESG — Here's What It Actually Is | Bob Doll, Crossmark

Bob Doll has spent 40 years managing US large cap equities — as Chief Equity Strategist at Nuveen, CIO of US Equity at BlackRock, and now as CEO and CIO of Crossmark Global Investments. Crossmark has been operating since 1987, is owned by AG Financial (the financial arm of the Assemblies of God Church), and in July 2025 launched two actively managed ETFs that filled a genuine gap in the market: CLCG (Large Cap Growth) and CLCV (Large Cap Value) — the first faith-based, actively managed large cap growth and value ETFs available at the time of launch. In this episode, Bob walks through the distinction between values-based investing and ESG — a conflation he addresses directly because it's what most advisors bring to the conversation. He explains the Avoid, Embrace, Engage framework Crossmark uses to build every values-based portfolio, and makes the case (backed by his own data) that there is no statistical evidence values-based portfolios give up return relative to non-values-based portfolios. Bob walks through the 75/25 construction split between the quantitative multi-factor secular screen and the values-based overlay, why return on equity and price to free cash flow are doing the heavy lifting in the current environment, and why both funds are meaningfully overweight financials — including a substantive case for why the banks in particular are set up well right now. Bob also shares his read on the value-versus-growth cycle after value's strong run this year, what he's watching most closely as he thinks about his famous annual ten predictions for 2027, and why a meaningful portion of Crossmark's client base doesn't identify as people of faith but still chooses to invest with the firm.

September 13, 202625 min

The ETF That Invests in What Made Billionaires Rich — Not What They Buy Now | Andrew Skatoff, Bancreek Capital

Andrew Skatoff is back on Behind the Ticker for his second appearance. Since he last sat down with Brad, Bancreek Capital has grown to approximately $300 million across four ETFs, rung the opening bell at the NYSE, and launched CLUB — the Bancreek Billionaires Club ETF — in May of this year. CLUB isn't what the name might suggest at first glance. It doesn't invest in the personal portfolios of billionaires. It invests in the 30 publicly traded businesses that created that wealth — the family-founded, still-family-owned companies that have already won their categories and continue to compound. Andrew walks through the intellectual origin of the fund in his family office years, the data science process Bancreek uses to identify and rank the top 30 wealth-creation businesses globally, and why the billion-dollar threshold matters less than the relative positioning of the business behind it. He explains why concentration is capped at 10% and the portfolio is equal-weighted at 30 positions, why the fund runs 40 to 60% international by design, and how the monthly rerun of the screen keeps the portfolio current without introducing noise. The episode also revisits the broader Bancreek investment framework — the combination of Andrew's fundamental value training from Columbia and Chief Data Scientist Anton Yen's information theory background (Lawrence Livermore, MIT Lincoln Labs, DARPA) — with what may be the clearest articulation of the firm's edge to date: two assets that compound at 10% over five years, one delivering it ratably and one delivering it through wild volatility, are not the same business. Bancreek is looking for Asset A across every one of its funds.

September 6, 202632 min

Getting 5% Yield With Half the Volatility | Jeff Klingelhofer, Aristotle Pacific

Jeff Klingelhofer spent the early part of his career at Pimco — Newport Beach, Tokyo, and London — before an MBA at the University of Chicago and a summer at a five-person hedge fund reset his expectations for what an investment career could look like. He landed at Thornburg as employee number three on the taxable fixed income side, grew into Head of Investments over the next decade-plus, and in 2024 came back home to Newport Beach to join Aristotle Pacific. Aristotle has been around for 15 years, manages roughly $16 billion across a mutual fund lineup, and in July of this year launched its first three ETFs. In this episode, Jeff walks through the relative value investment philosophy that anchors the entire suite — ARCP (Core Plus), ARMS (Multi-Sector Income), and SDUR (Short-Term Income) — and makes one of the more concrete arguments for it you'll hear on the show. His centerpiece example: in February 2020, American Airlines priced a five-year corporate high yield bond at 3.75%, while the same issuer's equivalent Enhanced Equipment Trust Certificate was available at effectively the same yield. Same issuer, same tenor, same risk. One month later — after COVID hit — the corporate bond was trading at 27 cents on the dollar; the EETC was at 65 cents. That's the relative value process at work, and Jeff explains why most fixed income shops are structurally unable to identify those opportunities because they're organized around distinct silos rather than a unified relative value lens. Jeff also gets into how each of the three funds fits into different parts of an advisor's fixed income sleeve, why active management still matters in short duration (SDUR is currently yielding about 5% versus roughly 4% on comparable treasuries), how ARMS is currently positioned toward the low end of its below-investment-grade range because he's not being paid for that risk today, and why the funds are running slightly long duration as a hedge against credit exposure. He also delivers a genuinely substantive macro read on why the current Fed chair — facing only high inflation for the first time — is likely to have a different reaction function than his predecessors. Full episode page, with the complete transcript: thorft.com/podcast/getting-5-yield-with-half-the-volatility-jeff-klingelhofer-aristotle-pacific Every episode: thorft.com/podcast Brad's daily market note: The Signal

August 30, 202623 min

Innovation as a Core Allocation, Not a Satellite | Anthony Caruso, Nomura Asset Management

Anthony Caruso is Head of Product and Strategy for Nomura Asset Management's US ETF platform — a business that launched in late 2023, now runs nine funds with just over a billion in assets, and is being built out on the foundation of the Macquarie public business that Nomura acquired earlier this year, including the legacy Delaware Investments and Ivy franchises. Anthony's career has moved with the ETF industry itself, starting at JP Morgan and moving through Dimensional and Macquarie before arriving at Nomura. In this episode, Anthony walks through FRWD — the Nomura Transformational Technologies ETF — an actively managed innovation strategy that converted to the ETF wrapper in January of this year but carries a live track record dating back to 2018 in separate account form, during which the strategy outperformed the NASDAQ 100 by approximately 200%. He explains the two-lens investment process that starts with thematic analysis and layers deep fundamental research on top, why the portfolio holds just over 25 highly concentrated positions with the top 10 representing roughly 57% of the fund, and why the strategy is deliberately not a technology sector fund — the framework allows the portfolio to move across sectors as different innovation waves take hold, from AI infrastructure today to healthcare, longevity, industrials, and beyond. The most substantive strategic argument Anthony makes is that innovation deserves to be treated as a long-term core allocation, not a tactical satellite. He uses the Babe Ruth analogy — you don't use your best hitter as a pinch hitter — and lays out how advisors should think about pairing FRWD with existing NASDAQ 100 or Russell 1000 growth exposures rather than layering it on as a small thematic tilt. He also covers the growth of FRWD to approximately $260 million in six months, the broader Nomura US ETF roadmap including EMEQ and HTAX, and what's coming through the pipeline before year-end. Full episode page, with the complete transcript: thorft.com/podcast/innovation-as-a-core-allocation-not-a-satellite-anthony-caruso-nomura-asset-mana Every episode: thorft.com/podcast Brad's daily market note: The Signal

August 23, 202632 min

Why the Real AI Bottleneck Isn't Compute | Howard Chan, Kurv Investment Management

Howard Chan is back on Behind the Ticker for his second appearance, celebrating almost exactly the two-year anniversary of KQQQ — Kurv Investment Management's first ETF. When Howard first sat down with Brad two years ago, the conversation was about theory. This time he brings two years of live performance data validating the approach and a new fund tackling one of the most under-appreciated bottlenecks in the AI trade. KMEM — the Kurv Memory Select ETF — launched on July 1st with a specific thesis: while the market has spent years pricing NVIDIA and the compute layer of AI, the next binding constraint is memory. Ninety percent of the world's memory chips are made by three companies — Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix — and all three are sold out through 2028. Howard walks through why the shift from commoditized memory to specialized HBM chips has created a moat where none existed before, why SK Hynix just reported 250% revenue growth and 500% profit growth, and why the physical constraints on expansion (fab costs, ASML equipment waitlists, workforce buildout) mean this is a two-to-four-year story rather than a quarter-to-quarter one. He also explains why the secondary effect — memory costs pushing up Apple, Xbox, and MacBook prices — signals how deeply this constraint is filtering into the broader economy. Howard also covers the two-year update on KQQQ, which has kept pace with and in fact outperformed its mega-cap tech underlying while generating 15-18% distribution yield through selective options overlays — writing calls only on positions with limited upside rather than mechanically across the portfolio. He walks through why the pairing of KQQQ with a dividend equity ETF gives an advisor a more complete sector picture than either alone, and hints at the tax-efficient portable alpha strategies coming from Kurv in the months ahead. Full episode page, with the complete transcript: thorft.com/podcast/why-the-real-ai-bottleneck-isn-t-compute-howard-chan-kurv-investment-management Every episode: thorft.com/podcast Brad's daily market note: The Signal

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