Behind the Ticker

Hosted by Brad Roth

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Episodes

122

Latest episode

Aug 2026

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EN-US

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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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.

August 16, 202628 min

The Value ETF That Kept Pace With Growth — Without Owning a Single Mag Seven Name | Mannik Dhillon, Victory Capital

Mannik Dhillon is President of Investment Franchises and Solutions and Head of ETFs at Victory Capital — a firm that manages a lineup of independent investment boutiques under a shared platform, with a business model informed by Mannik's earlier career evaluating asset managers on the institutional consulting side at Hewitt and Wilshire. He joined Victory in 2015 as Head of Product and has since grown into a leadership role across investment franchises, solutions, and the firm's ETF business. In this episode, Mannik walks through VFLO — the VictoryShares Free Cash Flow ETF — which has grown to roughly six to nine billion in assets in the three years since its June 2023 launch. He explains why VFLO isn't really a free cash flow product but a better way to measure value, why traditional value metrics like price to book have lost their power in an economy built on intangibles and IP, and how VFLO's two enhancements to the standard free cash flow yield approach — forward-looking cash flow estimates and a growth filter that removes the worst growers from the eligible universe — have produced a track record that outperformed value, core, and growth benchmarks over three years with zero Magnificent Seven exposure. Mannik also gets into how the free cash flow methodology has been extended across market caps and geographies (VFLO, SFLO, GFLW, IFLO, and GRIN), what future extensions are under research (enhanced income variations, more sector-complete versions, a global strategy), and how the pairing of VFLO with GFLW is being used by advisors to build differentiated wings around a passive core. He also walks through Victory's multi-boutique franchise model and why he believes independent, autonomous investment teams supported by a centralized (but not standardized) platform produce better outcomes for clients.

August 9, 202632 min

Built for the Retiree Who Can't Afford a 30% Drawdown | Raymond Bridges, Bridges Capital

Raymond Bridges founded Bridges Capital in 2018 after years at Wells Fargo, building his practice around a demographic reality he sees every day in South Florida — retirees who need to draw from their portfolios monthly and cannot afford the 20 to 30% drawdowns the market delivers on a regular basis. He built an active risk management process specifically to reduce the depth of those drawdowns, tested it through COVID, and packaged it into BDGS — the Bridges Capital Tactical ETF, which launched on the Nasdaq in May 2023. In this episode, Raymond walks through how BDGS actually works — the macro thesis grounded in Austrian business cycle theory that creates the fund's directional bias, the four-category breadth analysis that drives the actual trades, and the tranche-based scaling discipline that keeps the fund from ever going all-in or all-out. He explains why the fund has held as much as 80% cash for long stretches, how the top-ten market-cap-weighted names of the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 form the equity core, and why mean reversion is the buying discipline even when a name is a category leader. He makes the case for why the Sortino ratio is a better lens than the Sharpe ratio for evaluating tactical strategies, why he'd replace long-duration bonds with BDGS in most conservative portfolios, and how the ETF wrapper's custom basket redemption feature lets the fund manage risk without dragging tax consequences into every decision. Raymond also gets into his monetarist read of the current environment, why he's been an advocate for Kevin Warsh at the Fed for more than a year, and how his macro view directly shapes the cautious posture BDGS currently carries.

August 2, 202630 min

Real Small Cap Value Exposure | Elena Khoziaeva, Bridgeway

Elena Khoziaeva is Co-CIO of Bridgeway Capital Management — a boutique systematic investment firm founded in Houston with a long history of factor-based investing and one of the more unusual missions in asset management. Bridgeway donates 50% of firm profits to the Bridgeway Foundation and caps its internal salary ratio at seven to one. Elena joined the firm in 1998 as partner number six and has spent 25 years building strategies grounded in academic theory and disciplined systematic research. In this episode, Elena walks through BSVO — the Bridgeway Omni Small-Cap Value ETF — and what it means to build a small cap value strategy that's deeper on both factors than the benchmarks that dominate the category. The strategy carries a 15-year track record inside a modern ETF wrapper (converted from a mutual fund in 2023), holds approximately 600 names for diversification within the asset class, and uses a multi-metric valuation screen that produces a natural quality tilt. Elena explains why running value across the universe rather than within sectors produces the fund's characteristic tilts toward financials and away from healthcare, how the sidestep screens are designed to remove fallen knives from a deep value portfolio, and why BSVO's 79% correlation to the S&P 500 delivers meaningfully better factor diversification than the Russell 2000 Value. She also makes the case for where small cap value sits right now — with the median book-to-market ratio versus the S&P at 2.8 versus a historical norm of 1.6, and a Q1 2026 that already showed the kind of rapid reversal small cap value tends to produce. Her framing: the tighter the spring, the more powerful the release.

July 26, 202627 min

Turning Down $1 Billion in Flows to Protect Retail Investors | Eva Ados, ERShares

Eva Ados is Partner, COO, and Chief Investment Strategist at ERShares — a firm built on decades of academic research by founder Dr. Joel Schulman into what makes entrepreneurial companies successful and how the best VCs identify category leaders before the market catches on. Schulman famously identified Nvidia at $5 in 2005 and got into most of the Magnificent Seven early. That framework — the entrepreneur factor, or the VC lens applied to public markets — is now built into XOVR, the first ETF ever to combine public equity exposure with a genuine sleeve of private company holdings. In this episode, Eva walks through what XOVR actually owns beyond the SpaceX position that has dominated the media narrative — an 85% public equity portfolio built on the ER30 index and a 15% private sleeve currently holding SpaceX and Rocket Lab with more to come. She covers the four structural innovations that make the fund work: the crossover structure itself, the zero-zero SPV, the board-approved liquidity arrangement that allowed SpaceX to exceed the 15% illiquid cap, and the shareholder protection plan the firm built specifically to prevent arbitrage flows from diluting long-term retail investors. That last one is worth the price of admission on its own — Eva walks through how the firm turned away more than a billion dollars in creation flows the week before an IPO event, applied a 2% redemption fee on institutional creation orders, and repriced the SpaceX position multiple times through Q2 — all deliberate choices to prioritize retail investors over asset management revenue. Eva also gets into how ERShares uses revenue per employee as a screen for identifying which companies are actually monetizing AI, why Astera Labs and AppLovin were both picked up before they became household names, and what the fund is looking for next.

July 19, 202625 min

Why Your Emerging Markets ETF Isn't Actually Diversifying You | Young Jae Lee, Pictet

Young Jae Lee is a Senior Investment Manager at Pictet Asset Management — a Geneva-based firm founded in 1805, still owned by its managing partners 220 years later, and one of the largest asset managers in Europe. Young Jae joined Pictet in 2010, spent his first seven years covering emerging market technology as an analyst, and now runs the strategy behind RISE — the Pictet Emerging Markets Rising Economy ETF. In this episode, Young Jae walks through a fundamental problem with how US investors get emerging market exposure today. The MSCI Emerging Markets benchmark is more than 70% Korea, Taiwan, and China. Its top five holdings — TSMC, Samsung, SK Hynix, Tencent, Alibaba — mirror the same technology-heavy concentration as the top five names in the S&P 500. Buying a passive emerging market fund alongside a US portfolio, he argues, doesn't diversify — it amplifies the risk you already have. RISE was built to solve that problem. The fund invests only in emerging market countries where the working-age population is growing, which structurally excludes Korea, Taiwan, and China and shifts the portfolio into India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Mexico, and others. Young Jae explains the demographic thesis grounded in the Solow Growth Model, why he calls population growth in emerging markets structurally equivalent to what AI is in developed markets, and how the fund's 60% quantitative screen and 40% fundamental conviction sleeve are designed to work together. He also drops one of the more surprising statistics you'll hear on the show — that more than half of the MSCI EM benchmark's total return has historically come from dividend yield — and explains why that reframes the case for value investing in emerging markets.

July 12, 202628 min

The Space ETF Built to Let the Winners Win | Nick Frasse, Van Eck

Nick Frasse spent five years on Van Eck's internal wholesaler desk before making the uncommon move from sales into product management. He now covers the firm's thematic ETF lineup — semiconductors, robotics, data center supply chain, and most recently, space. In this episode, Nick walks through WARP, the Van Eck Space ETF, launched in May 2025 with 20 pure-play holdings and a 50% revenue threshold for inclusion. We get into why the index was deliberately written to be forward-looking and open-ended given how quickly the space industry is likely to evolve, what Van Eck learned from its European UCITS predecessor JEDI, and how the four building blocks — satellite communications, rocket and propulsion, earth observation and data, and space exploration — actually break down in the portfolio. Nick makes the mass-to-orbit case with real specificity: from $50,000 per kilogram in the shuttle era to under $200 with Starship — a shift that reframes space from a specialty sector into an economic unlock that touches shipping, communications, data, and industries that don't yet exist. He's also honest about the current revenue mix in the fund — still largely government-driven through prime and subprime defense contractors — and where he expects that mix to move as commercial applications scale. And he makes the case for a design philosophy that Van Eck has stuck to across its thematic lineup: build focused, pure-play, market-cap-weighted vehicles that let the winners win, and leave position sizing to the advisor.

July 5, 202633 min

Why 4% of Stocks Drive 100% of Returns — And How to Own Them | Keith Fitz-Gerald, One Bar Ahead

Keith Fitz-Gerald has spent 45 years as a global investor, researcher, and strategist — starting at Wilshire Associates, building One Bar Ahead from a yellow pad in his dining room into a publication read by tens of thousands worldwide, and earning a quiet reputation as one of the most independent voices in the business. Suze Orman called him "someone you should pay attention to" on her podcast, and that recommendation triggered the kind of viral moment most publishers spend a career chasing. In this episode, Keith walks through the research that underpins his entire investment framework — the finding that roughly 4% of US publicly listed companies have contributed essentially 100% of the wealth created in the stock market over the past century — and what that means for how investors should actually allocate capital. We get into why he believes diversification has become a problem rather than a solution, how the structural changes in modern markets (passive flows, zero-DTE options, ETF cross-correlation, 24-hour trading) have eliminated the non-correlation that diversification was originally designed to capture, and why concentration in must-have companies is the path the industry's best investors have quietly taken for generations. Keith then breaks down FITZ — the Fitzgerald Must-Have Portfolio ETF, launched in May 2026 in partnership with Nicholas Wealth and David Nicholas. The fund holds 20 to 30 names selected through the 5D framework: digitalization, plus four other structural drivers Keith identifies as the foundation of the sixth wave of human economic evolution. He explains why companies like Walmart get classified as retail and missed by sector-driven allocators when they're actually among the most consequential tech companies on the planet, why Intel got cut from the portfolio, why he rebalances three times a year instead of four, and why he sees FITZ as a core equity holding rather than a satellite sleeve.

June 28, 202622 min

The First Autism Impact ETF — and 100% of Profits Go to the Cause | Sylvia Jablonski, Defiance ETFs

Sylvia Jablonski is the CEO of Defiance ETFs — a firm that's grown from a handful of products in 2018 to over $13 billion in AUM across 80-plus ETFs, with launches happening on a weekly cadence. In this return appearance on Behind the Ticker, Sylvia walks through the firm's most personal product yet and the SpaceX launch on deck. The Defiance Autism Impact ETF (ticker ASD) launched on June 2nd, 2026, as the first ETF of its kind. The fund is built around the full value chain serving the autism community — drug development, genetic testing, behavioral therapies, educational platforms, assistive technology, digital health — and Defiance is donating 100% of net advisory profits to autism causes for the first two years, no less than 50% thereafter. Sylvia talks about the deeply personal story behind the fund, the investment case for a sector where one in 31 children is now diagnosed and the lifetime cost of care runs into the millions, and why institutional allocators are increasingly asking for products with a cause structurally built in. The conversation then shifts to SPCU — the firm's 2X long SpaceX ETF, set to launch alongside what may be the largest IPO in history. Sylvia covers how Defiance has been building space exposure for years across single-name, thematic, and basket products (UFOX, SPCL, JEDI, XOVL), why the space economy has gone from niche theme to mainstream so quickly, and how Defiance is positioning across an increasingly crowded category.

June 21, 202629 min

Stacking the Odds to 93%: Inside a Non-Directional Income Strategy | Carter Worth, Worth Charting

Carter Worth spent 35 years on Wall Street — Value Line, Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette, and a long series of major sell-side seats — before founding Worth Charting in 2021 to serve the largest institutional capital pools in the world. He's a regular on CNBC's Fast Money, and one of the more recognizable voices in technical analysis still operating at scale. In this episode, Carter breaks down WRTH — the Worth Charting Options Income ETF — and why selling both sides of an option, instead of buying them or running covered calls, is a structurally different way to generate income. He walks through how the fund stacks four probability filters on top of each other — short-dated, out-of-the-money, large cap only, non-biotech, sold only after outsized earnings moves — to reach approximately 93% odds that the options expire worthless. We also get into why the fund is fundamentally non-directional and bets only on a stock staying in a range for 15 to 20 sessions after a major move, how the cash-secured structure works to manage downside risk, why tail risk from acquisitions is more manageable than most investors assume, and how Carter and his team are thinking about distribution in what he calls the ETF Thunderdome. Carter also makes the case for why technical analysis is more relevant in a quant-and-AI-dominated market, not less — and why pattern recognition at the chart level is just the original version of what Renaissance was doing with 150 PhDs.