Behind the Ticker

Adam Schenck joined Milliman as an intern in 2005 while earning his master's in financial mathematics at the University of Chicago. He became the first trader in the firm's financial risk management group, helping life insurers hedge complex guarantees through the financial crisis, and the group has since grown into one of the largest sub-advisors in the ETF industry, advising on roughly $242 billion. In April, Milliman launched its first ETFs under its own name: MHIG, the Healthcare Inflation Guard ETF, and MHIP, the Healthcare Inflation Plus ETF.

In this episode, Adam explains why one of the world's largest...

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...

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 ha...

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.

I...

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 Te...

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...

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 walk...

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 intell...

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...

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 innova...

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 b...

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 billio...

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 Aus...

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...

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...

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...

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, an...

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 roug...

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, digi...

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...

Mike Willis has spent 25 years on Wall Street — Smith Barney, Paine Webber, UBS — before founding Cyber Hornet ETFs to do two things that traditional asset management still hasn't done well: offer a founder-run alternative to the index giants that dominate corporate voting, and build a way for financial advisors to put crypto into client portfolios without the volatility blowing the relationship up.

In this episode, Mike breaks down BBB — the Cyber Hornet S&P 500 and Bitcoin 75/25 Strategy ETF — and the methodology behind why 75/25 is the sweet spot, not 50/50 or 60/40. He walks through what the fund actually did during B...

Jerry Prior has spent nearly thirty years at Mount Lucas Management — a firm with roots in Commodities Corp, the legendary firm that launched Paul Tudor Jones, Louis Bacon, and the broader managed futures and global macro industry. Mount Lucas built the MLM Index in 1988 to give institutional investors a price-based benchmark for managed futures — the first of its kind — and four decades later, the strategy is still running largely unchanged, now wrapped inside KMLM, the KraneShares Mount Lucas Managed Futures Index Strategy ETF.

In this episode, Jerry breaks down why managed futures exists as an asset class in the...

Jon Clements built his career in equity research at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and Guggenheim before co-founding Market Desk Research with his brother Matt in 2020. What started as a research and model portfolio platform serving 200 of the largest wealth managers in the country eventually became an ETF issuer — and FMTM, the Focused Momentum ETF, is the result.

In this episode, Jon breaks down what actually makes FMTM different from legacy momentum products like MTUM and SPMO. We get into why Market Desk uses a six-month lookback instead of the academic standard of twelve, why the algorithm scores th...

Matt Camuso spent over a decade helping the industry's biggest asset managers enter the ETF wrapper — at State Street, JP Morgan, and BNY — before joining Baron Capital to do it from the inside. Baron is a firm with over 40 years of active management history, $47 billion in AUM, and a track record that includes the best-performing mutual fund of the past 25 years per Morningstar. In December 2025 they launched five ETFs at once. They're already approaching $800 million.

In this episode, Matt breaks down what "old school active" actually means at a firm like Baron — the person-to-person company engagement, the pre-IP...

Yuri Khodjamirian spent a decade running institutional equity portfolios in London before leaving the industry entirely to get a master's degree in bioscience at Cambridge. That intellectual restlessness is what eventually brought him to Tema ETFs, where he now serves as CIO overseeing a suite of actively managed thematic funds — and most recently, the Tema Space Innovators ETF, ticker NASA.

In this episode, Yuri breaks down what makes NASA different from every other space fund on the market — starting with the fact that it holds SpaceX. He walks through exactly how a private company ends up inside a li...

Steve Laipply is the Global Co-Head of iShares Fixed Income ETFs at BlackRock — overseeing roughly a trillion dollars in bond ETF assets. His path into the category started not with a job posting but with a moment of personal frustration trying to buy a two-year treasury note and a colleague suggesting he just buy a bond ETF instead. That curiosity led him to BGI, the iShares predecessor, where he joined a small team that helped build the bond ETF category from the ground up.

In this episode, Steve breaks down BTOT — the iShares Total US Fixed Income Mark...

Bill Birmingham spent his career as a buy-side equity research analyst before joining REX Shares to help build their crypto product suite — and eventually take on a broader mandate of finding the next emerging investment themes before they're obvious. That search led him to drones.

In this episode, Bill breaks down DRNZ — the REX Drone ETF and the only pure-play UAV fund on the market. We get into why existing defense ETFs were failing drone investors, how the index is constructed to capture emerging names before they dominate the cap table, and why the counter-drone market may actu...

Mo is the Chief Product Officer at Direxion — and the person who first told Brad to start a podcast instead of a Netflix series. Years later, he's the guest. With a career that ran from Vanguard to the New York Stock Exchange to Raymond James before landing at Direxion, Mo brings a rare cross-sectional view of the ETF industry that few in the space can match.

In this episode, Mo breaks down how Direxion — now managing roughly $55 billion across 130+ ETFs — builds tools for active traders to express short-term views with leverage. We get into how the daily reset...

Chris Tessin, founder of Acuitas Investments, joins the show to break down AIMS — the Acuitas Multi-Manager Small Cap ETF and one of the most structurally unique products we've covered on Behind the Ticker. Rather than a single portfolio manager picking stocks, AIMS aggregates multiple deeply researched, truly active small cap managers into one ETF wrapper at a single all-in fee of 75 basis points. Chris walks through how the multi-manager model works, how Acuitas sources and underwrites managers — often finding them before anyone else is paying attention — why active management has a real edge in small cap, and why the valuat...

Sean Emory, founder and CIO of Avory and Company, joins the show to break down the firm's newly launched Avory Foundational ETF (AVRY) and the decade-long investment philosophy behind it. Sean walks through Avory's "investing forward" framework — identifying secular friction points in the economy, finding the companies built to solve them, and running a high-conviction portfolio of 20 to 30 names across two buckets: structural secular winners and established businesses undergoing genuine transformation. We dig into the Six M's research process, how the fund manages position sizing and cash allocation, why identity verification is one of Sean's highest-conviction themes in an AI...

Rob Arnott chose Wall Street over astrophysics, built his career applying scientific method to markets, and coined the fundamental indexing revolution that now runs $150B+ in assets. He breaks down the hidden drag inside cap-weighted indices -- stocks get added after they soar and deleted after they crash -- and explains how RAFI's rebalancing alpha has beaten cap-weighted value in three out of four years over 20 years live. We dig into RAUS (fundamental selection, cap weighting, 99.9% correlation to the S&P but 90bps ahead in six months at zero fees), the upcoming RAFI Growth index that beats Russell Growth...

Christian Magoon built First Trust's early ETF business, raised $3B at Claymore before it was acquired by Guggenheim, and launched Amplify ETFs in 2015 — now approaching $20B across 40 funds. He breaks down Amplify's barbell strategy of income and thematic growth, explains why SILJ (the only junior silver miners ETF) won Alternative ETF of the Year, and makes the case that silver's industrial demand from AI, EVs, and solar gives it a profile gold can't match. Plus: the YieldSmart covered call approach, how junior miners act as leveraged silver, and why Amplify's open-architecture model is built for durability.

Full ep...

Paul Marino spent 25+ years in asset management, starting as a wholesaler at Federated Investors, managing teams at Pioneer Investments, and eventually making the jump to ETFs. Before any of that, he was a journalist at Newsday, the sixth largest daily newspaper in the country. Now, as Chief Revenue Officer at Themes ETFs, he brings all of it together - sales, marketing, PR, and a knack for communicating complex investment ideas clearly. 

In this episode, we get into two of the most targeted thematic ETFs on the market. First, DRGN - a China-focused generative AI fund built to g...

Paul Marino spent 25+ years in asset management, starting as a wholesaler at Federated Investors, managing teams at Pioneer Investments, and eventually making the jump to ETFs. Before any of that, he was a journalist at Newsday, the sixth largest daily newspaper in the country. Now, as Chief Revenue Officer at Themes ETFs, he brings all of it together - sales, marketing, PR, and a knack for communicating complex investment ideas clearly. 

In this episode, we get into two of the most targeted thematic ETFs on the market. First, DRGN - a China-focused generative AI fund built to g...

Sean O'Hara started in financial services in 1985, moved into wholesaling, and helped build the Hartford's mutual fund and 401k platforms before striking out on his own in 2007. By 2015, he and partner Joe Thompson were launching Pacer's first ETFs. Today, Pacer manages roughly $42 billion across 57 products — every one built around a simple filter: innovative, disruptive, or unique. No cheap beta replication.

In this episode, Sean breaks down QDPL, Pacer's S&P 500-based income strategy that delivers four times the S&P's dividend yield without leverage or covered calls. We walk through how the 85/15 equity-to-T-bill split works, how dividend fu...

Michael Monaghan spent 15 years on Wall Street at Goldman Sachs, the Carlyle Group, Sanford Bernstein, and UBS before leaving to build Beartooth, a technology company that let smartphones connect without cell service. That 12-year entrepreneurial journey — and a visit to the Smithsonian where he and his partner were struck by the iconoclastic nature of America's builders — led him to launch the Founders 100 ETF (ticker: FFF), a fund that owns the 100 best publicly traded companies still run by their original founders.

In this episode, Michael breaks down the strict definition of "founder-led" that drives the portfolio, the 30-year, 11,000-sto...

In this episode, Brad Roth sits down with Sam Klar of GMO to unpack the thesis behind the GMO Domestic Resilience ETF (DRES). Sam shares his path from joining GMO out of undergrad to helping launch a strategy focused on U.S. reindustrialization, supply chain resilience, and long-term domestic economic strength.

They break down how DRES is built, why GMO emphasizes quality and value even inside a thematic strategy, and how the portfolio is structured across manufacturing, transportation/logistics, energy/materials, and defense. Sam also addresses common pushback — including whether DRES is just an industrials bet — and expl...

David Nicholas, founder of Nicholas X Funds and a financial advisor with nearly 20 years of experience running a private wealth practice in Atlanta, joins the show to break down how he's building one of the more ambitious ETF suites in the smaller issuer space. David walks through the origin story of X Funds, which started during COVID when he saw an opportunity to recreate insurance company balance sheets in a liquid ETF wrapper. His first fund FIAX was designed as a liquid alternative to fixed annuities, pairing a treasury underlay with short spreads on HYG to harvest junk bond...

Bob Elliott, co-founder and CIO of Unlimited, returns to break down how his firm is bringing Vanguard-style indexing to the hedge fund world. After spending the bulk of his career at Bridgewater building proprietary investment strategies, Bob launched Unlimited on two truths the industry wouldn't say out loud — institutional hedge funds are largely no better than their peers over time, and managers take nearly all the alpha in fees. His solution: diversify across managers, cut fees to a fraction, and deliver it all through liquid ETFs.

We get into the nuts and bolts of how Unlimited's third-generation re...

David Auerbach, CIO of Hoya Capital, spent over a decade trading REITs at Green Street Advisors in Dallas before getting a front-row seat to the ETF industry's explosive growth at Esposito Securities. Now he runs two REIT-focused ETFs — HOMZ and RIET — managing over $135 million. In this episode, David breaks down the two biggest misconceptions advisors have about REITs: that they're all high yield and that they're all interest rate sensitive. He makes the case that most passive REIT ETFs are far more concentrated than people realize, with just a handful of large-cap names yielding 2–3% dominating the top holdings.

Davi...