Behind the Ticker

Joe DeYonker started his career on the private markets team at the roughly $30 billion DuPont Pension Trust, evaluating private equity, private credit, and venture managers. He then helped manage about $11 billion in real assets and credit at the roughly $64 billion UAW Retiree Medical Benefits Trust. He left to start and later sell a staffing company, then returned to investing to found PurePlay ETFs, a firm built to fix what he calls thematic dilution, the tendency of thematic funds to fill up with holdings that have little to do with the theme on the label.

In this episode, Joe walks through NVPS, the NVIDIA Ecosystem Picks and Shovels ETF, which launched in June 2026 and is built to track Nvidia's value chain. Because Nvidia is fabless, it relies on a global network of suppliers for silicon wafers, fabrication, memory, equipment, packaging, and data center infrastructure. NVPS starts with FactSet supply chain data to identify companies with a documented commercial relationship with Nvidia, then requires at least 50% of a company's revenue to come from defined ecosystem functions. Qualifying companies are grouped into six fixed-weight pillars: raw materials, tools, fabrication, packaging, infrastructure, and connectivity. Within each pillar, companies are scored as critical, core, or supporting based on how essential they are to Nvidia, with ASML as the clearest example of a critical supplier.

Joe also explains what NVPS deliberately leaves out: Nvidia itself, its customers such as the hyperscalers, and competitors such as AMD. That makes it a supplier-only exposure that doesn't duplicate an existing Nvidia, SMH, or QQQ position. He covers why the fund invests in Taiwan, South Korea, and Western Europe but excludes China, how quarterly rebalancing and semiannual reconstitution keep up with a fast-changing supply chain, and what he's learned about marketing a new fund under compliance rules as a first-time ETF sponsor.

Haren Bhakta got into the industry in 2008 by selling insurance at Prudential because nobody else was hiring, then spent time in wealth management at Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley before starting his own firm in 2017. There he ran a microcap fund, won a proxy contest, and later sold the company. The idea for his index came at the 2024 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, the first without Charlie Munger, when he realized the S&P 500 will actually buy more Berkshire stock when Warren Buffett dies, because Buffett's shares are excluded from the free-float index weight until they hit the market.

In this episode, Haren walks through OWN, the Inside Ownership 100 ETF, launched June 3. The fund takes the S&P 500, selects the 100 companies with the highest dollar value of insider ownership, and weights them by that dollar value instead of market cap. Haren built the index history himself from about 21,000 proxy filings covering 21 years because no major data provider had the ownership data. He explains the third way to index alongside equal weight and market cap, why the result is a power-law portfolio concentrated in leaders like Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, and why Apple still makes the cut but is significantly underweight. His clearest example is Intel and Nvidia in July 2020: the same size and the same S&P weight, with Intel ahead on revenue, profit, and free cash flow, but only Nvidia run by an owner.

Haren also covers a century of market leadership, from General Motors under Alfred Sloan to IBM under Thomas Watson Jr. and GE under Jack Welch, and how each declined after its leader left. He discusses the back test showing roughly two points of annual outperformance and shallower drawdowns in 2008 and 2020, his zoo lion versus wild lion analogy for hired CEOs and owner-operators, and why OWN focuses on owners rather than founders compared with FFF and the Billionaires Club ETF. He closes with why he'd use OWN as a replacement for S&P exposure and how that can let advisors reduce equity exposure at today's valuations.

Want the framework behind this conversation? Fifteen minutes with Brad Roth, founder and CIO of THOR: https://thorft.com/call?s=podcast

Behind the Ticker — new episode every week.
Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube
Episode notes and the full archive: thorft.com/podcast
Daily market note, The Signal: thesignal.thorft.com

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 actuarial firms started with healthcare. Health is Milliman's largest business, and the firm has tracked healthcare cost inflation for clients since the 1950s. He walks through the figures that frame the problem: a 65-year-old couple retiring today needs more than $600,000 for healthcare in retirement even with Medicare and supplemental coverage, and a family of four on a typical employer plan spends about $37,000 a year, a cost that has grown more than 6% annually since 2005. MHIG seeks to match Milliman's Health Trend Guidelines index, which tracks healthcare claims inflation, while MHIP targets that benchmark plus 2%. Adam breaks down the four building blocks of the portfolio: healthcare equities chosen by following the money to the companies that benefit from current inflation drivers, which is why Eli Lilly is the top holding; broad equities that capture inflation elsewhere in the economy; gold as a drawdown diversifier; and a Treasury strategy calibrated to wage inflation.

Adam also covers how the funds rebalance monthly using actuarial nowcasts of healthcare trend, how AI monitors FDA, CMS, state regulatory, and legal filings each week to manage company-specific risk, how individuals can use Milliman's online calculator to size their allocation, why cash has almost never kept up with healthcare inflation, and how insurers, employers, and other institutions can use the funds as a healthcare inflation hedge.

Want the framework behind this conversation? Fifteen minutes with Brad Roth, founder and CIO of THOR: https://thorft.com/call?s=podcast

Behind the Ticker — new episode every week.
Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube
Episode notes and the full archive: thorft.com/podcast
Daily market note, The Signal: thesignal.thorft.com

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.

Want the framework behind this conversation? Fifteen minutes with Brad Roth, founder and CIO of THOR: https://thorft.com/call?s=podcast

Behind the Ticker — new episode every week.
Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube
Episode notes and the full archive: thorft.com/podcast
Daily market note, The Signal: thesignal.thorft.com

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.

Want the framework behind this conversation? Fifteen minutes with Brad Roth, founder and CIO of THOR: https://thorft.com/call?s=podcast

Behind the Ticker — new episode every week.
Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube
Episode notes and the full archive: thorft.com/podcast
Daily market note, The Signal: thesignal.thorft.com

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.

Want the framework behind this conversation? Fifteen minutes with Brad Roth, founder and CIO of THOR: https://thorft.com/call?s=podcast

Behind the Ticker — new episode every week.
Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube
Episode notes and the full archive: thorft.com/podcast
Daily market note, The Signal: thesignal.thorft.com

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.

Want the framework behind this conversation? Fifteen minutes with Brad Roth, founder and CIO of THOR: https://thorft.com/call?s=podcast

Behind the Ticker — new episode every week.
Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube
Episode notes and the full archive: thorft.com/podcast
Daily market note, The Signal: thesignal.thorft.com

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.

Want the framework behind this conversation? Fifteen minutes with Brad Roth, founder and CIO of THOR: https://thorft.com/call?s=podcast

Behind the Ticker — new episode every week.
Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube
Episode notes and the full archive: thorft.com/podcast
Daily market note, The Signal: thesignal.thorft.com

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.

Want the framework behind this conversation? Fifteen minutes with Brad Roth, founder and CIO of THOR: https://thorft.com/call?s=podcast

Behind the Ticker — new episode every week.
Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube
Episode notes and the full archive: thorft.com/podcast
Daily market note, The Signal: thesignal.thorft.com

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.

Want the framework behind this conversation? Fifteen minutes with Brad Roth, founder and CIO of THOR: https://thorft.com/call?s=podcast

Behind the Ticker — new episode every week.
Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube
Episode notes and the full archive: thorft.com/podcast
Daily market note, The Signal: thesignal.thorft.com