PODCAST · business
Behind the Ticker
by Brad Roth
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.
Episodes
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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…
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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...
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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…
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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...
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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…
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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...
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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…
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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...
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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...
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The Bitcoin ETF Built to Survive a Drawdown | Mike Willis, Cyber Hornet ETFs
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...
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A Forty-Year-Old Index That Still Outperforms in a Crisis | Jerry Prior, Mount Lucas
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...
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Why Most Momentum Funds Are Looking at the Wrong Data | Jon Clements, Market Desk
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…
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40 Years of Active Management, Now in an ETF | Matt Camuso, Baron Capital
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…
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SpaceX in an ETF — Here's How They Did It | Yuri Khodjamirian, Tema ETFs
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...
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The Entire US Bond Market in One Ticker | Steve Laipply, BlackRock iShares
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...
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The Only Pure Play Drone ETF on the Market | Bill Birmingham, REX Shares
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…
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$55B Built on Tools for Traders | Mo Sparks, Direxion
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...
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The Multi-Manager ETF Built for Small Cap Alpha | Chris Tessin, Acuitas Investments
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...
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Building a Thematic ETF Around Where the World Is Headed | Sean Emory, Avery & Company
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…
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$150B Built on One Idea: Why Cap-Weighted Indexing Is Broken | Rob Arnott, Research Affiliates
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...
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40 Funds, $20B, and the Case for Junior Silver Miners | Christian Magoon, Amplify ETFs
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…
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China AI, Humanoid Robots, and the Next Wave of Thematic ETFs | Paul Marino, Themes ETFs
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...
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4x S&P Income Without Covered Calls | Sean O'Hara, Pacer QDPL
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...
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Founder-Led Companies Beat the S&P by 3-5% | Michael Monaghan
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...
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The US Reindustrialization Trade: A New ETF Play | Sam Klar, GMO
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...
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Building an ETF Suite from a Wealth Practice | David Nicholas
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…
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Replicating Hedge Fund Returns at ETF Prices | Bob Elliott, HFND
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...
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How to Play the Housing Recovery with REITs | David Auerbach
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,...
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How Institutions Beat Retail | Raymond Micaletti, MOOD ETF
Raymond Micaletti built the MOOD ETF around a single idea: institutions consistently outperform retail traders, and you can measure the difference. After watching a relative sentiment indicator correctly call two major market bottoms while all his other signals failed, he stopped ignoring it and...
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Hedgeye Macro Research in an Active ETF | Rahman & McNamara
Sam Rahman and John McNamara joined Brad to discuss the launch and philosophy behind the HGRO ETF. Hedgeye, originally built on delivering institutional-quality macroeconomic research to a broader audience, has now extended into the asset management space with active ETF offerings. Sam, who...
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Efficient Growth: Quality and Momentum | Seth Cogswell
In this episode of Behind the Ticker, Brad Roth speaks with Seth Cogswell, Portfolio Manager at Running Oak Capital, about the firm’s flagship ETF—RUNN, the Running Oak Efficient Growth ETF. With a background that spans fundamental equity research and derivatives trading, Cogswell shares his...
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Active Fixed Income: From the Pits to ETFs | Eric Lutton
In this episode, Brad sits down with Eric Lutton, CIO of Sound Income Strategies, to discuss the firm’s actively managed ETF: FXED, and its unique approach to fixed income investing. Eric shares his professional journey from trading in the pits of Chicago to managing institutional assets and...
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SMID Cap Value: Hidden Gems | Ryan Thomes, Hotchkis & Wiley
In this episode of Behind the Ticker, Brad Roth interviews Ryan Thomes, Co-Portfolio Manager at Hotchkis & Wiley, to discuss the launch and strategy behind the firm’s newest ETF—HWSM, the Hotchkis & Wiley SMID Cap Diversified Value ETF. Ryan shares his career journey from investment consulting to...
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From Air Force Pilot to MidCap Stock Picker | Kirk McDonald
In this episode of Behind the Ticker, host Brad Roth speaks with Kirk McDonald, Portfolio Manager at Argent Capital Management, about his unique path from Air Force pilot to managing the Argent MidCap ETF (ticker: AMID). McDonald shares how his firm’s mission to deliver both strong investment...
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The Essential Midstream Energy Trade | Rob Thummel
In this episode of Behind the Ticker, Brad Roth sits down with Rob Thummel, Senior Portfolio Manager at Tortoise Capital Advisors, to dive into the firm’s active ETF, the Tortoise Essential Energy Fund (Ticker: TPZ). Rob shares his decades-long journey in the energy sector—from working in gas...
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Replicating Hedge Fund Returns at ETF Prices | Bob Elliott, HFND
In a recent episode of Behind the Ticker, Bob Elliott, co-founder and Chief Investment Officer of Unlimited, discussed the firm’s mission to democratize hedge fund strategies through innovative ETF structures. Drawing on his experience managing strategies at Bridgewater Associates and running a...
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75 Years of Growth Investing: What Still Works | Brad Neuman, Alger
In a recent episode of Behind the Ticker, Brad Neuman, Director of Market Strategy and Portfolio Manager at Alger, joined the show to discuss the firm’s rich history in growth investing and the launch of their latest ETF: Alger Russell Innovation ETF (ticker: INVN). Neuman, who has a 25-year...
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Commodity Trader Builds the Perfect Portfolio | Wayne Penello
In a recent episode of Behind the Ticker, Wayne Penello, founder of NextGen EMP, shared the fascinating journey that led him to launch the NextGen Efficient Market Portfolio Plus ETF (ticker: EMPB). With over 40 years of experience as a commodity trader—including a decade on the floor of the New...
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Inside DFA: Evidence-Based ETF Construction | Rob Harvey, Dimensional
In a recent episode of Behind the Ticker, Rob Harvey, Vice President at Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA), shared his personal journey into asset management and gave an in-depth look at DFA’s unique approach to building portfolios, particularly their work in the ETF space. Harvey described how he...
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Horizon's Defined Outcome ETFs for Advisors | Clark Allen
In a recent episode of Behind the Ticker, Clark Allen, Head of ETFs at Horizon Investments, shared his journey from public accounting and family office investing to leading Horizon’s entrance into the ETF space. With a deep background in institutional asset management and quantitative research,...
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Managed Futures Made Simple for Advisors | Paisley Nardini, Simplify
In a recent special edition of Behind the Ticker recorded live at the Exchange ETF Conference, Paisley Nardini, Vice President and Client Portfolio Strategist at Simplify Asset Management, joined the show to discuss her path from bond trading to ETF strategy—and dive into Simplify’s Managed…
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Full Risk Protection ETFs: Calamos' Innovation | Matt Kaufman
In a recent special edition of Behind the Ticker recorded live at the Exchange ETF Conference, Matt Kaufman, Head of ETFs at Calamos Investments, joined the show to talk about Calamos’ expanding lineup of structured outcome ETFs—including their latest innovation: a suite of protected Bitcoin…
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ABOUT THIS 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.
HOSTED BY
Brad Roth
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Behind the Ticker have?
Behind the Ticker currently has 129 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Behind the Ticker about?
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...
How often does Behind the Ticker release new episodes?
Behind the Ticker publishes regularly with 129 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Behind the Ticker?
You can listen to Behind the Ticker on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Behind the Ticker?
Behind the Ticker is created and hosted by Brad Roth.
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