Behind the Ticker
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
124 episodes
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 Macqua...
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 a...
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 earlie...
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...
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% o...
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 leader...
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 201...
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 r...
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 ear...
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, S...
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 ...
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 t...
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 ...
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 large...
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 mana...
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 E...
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...
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 o...
$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 b...
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 manage...
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...
$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 --...
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 ...
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 large...
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 ...