Behind the Ticker

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...

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 Ju...

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 brea...

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 relations...

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, th...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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 h...

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 p...

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 portfoli...

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...

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...

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 commun...

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...

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 t...

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 t...

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...

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 ma...

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...

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 started building. In this episode, Ray breaks down how he uses Commitments of Traders data and sentimen...

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 previously managed public equity investments for the Fidelity family office, explained how HGRO fills a gap...

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 journey to Running Oak and how the firm’s roots in separately managed accounts (SMAs) laid the foundatio...