Michael J. Venuto, Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Tidal Financial Group joins ETF Central’s The Podcast to discuss best practices for launching an ETF franchise, how Tidal partners with asset managers entering the industry, and the outlook for ETF innovation for the next five years.
In this episode, Douglas Yones, Head of Exchange Traded Products at the New York Stock Exchange, is joined by Michael J. Venuto, Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Tidal Financial Group to discuss best practices for launching an ETF franchise, what to do and what not to do when building ETFs, and the most important areas of focus for new asset managers entering the industry.
Douglas and Michael discuss:
· The latest innovation across the ETF industry
· Best practices for launching a successful ETF franchise
· How firms like Tidal can partner with asset managers entering the marketplace

ETF Central’s THE PODCAST:

TRANSCRIPT:

Douglas Yones:

Hello and welcome to ETF Central, the podcast where we bring the latest and greatest ETF industry perspectives directly to you through in-depth conversations with key thought leaders from across the ETF ecosystem. I'm your host, Douglas Yonas, the Head of Exchange Traded Products at the New York Stock Exchange, the home of ETFs. Now, today I'm joined by Michael J. Venuto, an ETF industry veteran and good friend of mine. He has over two decades of experience in the design and implementation of equity, fixed income, and ETF-based investment strategies. He's the co-founder and Chief Investment Officer of Tidal Financial Group, which has helped over 100 ETFs launch and grow in the industry.

Michael also oversees the research, database and software plus the media of the ETF Think Tank. If you're not following ETF Think Tank, please do so. That's your first job today, listening in on this podcast, ETF Think Tank. Previously, Mike was the Head of Investments at Global X Funds. There, he provided portfolio optimization services to institutional clients. Oh, geez, before that, Senior Vice President and Portfolio Manager at Horizon Kinetics. His responsibilities included new business development, investment strategy, FinTech, private equity. The list goes on and on. Where do I begin or end? But, with Mr. Mike Venuto, ETF veteran and legacy holder here in the world of ETFs. Thank you for joining me today.

Michael Venuto:

Yeah, I'm excited to be here, Doug. I've never heard my whole bio read out. It sounds much better than the experience.

Douglas Yones:

You just nod and wave and you lean in, and that's how you do it. Mike, for anyone who doesn't know you, they should, and by the way, you're probably one of the most accessible people I know, with that level of a resume, so if you're at an event, go say hi, go meet you. But tell us a little bit about you, your team. Where are you spending most of your time these days?

Michael Venuto:

Yeah, I mean, I spend all my time with ETF entrepreneurs. What that means is our Tidal platform really helps people come to market, take an existing strategy, a new idea, a mutual fund, whatever, convert it to the best wrapper out there, which is the ETF structure, and then we help them grow. I think that's probably our biggest differentiator is other groups will help you get launched. We help you launch and grow. Our model works when it's symbiotic, when there's growth to the end product.

So every day I'm on calls with new issuers, existing issuers, and talking through them about what the next product is or what event we should do at the New York Stock Exchange to help grow their product or what we could do to get in front of the right gatekeeper, what we could do to just grow it in whatever way is possible. It's a lot of creativity involved.

Douglas Yones:

Yeah, I mean look, if you take a step back, people would say, "Oh, Tidal, you're a white label platform." But it doesn't get into the depth of who you are as individuals and what you provide as a firm, and I've gotten to see it live now for the last, oh, geez, at least a few years plus, where I'm watching you and Gavin and Guillermo and the whole team. You're engaged, you're partnering up with firms.

You're not just saying, "Hey, I've got a solution for you to step into the ETF arena." It seems like from the very beginning, you're pressure testing, you're poking holes in theories, you're talking about the hardest parts, not just the easiest parts. I mean, you guys, do you think of yourselves as more of like a consultant than you do a provider? How do you think about your business?

Michael Venuto:

We like the word platform. We are a fiduciary asset management platform. So the term white labeler means, "Hey, you can use our existing infrastructure to get your product to market." That's all it means. It's a service. I've done it. I've worked with the others. They're all awesome. I've got nothing negative to say. I learned a lot doing an ETF with ETC or ETFMG or all these folks. They did what they said they were going to do. The three big things that differentiate the Tidal platform is, number one, the first thing we do is an assessment.

Essentially, we sit down with a new issuer and we ask them 114 questions that we've asked every issuer that we've worked with, and we score that against everything else that we've seen in the industry. It's all a logarithm using our deep database from the ETF Think Tank. We come back with a seven-page McKinsey style looking report with cool charts and recommendations and a full proforma and suggestions on what the fee should be and suggestions on what the ticker should be and all that fun stuff.

And sometimes, call it two out of every 10 of these we do, we say, "Don't launch," or "Go back to the drawing board." So we are not a service provider in that we won't just take everybody. We're a fiduciary asset management platform in that we do due diligence for you and for us to make sure we launch this thing to launch and grow.

Number two, we offer sales and marketing. We call it our Smart Growth program. It uses the audience that we have curated with the ETF Think Tank over the last decade of people who are interested in ETFs, and we have multiple different ways to help you get one-on-one meetings with RIAs, to do road shows with RIAs, to do digital marketing, to do Twitter spaces, to do social media marketing. We have all the sales-enabling tools to help a new issuer grow.

The third thing that is a true differentiator is what we call diamond partnerships. Like people call it white label, a diamond is for us when we will finance a client. So a client comes to us and says, "Hey, I've got this great idea." We like the idea. We say, "We'll cover X percent of the cost and we expect X percent of the profit." It's a very simple symbiotic venture relationship. About a third of our clients have opted for it, and we have some big diamond successes. The blockchain ETF BLOK, the YieldMax suite, RISR with FolioBeyond, so ATAC family. Those are probably the three key differentiators between a fiduciary asset management platform at Tidal Financial Group versus traditional white label.

Douglas Yones:

I'm glad you didn't put me through a 114-point question before we started building a relationship together, but I love the statement. I was on a panel not that long ago with Gavin from your team, everyone who, again, if you don't know Gavin Filmore, you should meet him, where he mentioned that fact that you tend to tell more people walk in the door with their idea that they need to go back to the drawing board than actually accept business, which is fascinating to me. But it does show you the growth and power of this ETF industry where people are coming in and saying, "I can build it," but maybe we in the industry are no longer saying, "Okay, if you build it, they'll come." We're starting to say, "Hey, if you're building it, that's great, we want to be partners, but we need a partnership." And I think we're saying the same thing here at the New York Stock Exchange.

We offer a lot of different media services and we want to hear back from our partners that they want to engage in those things, that they want to have the face of the media. They want to lean in on social, they want to do videos and content and pieces, because otherwise, how else do you create shelf space?

Mike, I want to take you back in time a little bit for me because a lot of our listeners, they're either young in their career or they're following the industry. They're thinking about ETFs. If somebody goes out and looks at your LinkedIn profile, they're going to see you started as a runner on the New York Stock Exchange floor. How do you get from a runner on the floor to running your own business?

Michael Venuto:

I studied philosophy and religion on a debate scholarship in North Carolina. After my last year, I came to New York because my grandmother had passed away, and I came to help my grandfather settle the estate and get everything together. We were very close. And I had a friend from my childhood, because I was born in New York, who was driving a Lexus, and this friend, I like to call him the personification of Joey Tribbiani from Friends. A really nice guy, but you wouldn't call him smart. And I'm like, "How did you get a Lexus?" We're both 21 years old. I'm like, "How did you get a Lexus?" He goes, "Well, I work on the stock exchange. I got it with my bonus." And my next question was, "What do you do there?" And he says, "I don't know."

I was like, "Wait, he doesn't know?" I'm a philosophy religion guy. I'm going to write a book about crazy Wall Street and how these people who don't know what they're doing are getting jobs and all this stuff. So I make three or four phone calls. I'm able to get an internship, running tickets on the exchange, and within two days I fell in love with it. It was the exact opposite of what I thought it was going to be. I thought it was going to be an old boys club with rewards to Ivy Leaguers and that's it. And it was the complete opposite.

It was the first time in my life that I saw a true meritocracy, and my complete hypothesis changed and I fell in love. So I spent about three or four months running tickets on the floor, meeting all the personalities. It looked a little bit different back in 2000. There was 10,000 people down there. You guys were opening up new rooms that I can't even get access to anymore. There was hardly any computers, which is hard to believe. People were getting handhelds for the first time.

The way it worked back then is you lived in that meritocracy. You worked really hard. You learned as much as you could. You spoke to as many people as you could, and you got what was called picked up. Somebody from the floor or upstairs recognized that you were a hard worker and you got to get to the next level, the next job. Again, true proof of meritocracy. So I got picked up by Rudy Mass. He's no longer down there. He recently left to retire, but at the end he had a green jacket. What was that in the end, Doug? He was like a floor governor or something.

Douglas Yones:

Put it this way, well respected.

Michael Venuto:

Yeah. Yeah. So Rudy Mass gave me a job as a junior broker for Wheat First Union, which was perfect because I still had a southern accent, and nobody in New York knew what First Union was, but everybody in the South did. I spent two years in their broker training program. I was the only one who came in the day after September 11th when it reopened, and I opened up 20 accounts that day because I was just answering the phone. But I also realized being a broker was not a fiduciary thing. I mean, it's just not. And so I like to say those two years I learned what not to do.

I ended up getting a job at Horizon Kinetics, third or fourth or fifth employee there. They had like a billion. Got to ride that all the way to 90 and 40 billion and back and all that sort of stuff. There, I got involved with ETFs. The management there were very good at seeing long-term trends, and in '05 when State Street launched GLD, they saw Newmont Mining, their biggest position, go down while gold went straight up. And they said, "That's because now there's an ETF that gives you direct access and people aren't willing to pay the premium for a gold miner."

So they said, "Hey, you young guy, Mike, you now go figure out ETFs." So we became angel investors in WisdomTree, we became angel investors in Emerging Global Advisor. We did some things with ICE Ventures, and we really got to the heart of the ETF industry by being on the outside, but incubating a lot, like Emerging Global Advisors, Bob Holderith's company, which is now Columbia Threadneedle ETFs, was incubated in our offices. We watched them in '08 and '09 launch and build AP relationships and handle all those liquidity questions.

2012, I had had enough. Horizon was a great place, but they were in their process of institutionalizing, going away from the entrepreneurship. Instead, bringing in a bunch of Goldman folks and focusing on institutionalizing. That's not where my head was yet. So I joined Global X as their Head of Investments and started incubating Tidal. Tidal went through a couple of iterations and all was always research based, but the hockey stick for our business was about four years ago when we realized, "Man, we're really good at growing ETFs. We should own a stake in that, so let's build a fiduciary platform." We brought over Eric Falkeis from Direxion and U.S. Bank, and we launched that platform and then it did a hockey stick. Today we are touching 118 ETFs and about $9.5 billion of AUM.

Douglas Yones:

I have a very important question that only has one right answer here. Did you end up buying a Lexus?

Michael Venuto:

No. No. I'm much more a boat person than a car person so I am still driving the same car I bought before I started the company. I'm still driving it.

Douglas Yones:

But there's a boat, but there's a boat.

Michael Venuto:

There's been probably five or six boats. I love to buy old beat up boats and restore them, and I love doing that work with my kids. This year I bought my kids a 50-year-old boat, made them learn to weld, made them learn to paint it, do the woodwork, all that sort of stuff. So, I'm driving a 2010 car at a 1973 boat right now.

Douglas Yones:

I love it. I love it.

Michael Venuto:

Okay, so we could say I'm still a value investor.

Douglas Yones:

Yes. Hey, listen, it fits the theme. It's on brand. You like to build things, grow them, make them better, and make the people around you more successful, so it's very on brand. Do you have suggestions for someone that's listening in, a young person, they're saying, "Hey, I need to become a part of this growing ETF industry"?

Michael Venuto:

Yeah. The number one thing I would say is education. We're hiring like crazy. I think we hired 15 people this year. It's hard for us to find people with ETF knowledge. The places where it's hardest is in marketing. There's very few people out there that understand both ETFs and marketing. It's really, really hard. Another place is trading. ETF trading is different than mutual fund trading. It's different than SMA trading. It's different than hedge fund trading.

Hedge fund trading, mutual fund trading, SMA trading, all have a lot of similarities. ETF trading does not. Basket management, creates and redeems, heartbeat trades, these things are really complicated. If you're in the world of trading already, learn those things. There are a lot of jobs available in that space. I think getting into the ETF space is about having a specialty in something else and then having the ETF knowledge as well.

It's really, really hard for us to find those marketing people, those trading people, those legal. There's not that many lawyers that know ETFs. They're all at five or six big firms, and we work with every one of those five or six big firms, but we also have internal legal to work with them because it's so much more efficient. Mike Pellegrino here, our GC, he's been doing this 40 years. He's amazing at it. So yeah, having a specialty and having ETF knowledge. By the way, you can get lots of ETF knowledge at ETF Central or ETF Think Tank.

Douglas Yones:

Yeah, I mean, look, it's a perfect plug. There's a reason why we are helping each other with educating the audience. There's a reason that ETF Central absorbed the ETF Institute earlier this year. Just go to ETF Central, click on ETF Institute. You can become a certified ETF advisor. That section, that advisor designation, it's a FINRA designation. We continue to invest in there. We are planning to double the amount of knowledge centers in that section this year, and then again, put another 50% on it next year. We're adding digital media in there. I love it. Take what today, take your specialty and bring it to the world of ETFs.

We need you, and I'll reiterate what Mike said. We were hiring here at the New York Stock Exchange recently, very hard to find people with ETF pieces of education, and we want your other ideas. We want your other knowledge. So come to the ETF industry. We need you. Mike,, talk a little bit more about Tidal Financial Group, because it is a big group. You do a lot of different things for different people. How do you see yourselves fitting into the broader ETF ecosystem? You've got all these little services. Take us through some of those parts.

Michael Venuto:

Yeah, we're lucky in that we touch almost the entire ecosystem, and we're not really competitors to anybody. We can be a service provider to almost everybody out there and work together in some way. We have a very unique system or setup that allows for this. So if you break it down today, we're about 50 employees, call it five-ish in legal, 15-ish in admin, doing all the calculation of dividends and making sure your NAV's rights and all that, some fun stuff, five or six in sales and marketing. It's what you expect. Every piece of the ecosystem, we have a division that's devoted to it.

So, if you are a giant ETF company like State Street or Columbia Threadneedle, they're clients of ours through the ETF Think Tank. They know we have a curated audience of people who are curious and interested in ETFs and they sponsor some of our events to continue that education. Then you have mega companies like SoFi. This is probably one of the most, well-known unicorn FinTech companies out there. They have eight ETFs today that we helped them launch. They were the first ones to do a zero-fee ETF. Nobody saw that coming. They got something new coming out soon. So there's companies like that that want to take their existing business and add an asset management component to it without all the headaches and pipes and running a trust.

We do all the headaches. Gavin Filmore on our team likes to call us the headache business. What we really do is remove that headache from the client and we use our scale to solve for it. Then you have clients like HAN in Europe or Amplify here in the US. They have their own companies, their own brands, their own funds, but they don't want to build a sub-advisory desk because, you know what? As I said earlier, trading ETFs is hard. You've got to go out and spend 300, 400K on an order management system. You've got to go out and hire six traders who know this stuff well and who have relationships with 13 APs and 48 brokers and specialty brokers that do mortgage-backed IO strips or commodities, or who can get an LMM for a product that trades both commodities and stocks. Good luck.

Companies like Amplify, HAN, Confluent... I mean, Ultimus Trust, they'll use us as a subadvisor, so we're entangled and working with so many different angles of it. And then we have our tangential, call it, places where we work with them, but it's not necessarily fully commercial like we work with you or with the lead market makers, APs with Reggie or Kite or Yugo, Harry, Chris Hempstead. All of this is synergistic. There's pretty much nobody in the ETF space that we're not doing business with in some way.

Douglas Yones:

And I recently heard someone on your team use the term co-opetition, where it's like they said, "We don't really think about ourselves as competing. We are cooperating. We're trying to help grow the whole industry." And I think that that's our approach here at the New York Stock Exchange, too. I mean, it's all about growing the pie, making sure everyone who launches an ETF... We launched 25 brand new asset managers, I just counted this week with my team, this year that have never had an ETF.

We helped them come to the market, and guess what? We need those to be successful because then the next firms that are interested in coming have success stories that they can follow. And so it's super important that we all work together to grow the industry. Are you surprised at all by the growth rate of Tidal, of the industry? Do you think this continues to grow at the pace it's growing? Do you see a slowdown? What are your thoughts there?

Michael Venuto:

Okay. One of the metrics that we track is the open-to-close ratio. It's something we send out every Monday because we do a snapshot of the ETF industry every Monday. Today it's 2:1. So for every two ETFs that launches over the last 12 months, one has closed. That's a pretty healthy ratio. It was negative about a year and a half ago. Then it went bonkers and went to 4:1, meaning for every four that launched, one closed. So it slowed down from there. Right now, 2:1 is, to me, pretty healthy growth. I have seen a bit of a slow-down in call it the entrepreneur jumping in. This year, we've seen mostly our existing clients who have had success launching more things or onboarding.

We just onboarded Cambria and helping them scale and go to the next level. And I think that's just a function of the market being unsure. Everybody's like, "Let's just crash already so that we can get back to going up." So I'm not worried about that at all. What is not a surprise to me is the growth rate is really spot on. We just had our company onsite. We moved our headquarters to Milwaukee, and we just had all 50 employees in Milwaukee, and I did a presentation to the team where I used some slides from 2017. Remember when we had the ETF industry, ETF together? So I pulled some slides from that and it had all the predictions.

"PWC says seven trillion in five years," and, "This group says this in this." And you know what? Every one of the predictions were surpassed. So what we said the growth, or what all the big firms said the growth was going to be five years ago, here we are five years later and it's way past it. It's like a trillion or two past it. Trillion or two is not a rounding error. So all these predictions that we're going to 30 trillion, 50 trillion, I think that's all true, and we'd still be smaller than the mutual fund industry. So I am excited about it. I don't see what could stop this. The only thing I've ever said that could stop it is tokenization and blockchain and all that sort of stuff. And as you and I both know, the regulators seem pretty slow to adopt that stuff.

Douglas Yones:

And my team, I mean, me personally, we work a lot with tokenization. Some of the different approaches that are out there, the versions I'm seeing come across my desk these days that are ones that are additive to the ETF industry, not anything that would detract from the growth. I think, if anything, they'll amplify it, so we look forward to it. Look, Mike, your team, I mean, geez, we communicate almost daily with Ally and everyone on her side.

You've helped launch a lot of really innovative ETFs, especially this year. And last year, I guess, because we're starting to come up on one year records. What are some of the strategies that maybe you guys have been a part of or you've brought out that you think, "Hey, everyone should know about this"? You know what I mean? "More people should be aware that these strategies are out there and they're in an ETF wrapper."

Michael Venuto:

Yeah, part of us being a fiduciary asset management platform is product development with our clients. The breakout hit this year has been YieldMax, and YieldMax was a product of the idea that single security ETFs are coming. Everybody jumped on the bandwagon of 1.5 times or 1.6 times and inverse. We said, "Wait, there's got to be other things we could do with a single stock." So we started working with an existing client, Jay, over at ZEGA, and we came up with the concept of doing a yield off single securities.

So last November, I believe, we launched TSLY, T-S-L-Y, with a yield. So you get exposure to Tesla and we sell calls off of it depending on the volatility of Tesla. It's been everywhere from a 40% annualized yield to a 70% annualized yield. That gets eyeballs. It's options writing on individual names. From there, we're now up to 15 of these. We've done Apple, we've done Exxon, we've done Disney, we've done Amazon, Netflix, Coinbase. That's one of my favorites because there's a lot of volatility there, so the idea of standing on shoulders of the first iteration of single stock and taking it to the next level.

Another thing that I've been real proud of this year is what we did with Blueprint and Jerry Parker, the famous trader in the world of commodities, CTA, all that stuff, trend. He was out there for a year, you knew it because you got us connected, trying to take the idea of doing trend following on both equities and commodities in one portfolio. What we did for him was the capital markets. We stepped in and said, "Hey, we can take this, do all the operations and find you the lead market makers," which they couldn't do on their own because they didn't know the ETF ecosystem and how to take care of this stuff in a way where a market maker could keep a tight spread.

So, being able to take something that three years ago wouldn't even have fit in the regulatory environment, and even a year ago market makers couldn't handle, get it out there and already cross 50 million. That's, to me, amazing. The last one was something pretty recent. We had all that success with the YieldMax. We saw what's going on with 0DTE options and all the excitement there so recently we partnered with Defiance to bring out buy rights on broad-based indexes. So we did the large-cap US S&P, essentially, 0DTE daily writing calls, and we did the same with the Qs.

Those two are out of the gate getting people really excited because, if you're writing monthly options, you get a decent yield and there's a number of funds doing that very successfully. If you write them daily, it's the same kind of risk return profile, but you get a lot more yield. We printed the first yields and one had a 40 handle, the other had a 50 handle on an annualized basis.

Douglas Yones:

Yeah, I mean certainly ETFs that get a lot of attention, like you said, they sort of pop in the list when people start to look for income or yield or yield generation. And I mean you guys by and far at the forefront of some of these very unique strategies coming to the market. Mike, you and I have known each other for a while now. I've watched you launch a lot of asset managers into this space. I think about folks like Bob Elliot on your platform who came in and said, "Let me partner," and bang out of the gate, the success story that I think a lot of entrepreneurs look at and say, "That's what I'm going for."

Are there best practices that you say, "Hey, here's what you should be thinking about or doing, launching a successful ETF franchise"? Because not everyone can replicate Bob's Twitter following and the media following he gets, but are there best practices in general that you say, "Hey, here's what we're going to do together." Maybe it's part of that Diamond Club. You go to the third floor Diamond Club lounge and you guys meet. What do you talk about there?

Michael Venuto:

Okay, so the main thing is getting the product right. If you don't got the right product, it doesn't matter how many Twitter followers you have, doesn't matter how much you have of a network or that the performance is going to get there someday. You have to have the concept right, and having the product right means not just something that solves a problem and people want, but it also means having some circled seed. It means having the right ticker. That's a lot that goes into product. Once you have that, you've got to work hard. And that's, to me, the part that most ETF entrepreneurs that we turn away are because they think it's going to sell themselves. They come on and say, "My idea has the best Sharpe ratio of any fund that you've ever seen."

Nobody has ever bought an ETF on Sharpe ratio. The second they say, "I've got the best R-squared Sharpe ratio, trend up, captured it down, captured..." Done. You're dead in the water because you're going to spend all your time calling the market makers and telling them how great your Sharpe ratio is and asking them to lower your spread when, reality, you shouldn't be calling a market maker ever. That's my job. I have a team that does that. We're the ones that give them flow. Guess what? They want to talk to us. They don't want to hear from you.

What they want to hear is that you're out there every day talking to 10 RIAs or allocators or doing media. Bob Elliot's not a success because he had the right product. He's a success because he had the right product and he worked his ass off. He does not stop. He's got a team. He raised a lot of capital. He invests that capital to go do the work. So anybody who gets into this business and thinks that they're going to make three phone calls a day, and two of them are going to be to market makers or their buddies or to some PR firm, you're dead in the water. The only people who make this is they get the product right, and they're doing 10 to 15 meetings a day with allocators.

Douglas Yones:

I'm renaming the podcast for today. It's Tough Conversations with Michael J. Venuto. But look, it's direct, and it is, we had a conversation here yesterday at the New York Stock Exchange, two innovators who have really built up a following with respect to hedge funds-like money that they're managing and doing an amazing job with. And the conversation was not about their performance and not about their structure and how it has the best this or the best that. It was, "Well, what are you going to do to turn that into assets. And in the ETF world, then how are you going to get out there and having those conversations?

And so, look, if you're out there and you're listening in and you're thinking, "Okay, I want to come to the industry, but I want to be successful. I want to do it right." Okay, Mike, they're going to call you. How do they call you? What's the best approach? How does an asset manager, someone who's looking to launch an ETF, an entrepreneur, how do they engage with you? How do they get into the room with your team?

Michael Venuto:

We made it real easy. If you go to tidalfinancialgroup.com or the ETF Think Tank, there's a link to it from there, there's a little button, a purple button, that says, Build an ETF. And up comes a series of questions. What's your idea? Do you have a ticker in mind? Do you have seed? I don't care, once you put this stuff in there, we're going to contact you. Brittany, on our team or Mac or Gavin, and they're going to do an initial discussion with you.

If they think that you're serious and that you're going to do 10 meetings a day with RIAs, then we're going to move to the assessment. And that's when you're going to meet the overall team. The assessment's going to include somebody from trading and somebody from marketing and somebody from sales, and we're going to ask you those 100 questions. But just go click Build an ETF and you're going to get a call back that day.

Douglas Yones:

I love it. And is there a reason you guys are all purple? Is purple like a favorite color or how did you guys end up in purple?

Michael Venuto:

When we started the firm, we were in partnership with Global X at that time, and Alex and Annoushka, who now run Arro. So there's a lot of us who left Global X to start other ETF ventures. They were our marketing group and they did their research that said, "Purple's your color," and ever since, I've loved it.

Douglas Yones:

Yeah, and we've name-dropped everywhere. We'll add it with that one. I mean, if you don't know Alex at Arro, A-R-R-O, and her marketing and media firm, please reach out to them as well. She and her team are doing a phenomenal job for a lot of ETF issuers. If you've gone to an ETF website and you were impressed, probably-

Michael Venuto:

Absolutely.

Douglas Yones:

... Arro was behind that. Mike, I want to thank you and you're entire team for the time today. Unbelievable support into the ETF industry. And you can find Mike on social media, or you can look up Wavemakers or Tidal or ETF Think Tank, follow him everywhere, or some of his content he's building out on ETF Central. That is a wrap on today's edition of the podcast. As a reminder, you can find this episode as well as many other episodes and spend time utilizing that free ETF screener all on the website, etfcentral.com.

I want to thank you again for being here to share your insights, Mike. Stay tuned for upcoming episodes featuring thought leaders from across the ETF ecosystem. I'm Douglas Yonas, Head of Exchange Traded Funds at the New York Stock Exchange, the home of ETFs.