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.

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.

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.