Mike O'Brien started his career in Chapter 11 restructuring at FTI Consulting, moved to sell-side equity research at Wolfe Research covering spin-offs and special situations, and joined Hilton Capital Management in 2024, where he co-manages the firm's tactical income and dividend strategies alongside HBDC. Hilton has doubled to roughly $4 billion in assets since he joined, and in June 2025 it launched HBDC, the Hilton BDC Corporate Bond ETF — the first and only pure-play BDC bond ETF on the market.

In this episode, Mike explains what business development companies are (banks without deposits, created in 1980 to lend to small and mid-sized US businesses), why they grew rapidly after post-2008 bank regulation, and why the bonds they issue have been overlooked while BDC equity gets most of the attention. The investment case rests on structure: BDCs are legally capped at 2-to-1 leverage, most run closer to 1-to-1, and a BDC's NAV would need to fall 50% before its bonds were impaired. Mike notes there hasn't been a BDC bond impairment since the vehicle was created in 1980. He walks through the index Hilton built with Solactive, including issuer caps that deliberately overweight smaller BDCs for extra spread, a $250 million minimum issue size to protect liquidity, and the decision not to impose an investment grade mandate. At recording, the fund was about 95% investment grade with a yield to maturity around 6.7% and a spread of roughly 175 basis points over Treasuries.

Mike also covers what advisors have taught him since launch: the BIZD question that comes up in nearly every meeting, the negative press cycle around private credit, and why BDC transparency (every loan disclosed in SEC filings) is underappreciated. He's direct that HBDC is not a substitute for core bonds, with a spread beta of about 1.4 to investment grade, and makes the case for it instead as a replacement for interval funds and non-traded BDCs that carry lockups, quarterly redemption limits, and much higher fees. HBDC charges 39 basis points and recently received an NAIC 2C designation.

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.