Talk Your Book: Structured Notes in an ETF

0:00Today's Animal Spirits Talk Your Book is brought to you by Simplify.us to learn more about their whole suite of equity income ETFs at Simplify.us. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Ritholtz Wealth Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

0:42Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Today we talked to Jeff Schwarty from Simplify ETS. We've talked to Paul Kim, the founder of Simplify, a number of times in the past. Pretty much right from when they kind of found it, which I believe was like in the pandemic. And they've always tried to do things a little differently. Like very interesting, options-based, alternative. And they have this whole group of barrier ETFs. So there's a Simplify barrier income ETF. They have this Target 15, which targets a 15 % distribution. They have a Target 25. And they use options and structured notes to create these strategies.

1:16And honestly, I'm kind of skeptical of a lot of these high distribution yield products because a lot of times they're just returning your capital to you. And the actual end return to the user or the investor is not as great as it seems. So I went into this talk a little skeptical. And I didn't realize how much structured products these are. These are more like structured notes within an ETF. I did not understand that. And totally redeemed yourself. Yeah. So it's interesting how far we've come. It does seem like every year, you made the point. I mean, factory ETFs used to be the big thing, right?

1:49Like that's all we had is we had index funds and kind of factory ETFs. And that was it. It wasn't anything very exciting. Now it seems like every six months, there's a new form of something coming into the ETF space and seeing structured note products within ETFs is something new. Let me take it because you've got a mouthful of something. Great podcasting. Edamame beans. Well, you were cooking. You know, you were on the wall. You said you've been gaining too much weight lately, and you haven't been happy with the scale, so you're eating healthier. So here's our talk with Jeff Schwarty from Simplify ETFs.

2:26Jeff, welcome to the show. Great to be here, Michael and Ben. 20, if we rewind the clock a little bit, like ETF land was kind of boring for a few years. It was nothing but flows into products that cost three basis points. It was just like, I don't know, that persisted for a while. And then there was like this Cambrian explosion of new ideas, new products. And we're excited to talk to you today about one of them. And a lot of the activity that we've seen, of course, like money is still flowing to the, you know, the four basis point product. But a lot of the flows that we saw last year were to like different sort of different strategies, which is exciting.

3:04So what you guys are doing at Simplify, you have something new. It's called an auto, quite as new to me, it's called an auto callable barrier income strategy. Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but let's start high and then we'll zoom in. What in the world is an auto callable barrier income strategy? Yeah, Michael, as you pointed out, ETFs for a long time in my 35-year career of this industry, they start off as just being ways to get exposure to the market in an efficient, low-cost manner. And then you had the explosion of innovation with factor-based investing. And then what you've seen in the last couple of years, if you got more active managers bringing anomalies in the form of ETFs.

3:44So really that mouthful of auto callability really comes down to these are structured notes that have been around for a long time. This is a$450 billion market with structured notes. What Simplify has done is taken that experience of negotiating an individual structure note contract with an investment bank, we've put it together in an ETF in the form of a structured note of structured notes. For example, SBAR has 40 individual structured notes with laddered maturities and allows investors to efficiently, in a liquid wrapper, just like any other ETF, with constant liquidity, you can take your exposure.

4:19And if you have an event where you need the capital, you can take it out for whatever your needs are. So how does the barrier option work? I'm not really familiar with those. Yeah. So, Ben, what we're doing is, let's say you were to give me$10 million today, January 1, I would take the$10 million and I'd buy treasury, short-term treasury bonds for the collateral. And then I would go out to an investment bank, some of the other advisors are doing with structured notes, I'd call out to an investment bank and I'd say, look, I need to sell you a$10 million notional amount of a barrier option. So when I'm selling the option, I'm getting a premium in.

4:51So the income that we're distributing from these products is treasury income, as well as the premium from selling options. Within that option contract, you have several terms that are of note. Number one is the maturity date. All of our positions are going to be one year out. So at the end of the contract period, that's the date that's called European knock-in that matters the most, whether you participate in the drawdown or not. The second thing that you want to keep in mind is the non-call period. So again, these are structured notes. Non-call period typically is three months. After three months, if the underlying reference indices are greater than the initial value, that position gets called.

5:30Now, the super cool part about the auto call feature is you're receiving an annualized premium at the beginning of the contract. January 1,$10 million, I get a premium in, typically about 4%. If after the non-call period expires, if those indices are up, I get to keep that entire premium and stack that initial premium with the second call position and keep return stacking that premium income over time. And so we all know equities go up more than they go down. We would expect about two or three times a year these positions to be called and investors can generate that income from the treasuries as well as the very option income.

6:10Does that answer your question, Ben? Yes. I think what I want to cut through. Yes. I think Ben just lied. That was a polite lie. That was a Midwestern lie. So let's cut through the technical. And like, so what is the objective of this strategy? Like what exposure are you trying to mimic or what are you trying to protect or what are you trying to get out of the fund? Yeah. So investors are thirsty for income. So you get a double digit yield. That's number one. Number two, it's a diverse source of income. Essentially, what we're doing is selling risk in the form of premium to a third party, in the event equities have a major drawdown, they would have a claim against the portfolio.

6:48Now, it's called a barrier. It's called a strike price. It's typically 30%. So if one of the equity indices goes below 30%, then that fund would have that participation in the drawdown. If the underlying index is down 29%, there's no participation in the drawdown. So it has an element of downside protection, if you will, as well as that income. So you get income, you get protection. There's no counterparty risk. And to me, it's a unique source of income. It's similar to selling auto insurance. You only have to pay out a claim if there's an experience of an event. In our case, we're underwriting the risk that equities do not go down more than 30 % over a one-year time period.

7:28So the difference between a 25 % loss in the stock market and a 35 % loss could be a much different experience for the investor, correct? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. If there's a 25 % equity drawdown, there is no drawdown in that individual contract because you didn't break the barrier. But once you go through the barrier, you fully participate in the drawdown. However, you get to offset that drawdown with the income that you receive from the product. But the alternative is, okay, down 35. And this is when you're, I guess what I don't understand about the option part is because the S &P fell 34, 35 % in the COVID crash, right?

8:07Correct, correct. But then it recovered very quickly. So you would have taken part in that drawdown, but the recovery happened so fast that it obviously stayed there. So you just kind of rode the volatility of the market in that situation or only that last 5 % or whatever? Well, here's the deal. So we're laddering option positions in the portfolio. That simply means every Friday we have something maturing. So we're trying to get to 52 positions in the portfolio. So every Friday you have something expiring, right? Now remember COVID 2020, market was down 35 % over a four to five week time period.

8:41And then it rebounded significantly over a six to eight week period. Remember, every time we write a contract when the market's down, if after the non-call period, the values are above the initial value, it gets called, right? So on the way back in the rebound, all the positions were getting called and we were able to stack those returns. Now, on the way down, you did participate because like any other instrument, you're going to have mark to market losses as that COVID sell off was occurring. But remember, it's only when you break the barrier on the last day of the contract. It's called the European knock in contract.

9:14So that's the only day that matters. You can have unrealized losses throughout the year. But at expiration, you're down 28 percent. Your participation is zero. If you're down 32%, you're down 32%. Again, these are structured notes, just like hundreds of advisors have been using for a very long time period. What we've done is we've really put an ETF wrapper to help with the operational inefficiencies because advisors have to monitor every single position. Is it being called? Have we anniversary the maturity? Do you have to roll the individual contracts? So we're taking that operational burden away from them.

9:47Plus, we're giving them continuous liquidity, which means if they, well, in the event that, let's say an investor buys a five-year structure note, that capital is tied up for five years. But if, Michael, you decide you want to buy a boat next year, you can liquidate the ETF just like any other ETF and you can go buy your boat. So I love the idea of removing some of the operational inefficiencies and the frictions because structure notes, not a new idea, a good idea. You're able to define your risk, but they're a pain in the ass. You have to monitor them. They're difficult to scale you with your client base.

10:19So I love the idea of doing that, getting back to like the, okay, how does this work? So there is a new, there is a new, there is a contract that is maturing every Friday. So does that mean that if the market were in a drawdown of more than 30 % for the course of a year, each one of those would get knocked in? So like, as each one gets called, do you have like another stair step lower on the return of that day of maturity. Talk through the mechanics of this because I think this is where the rubber meets the road, right? The idea sounds great. I think I understand, but I don't really understand until I experience it and then it's too late.

11:02So for advisors that are listening that love the idea, but just want to understand how it goes wrong, right? The upside is great. Who cares? But if there's a bear market that persists and we're down 35 % with no recovery for a year, What does that look like? Yeah. So if you look back historically, the last 35 years with weekly maturities on a one-year basis, if you look at the three indices that we use, NASDAQ, Russell, and S &P, we look at the worst performing of those three. So again, it's a worst-off concept, NASDAQ, S &P, Russell, 2000. Historically, for the last 35 years, you broke the barrier at expiration 7.8 % of the time.

11:38Okay. So what that means is 92 % of the time, you're selling a contract, collecting a premium, distributing to your investors. And only 7 % of the time did you actually have one of those contracts break the barrier and participate in that drawdown. And most of that was concentrated in the global financial crisis, which you would expect, right? We had a very difficult market. We had fourth quarter was down over 20%. First quarter was down over 25%. So you would experience losses in the portfolio, but you have a 92 % chance historically, empirically, that you don't break the bear and you keep the capital.

12:12Now, in 2022, we talked about that a moment ago. 2022, the market was off, say, 20%. But the first week of January of 2022 was one week of January 2022 plus 51 weeks from the prior year. Remember, it's a rolling 12-month cycle. So again, you have to, for the fund to experience a complete drawdown of over 30%, every single Friday, you have to have a return on a rolling basis of down over 30 % to participate. Again, if you ladder the - All right, so wait, so you were up 10 % in 2022. Correct. What, or let's for one, okay, so at the worst of 2022, I can't remember when the market bottom. I think it was November actually, or forget 2022.

12:58In a year like 2020, where the market goes down 35 % in three weeks, I would imagine that there's mark-to-market losses. Correct. What does a year like that look like? So we were down about 27 % on the mark-to-market basis during that initial sell-off. Okay. So that was an aggregate. That's looking at 52 positions in the portfolio. Again, this is a simulation, not an actual portfolio, but it's a simulation. But you did have that mark-to-market drawdown. But when you held the contracts to maturity, so the January contracts experienced the mark-to-market through March, but then when COVID rebounded, the market started to rebound.

13:34By the end of the year, you're still down about 18. That initial contract did not break the barrier because it didn't close below 30%. So the mental gymnastics is complicated. So what we're trying to highlight is there's, you know, double digit yield. You get paid for taking these risks. You're underwriting equity drawdowns. If the drawdowns don't occur, you keep the premium and you get the dividend. If you do happen to experience a drawdown, we've dilated the position. So one position doesn't dominate the entire portfolio. And empirically, it happens about 8 % of the time historically. So. So Michael and I have been really stress testing you on the downside here, obviously, but we know I'm not done with the downside.

14:14Oh, OK. All right. Hit him again. I want to hear about the upside. No, so do I. I'm almost done with the downside. All right. So as an investor thinks about the benefit of a strategy like this, this is clearly, in my opinion, not a fixed income substitute. Would you agree, Jeff? You know, we get that question a lot, Michael. It kind of feels to me like a preferred security where you're going to get a coupon payment and it has an income feature, which feels like income, but the drivers are going to be equity volatility and equity drawdowns. That's the drivers of the returns, right? So you're going to get the premium from the option market, which is driven by three equity indices, but you're going to get a coupon.

14:58So it feels like a preferred security to me. And I would categorize it as an alternative income-oriented solution where you're going to get the income. A lot of investors want income, but you want some level of protection. Buffer funds are very, very popular, but there's no income associated with it. And so to me, it kind of feels like an alternative income solution, which represents what Simplify is all about, liquid alternatives. Yeah, it's like a middle ground. So my question to you before we get to the upside stuff is, so you're talking about putting structured note-like products in an ETF.

15:30How did we get to the point where you're able to do this? Because this obviously isn't something that investors were able to access before. You had to go through an insurance broker and buy a structured note and fill out all this paperwork and it was highly illiquid and the fees were high and kind of hit it. And so how did we get to the point where you're now able to do this in an ETF? Well, Simplify is known for being a liquid alternative provider. And we have ISDAs, which allow us to negotiate these individual contracts on the behalf of our investors. So most of our strategies do have some form of derivative futures option swaps embedded with them.

16:03So it fit right into our ecosystem and our DNA. So we will go out and work with the same counterparties that advisors do, but we have scale with about 12 billion assets under management. We have the ability to negotiate these individual contracts. We get quotes from multiple brokers a day. And essentially, we've taken that operational burden from the advisor. Compliance departments like what we're doing because it's just like a regular ETF. But we didn't invent the structured note concept. We just made it more operationally efficient. And it's better to have one or two or three guys looking at calls versus 40 analysts or 40 advisors monitoring thousands of individual positions for callability.

16:41So again, we just took a concept that was already out there, time tested, very well used by lots of advisors, and we just made it more efficient. All right. Love it. So now let's talk about the upsides. So people are using this product because there is equity-like volatility in a steep-air market. The upside is what exactly? Let's talk about the good stuff. Yeah, so the upside is generally going to be limited to the option premium plus the treasury income. That's going to be your maximum upside because you're getting capital in the portfolio. We're going to buy treasury, so that's going to give you somewhat of a yield.

17:19And then we're going to sell a barrier option to an investor or an investment bank. And that premium that you get, that's what gets attributed to investors. So if you're super bullish on the market, I would say this is probably not the product for you. The way I think about it is any return distribution, 10 % or less, you're always going to outperform because that's kind of the SBARS distribution yield is going to be between 9 % and 11%. We've been distributing almost 13 % because we've had a heightened vol environment. So best case scenario is you have equity markets that rise where a lot of the positions get calls so you can stack that income.

17:54And then the volatility creates higher yields from the option contracts that you're selling. So you can have, like for example, SBAR, we would say 10 % is the distribution yield. XV, Roman numeral 15, we're targeting a 15 % distribution yield. And XXV, we're targeting a 25 % distribution yield. The way we get to 25 is we do individual stocks. Instead of writing on three broad-based baskets of indices, we're doing about 14 individual stocks. The names that you would probably recognize. And the downside protection is at that same level? Is it still 30 %? Because I would have assumed that you're doing it similarly, but you're taking more risk.

18:33So the barrier is not 30, it's 20. What does it look like with the individual stocks? Are you getting pages? Because obviously they're more volatile. Yeah. So S-bar is always going to have a 30 % barrier. I would consider that a core position in anybody's portfolio. Every single option is going to be 30. And then whatever income you get, you get, right? Whereas XV, we're averaging a barrier of 25%. And that's allowing us to get 15 % distribution yield. So yeah, you've lowered the barrier. You're taking more risk. you're taking on, you get more income for that. And then in the case of XXV, with stocks like NVIDIA or MicroStrategies, the barriers are typically around 50%, 40 to 50 % for those individual stocks.

19:13So that's the challenge is finding the right levers to pull on to achieve the income that you're looking for. So you vary the barrier level or the strike price. In the case of XXV, every single position has a one-month call period. So after one month, if you've made money, boom, the position gets closed. You keep the premium, you write another one. My question to these other ETFs, the XV and XXV, that are targeting the higher yields. So there are other income-oriented ETFs out there that are selling options against these highly volatile stocks and getting these huge distribution yields, right?

19:46But if you look at the total returns, they're not getting investors much of anything at all because it depends on the stock. But it sounds to me like you're doing more of the structured note thing on these individual stocks. Is that correct? You're not just like selling options for income here because they're highly volatile. There's something else going on here. Is that right? Yeah, we're doing the same structure note process we talked about. These are OTC negotiated contracts on individual stocks in the case of XXV. In the case of XV, it's three equity indices. Same with SBAR, three equity indices.

20:16The folks that are out there distributing these super, super high double digit yields They're largely doing return of capital, which is a little bit confusing for investors in my mind. We're distributing the earnings that we make from the product. These other investors are probably returning some of that option premium, but they're also doing return of capital, which is something to be aware of. It does reduce your cost basis. It's not a taxable event. It reduces your cost basis, but it's not really earned income. It's distributed income. There's a big difference between those two concepts. Right.

20:48But you're not doing that where you're returning the capital. No, we are not. We are not. Okay. So here's what I love about this concept and why I was so – why I kept pressing on the downside because I think it's really important for investors to understand this is the risk. This is the upside. And now I can make an informed decision. with stocks, with bonds to a lesser degree, but certainly with stocks, like you can't define your risk, right? Like we know what the average return is, but like we also know that the average return is bullshit because it's never average. So I love that an investor can make an informed decision of, okay, this is how this particular strategy works.

21:34I understand the downside. I understand what happens in a COVID market. I understand what happens if we're down and we stand down. I know what happens 8 % of the time. and then also like that's the bad and here's the good and now i can make a decision for myself um yes i do like it i like i like some protection i understand the mark to market but i'm getting nine to eleven percent i know in the environment in which it works i know the environments in which it doesn't work like i like that concept yeah i would agree with you michael i managed money for principal for 30 years managed about 80 billion dollars for them and every and this was global clients.

22:08And every year I get asked, what's your return target? What do you think the market's going to do? Well, the drivers of equities are earnings and multiples. Good luck trying to forecast either one of those, right? And so that's why I think what appealed to me about Simplify is that we can take unstructured, unknown outcomes and try to create that structure for people. And with the structured note strategies, S-bar, XV, XXV, I can give you a pretty good certainty on what the outcomes are going to be. If returns are less than the barrier, you have no drawdown or limited drawdown, right? If things become more difficult, which again happens, you're going to participate, but it's somewhat protected.

22:45And the one thing we haven't talked about, Michael and Ben, is given our derivative expertise here at Simplify is we also put in a long put option in both X, V, and S bar. So I think of that as like flood insurance. So we're able to get 100 % notional protection on both portfolios at a fraction of a cost. I think it costs us about 12 basis points. So in addition to having the barrier, we also have a long put option on the portfolio. And in fact, things get really, really, really bad. That option contract will monetize and help protect any sort of drawdown in the marketplace. So when does that option begin paying off?

23:20Is that, I mean, is like a 40 % decline or something? Like, when does that kick in? Well, it's about a 20 % out of the money put option that expires in February. So again, it's below the barrier. So that put option will help offset any sort of drawdown from the bear option that we sold at 30 % out of the money. So again, these are different tools that we use to keep investors invested in the market, to smooth out that drawdown potential. We know that investors get compensated for taking risk. And in my opinion, a 92 % probability of not breaking the bear is a pretty attractive offering. And you get the double-digit yield that's generally taxed at ordinary levels.

24:01So with that embedded protection, plus the seatbelt of the put option, it's a pretty compelling investment opportunity for investors, in my opinion. Michael kind of already asked this question, but I'll ask in a different way. Because advisors, we have a lot of advisors listening to the show, they like labels. Are people putting this, is this like an alternative investment for a lot of advisors? Is that the way they're looking at it? It's not really stocks. It's not really bonds. It's kind of different. Is that fair? Yeah, I think it's fair. Morningstar would put this in a derivative income category.