Talk Your Book: The Psychology of Income

0:00Today's Animal Spirits Talk Your Book is brought to you by Neos Investments. Go to neosfunds.com to learn more about their whole suite of options-based income ETFs. That's neosfunds.com, N-E-O-S, neosfunds.com for more. 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.

0:38Clients of Ritholtz Wealth Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

0:47Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. On today's Talk Your Book, we talk to Troy Cates. Troy is the co-founder and managing partner at Neos Investments. We got into an interesting topic on the show, just about how even in a bull market, there's all this money pouring into these option-based income funds. And there's a lot of different funds out there, but there's something to the fact that people just like that regular income. They like the safety they feel from the yield, even in a bull market. So I can't imagine that. And even young people, we've heard from young listeners that use this and they understand what they're getting into for the most part.

1:25So I won't be surprised again. People love income. It's that simple. But let's say we have a bear market or just a period where the market goes sideways. These things are going to take off even more in popularity. Dude, if the market goes sideways, these things are going to soar. Yeah, because that's kind of a good – it's a really good environment for them, right? Yeah. That means they're not trailing and transforming flat returns into income. Not bad. Right. So we talked to Neos today and Troy about their different funds. They got funds on the S &P 500 and the NASDAQ 100 and the Russell 2000.

2:01They have a hedged version of this where they use a collar. So leading to all that, here's our talk with Troy Cates from Nios Investments.

2:11Troy, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me today. All right. We talked to your colleague Garrett before, but for those who are unaware, give us a little background on Nios Investments, who you are, what you do, and kind of the focus of the firm. Sure. So Garrett and I are both co-founders and managing partners of Nios Investments. We are an ETF issuer that focuses on the synthetic option space. So really looking at option income and how to bring it out in a tax efficient manner to clients. We have 13 ETFs in our lineup. We have just over$15 billion in assets across those 13 ETFs. And we have a number more in registration, which we hope to get out over the next few months.

2:54Troy, how do you differentiate yourself versus the competition? Because there's a lot of legitimate people in the space and there's a lot of, I guess what I would call bad actors, people that are fun companies that are overpromising, taking advantage of distribution yields that investors might not understand. How do you separate the wheat from the chaff? No, it's a good question because there is a lot of competition in the space. And even just thinking over the past couple of years, the space has grown so much. And it seems like almost everybody who has an ETF wants to bring out something in the option income space.

3:24So for us, we really focus on your core allocations, whether it's the NASDAQ 100, the S &P 500, fixed income, Bitcoin, gold, real estate, and we build option strategies on top of those reference indexes. So thinking about the NASDAQ 100, we have a high income product, and we have a hedged equity income product. So we really want to build around those core parts of your portfolio. And we really just want to be a solutions provider in the end and continue to slice up the asset allocation pie. So whether it's equities, fixed income, alternatives, and just keep slicing that up and offering more solutions.

4:03And the way we look at it really is we want to obviously have a decent distribution that goes out to the shareholder, but we want to do it in the most tax efficient manner, number one. And we also want to, over time, we want to make sure that you can participate with the underlying reference asset. We don't want to just cap your portfolio, send you out a distribution, and you don't participate with, say, the NASDAQ 100 or the S &P 500. We want you to be able to participate with that. So we want to make sure that those distributions going out can be supported by the total return over time. Can I describe what I think the product is and tell me if this makes sense?

4:36All right. If you are doing an options-based strategy on one of the reference indexes that is distributing income, almost by definition, you should expect to have all else equal, let's just say in a rising market, you will not keep pace with the index. If the NASDAQ 100 is up 20%, all right, you're not going to get 20%. Maybe you get 18. But what you are doing is you are transforming the return structure of an asset class with positive expected returns into an income stream without giving up so much that you're getting destroyed. It's not like the Nasdaq would be up 20 and you're up 12. Do I have that about right?

5:17Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. I think a lot of people don't understand what they're giving up by being in one of these products. You're really giving up the upside. You know what your downside is. You're still invested in those Nasdaq 100 names in this example. And yes, in the flat to down markets, you should outperform by the amount of income you're bringing in. But in the up markets, especially the bigger, stronger bull markets we've seen over the past couple of years, you're not going to be able to keep pace with that. But yes, we want to make sure we're capturing as much of the upside as we can in the products that we put out.

5:47I think this environment and the fact that these option ETFs have grown so much. You were talking to me before we started recording that since last time we had Niosan, that your assets have effectively doubled, right? What? I think we just had you guys on. Yeah. Wow. Must have been a good podcast. I mean, one thing is that like investors obviously love yield. They love income or they love more certainty, I guess. Pick whichever one you want. I think that's kind of what this has shown us because it's not like all this growth is happening in a bear market. I mean, 2022 options strategies did perform very well, you know, as far as I know.

6:23But what do you think it says about investor risk appetite that in a bull market, there's still been all this money that has gone into option income strategies like this? I think we're seeing more and more people. If you had asked us 10 years ago when Garrett and I had our first business bringing out a lot of the early option-based ETFs, we were primarily talking to advisors that would be representing people that were in their retirement years and looking for income. How do they supplement their income off of their fixed income portfolio? Now we're starting to see people younger and younger wanting to be invested in these types of products, not because they're really looking to trade in and out of it, but they're looking to how can they build an income producing portfolio at a young age.

7:05And maybe they just reinvest the dividends. Maybe some of them actually take the dividends and use it to supplement their lifestyle. But how could they continue to build a portfolio that one day maybe they turn on those distributions and they're taking them because they're trying to retire at an earlier age. but we've seen it more and more. We've seen more people looking to diversify their portfolios by doing this, lower their overall portfolio volatility, and have a different source of income. Whereas traditionally, you were looking at fixed income. Now, where you could source income off the volatility of one of these reference assets, it's really intriguing for a lot of people as they do their asset allocation.

7:41I know we don't have perfect data, see-through data on ETFs, but I do wonder how many young people would surprise the audience that are investing in because they like the reliability. It feels like income. And listen, say what you will, they're taking advantage of capital markets and they're transforming the price into an income stream. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think as you think about it, we don't have that data. It would be great to understand what that data looked like. But a lot of them look at it. And yes, of course, as you mentioned, there's some funds out there that put out these astronomical yields.

8:15And can that be supported by the underlying equity or reference asset over time? Maybe, maybe not. But for what we're trying to build here, we're trying to build around your core portfolio allocations. We're trying to give you what would be a tax-efficient income, in our view, over time, and really trying to participate with the upside of those markets. Yes, there's going to be markets where volatility steps in and the market moves lower, the equity markets move lower. During that time frame, you should outperform because of the amount of income you're bringing in. But we want to make sure when it turns around and the market does move higher, which history has shown it does, we want to participate with that as well.

8:54All right. So we understand that in a bull market, it's not going to keep pace exactly. But how much protection does it provide in a bear market? Because the income strategies, these are not black swan funds. If the market is down, you're going to be down. So explain to us conceptually, in a bear market, the market's down 20. not exactly, but are you going to be down 20 with the difference being like what you receive in distributions? If you get 8 % of you down 12, is it that simple? How about this? What's the upside downside capture if you had to give like an average or range or a number you're comfortable with?

9:28No, it's a great question. I think it really comes down to, is that down 20 happening in one month, like a COVID type scenario or April 2nd or April 9th of this year, or is it happening spread out over the year. So the only downside protection, say a covered call product is offering is the amount of premium brings in. So if it brings in one and a half percent that month, and that month the fund is, you know, the underlying reference is down 20, you're going to be down 18 and a half percent. But if it's spread over 10 months, and you're kind of just flat because you're bringing in income as the underlying reference is down one, to 2 % every month, then you're going to outperform by a lot in that scenario.

10:09So in an extreme example, which is not real life, but just for conceptually, if the market falls 20 % in one month and then goes completely sideways for the rest of the year, no gains, no losses, you'll be down 20 % to month one, less whatever you get in interest. Let's just use one and a half percent. You'll be down 18 and a half percent. And then if it goes sideways and you're collecting 1 % for the other 11 months, that will accrue to you. So that would be your downside buffer. but it's not, this, this is not a hedged strategy. Correct. It is not hedged. It is not a downside protection strategy.

10:39It's not a defined outcome strategy. So it's very different than a lot of other option-based products that are out there. Um, and it's very, you know, I want to make it very clear that most of these products we're talking about outside of the hedged one, these are not hedged products there. If you're selling calls to bring income in, you're just going to outperform that month. We wrote, roll our products on a monthly basis by the amount of income you're bringing in from that short call. Gotcha. Okay, so you teed it up nicely. You also have the NASDAQ 100 hedged equity income ETF. It's QQQH. How does that one work?

11:11How is it different? What are you trying to provide with this strategy? Sure. So it's very similar to our high-income product QQQI, where you're along all 100-plus names of the NASDAQ 100. So you have that access to that index and the growth potential behind that. And then we're using NASDAQ 100 index options. So we're selling calls very similar to QQQI, but then we're taking some of that premium that we receive and instead of paying it all out, we're taking some of that and buying a long put spread. And what that long put spread looks like is we're buying a long put slightly out of the money, usually 4 % to 5 % out of the money, depending on a few factors around where vol is.

11:48And then we're selling that insurance away anywhere from 12 % to 15 % out of the money. So what it does is it gives you a measure of downside protection and it lowers the volatility of your portfolio. So you think back to April with what we saw with the market and what tariffs did. And we saw this big sell-off in the equity markets. We saw a huge spike in volatility, volatility levels we haven't seen on a closing basis since back in COVID. And what happened during that time is it went through this put spread. So it went through the long put, gave you protection, but it gave you protection down to where the short put was.

12:24So it gave you this measure of downside protection while everything else was selling off in the equity markets very quickly. But then when the market rebounded, when the tariffs were all paused on April 9th, it was able to capture most of that upside because we had written calls out of the money and we don't always write calls on 100 % of the notional. So even if the market had gone through the short call strike, we can still participate with the move higher. You're not going to capture all of it, but we could continue to participate above the short call strike. So the idea behind this hedge product is if you're, let's say you like the NASDAQ 100, but it's too much equity risk to just own the Qs.

13:02And you want to earn some income off of the volatility around the NASDAQ 100. So you look at products like ours and you look at QQQI. And the high income product, it's still too much equity risk. Just like we walked through that example of Michael before. If you have this big sell-off, you're taking a lot of that downside risk. but then maybe QQQH comes in because you can still capture a good portion of the upside, but it'll give you that measure of downside protection and smoothing out your kind of return stream. Why options on the index instead of the individual names? I know a lot of companies do it differently.

13:34Why did you go that route? Well, the index, I mean, a few reasons. One, they're extremely liquid. They're the most liquid options out there. Two, since we're owning the entire index and we want to overlay that index, even if we don't overlay it on 100%, We want to cover all those names in the same weighting. Three, the tax efficiency is huge. So they're considered 1256 contracts, which give you 60 % long-term, 40 % short-term cap gains rate, no matter the holding period. So we roll these on a monthly basis. So there's always a P &L associated with these options. So we wanted to make sure the tax efficiency was there.

14:09You don't get that on single name options, ETFs, equity link notes, swaps. So we really wanted to stick with the index options wherever we can. So I don't think I've ever built a put spread in my life. So hand up. I'm not an options guy. Maybe you could explain what exactly these you're trying to do. I assume you're giving up some upside by buying that. But is it like at a certain point you're hoping to hedge, like when the market is down a certain point? Or like, how does that or does it change because of volatility? Like what exactly is like the line in the sand you're trying to achieve there?

14:40Sure. So all of our strategies here are rules-based and systematic. So we're not taking, there's no portfolio manager discretion taken as we're rolling it. So what the put spread looks like is it's really a put spread collar because we're selling the call. We're selling the call and bringing in premium. When we bring in that premium, we have all these dollars that we can distribute out. But instead of distributing out all of them, we take some of them and we buy a long put spread, which means we're buying a long put, which like I said, depending on volatility and a few other factors is usually four to 5 % out of the money when we roll it.

15:13And then we're selling away that insurance. So instead of just hedging yourself to zero, which usually costs a lot and doesn't always pay off, and it's usually not worth it when you think about the probability of the market going to zero or even down 50 % where it would really make a difference, we sell that insurance away anywhere from down 12 % to 15%, depending on a few factors. So when you sell that insurance away, you have this block of this long put spread that protects the portfolio for a period of a market move. How much of the return of the hedge strategy is path dependent on where the market goes?

15:51I think a huge part of it, if you think about it, because you're long that entire NASDAQ 100. So if you're going to go sideways and we're bringing in a net credit from the short call, long put spread combo, you're going to bring most of it in from the option portfolio. But if you're going to be in a bull market like we've seen, 23, 24, now 25, where the market's still moving up, most of it's going to come from the underlying equities in the portfolio. So I'm a financial advisor. I'm thinking about either of these strategies, right? The option income versus the hedge. I'm making up the numbers here, but is it kind of like, well, it's like an 80-20 portfolio versus a 60-40.

16:34How much different risk profile is there in the two strategies in terms of investors being more conservative or wanting to take more risk? Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, the underlying beta of the hedge portfolio is much lower than the high income portfolio. So if you're thinking about it for your clients and you have younger clients that want to be in this space, want to get income, my view would be probably QQQI. You have a longer time horizon. You want to take more equity risk while getting more income at the same time. Whereas if you have clients that are older in retirement years, but still have what they hope is 20, 30 years before where they don't need the income anymore because they're not around, you really would want to keep it more, in our view, conservative, where you have that downside protection used.

17:21A little bit of sleep at night protection that you know if the market's down 20 the next day, you shouldn't be down 20 with it. Here's what I would see this as the perfect use case for. A bit niche, although this is not a niche product, I guess, because it's... How much? What is it? Six billion or more? So QQQI has over$6 billion, but QQQH, the Higgs products, is about$350 million. Okay. All right,$6 billion. Not an insignificant sum. For the person who is over age, what are RMDs? Is that 59? 69 and a half? Whatever the age is. What's the age? 59 and a half. 59 and a half. You sure about that?

18:07Okay. I just want it to be 69 and a half. So if there's no point to taking the income, if you're not going to spend the income, no? Like if you're 40 and you have this in an IRA, like why would you do that? Yeah. A lot of people that we talk to that actually take the income, say off of a QQQI, look at it and then they invest it in other places they want to invest, whether they're alternative space or different sectors. All right. Counterpoint, why not invest in the Qs and just sell some and then do it that way? No, I know the answer. We've had this argument with people a million times. It's not an argument, but people love the easy button, even if it is not, quote, the most mathematically efficient way to do this.

18:51And I put myself in that category too. I am not a spreadsheet. I don't live my life in a spreadsheet. If it's easy and it's a little bit more expensive, guess what? I'm going with the easy button. I love the easy. So that's a huge component of it. I think that's a big component. And I think people, while they might understand options and how they work, a lot of people do that. A lot of people look at the NASDAQ. You know, most people don't have enough cash in their account to trade index options when you think about it. So then they're pulling out the tax efficiency piece. So then they're going to sit there and roll 100 short calls on the NASDAQ 100 on a monthly basis.

19:27Ridiculous. Yeah. So most people don't want to look at it that way when they could do it in a product that is managed by somebody else. And the nice part about ETFs is it's fully transparent. On a nightly basis, they could see all the holdings in the ETF. They could see what short calls were in, which is another great thing about using the index options. They could understand how they're positioned versus some of the other swaps or equity link notes where you really don't know what they're doing because it doesn't spell it out. So that's one of the things we always look at is trying to be as transparent as possible, talk about our products, educate wherever we can.

19:59And I think since this space is growing so much, and you think about how many people are investing in all these different funds out there, it's really important to do your homework. Anybody looking at this space should spend the time, understand what they're investing in, look at the holdings files, understand what's under the hood of these different ETFs, and then see if it fits their portfolio. So what are some of the things that people should be looking for? Because I'm glad you pivoted that way, because honestly, I don't know how many more questions I could ask you. I think you did a great job on this, by the way.

20:27So that's a credit to you. You had every relevant question that I had on these products. But in terms of investors doing their homework, are there things that maybe like a red flag that they should look out for? What does that even mean? Where do investors start? I think a lot of people first, which I think is a mistake, first look at what the distribution yield is. And they're like, oh, this one has 15 and this one's 95. That one's 95. I should take that one. But when you really look at it, the best way to equalize the returns is to look at the total return and say, all right, is fund A, fund B, and fund C, let's look at they're all in the same space.

21:02Let's just use the NASDAQ 100 as the example. Are the total returns similar? One might have a huge distribution, one might be smaller. And then after you start to whittle down what kind of returns these are putting out, then you can start to look into these ETFs. You can go on any competitor, our website, any competitor website, and look at the holdings and understand what's actually in the ETFs, and then to start to really dig down and understand the tax efficiency behind them and what it means. Because at the end of the year, you're going to get your 1099. And somebody is going to look at that 1099 and say, all right, how much of this distribution, whatever the percentage was, how much do I get to keep?

21:39How much is deferred down the road? And what does that look like on a yearly basis? So it's really important to really dig in. I think there's so many resources now to start to understand it and do your homework that it's important that everybody does it. So from a business perspective, are you secretly hoping the Fed just keeps cutting rates because that on a relative basis makes you look better? Or do falling rates actually hurt the yield you're getting on the options income? Is it a one-to-one? How does that work in a falling rate environment? No, I think as rates come in, I think people will look to source income in other places.

22:15And I think that's where we start to fit in a little more because we're sourcing income from the volatility of the NASDAQ 100 in this example, or one of the other reference assets. And so when you think about it that way, yes, as rates come in, it should look more attractive to be in products like ours. Although we do have a number of fixed income products. So as rates come in, the underlying holdings of those fixed income products, those will come in as well. But we add options on top of them to enhance those monthly distributions. So for us, yes, it's always nicer to have a lower rate environment for this type of thing because we're really just sourcing the income paid from the volatility market.

22:57What about crypto? You guys have a Bitcoin product? We do. We have a Bitcoin product, BTCI, that has been out a little over a year and that's been a great products. Obviously, we've seen a lot of volatility in Bitcoin lately. We saw it right after the election last year. And then we kind of went sideways for a while. We saw another move higher. And now we've seen a pretty good sell-off over the past few weeks in Bitcoin. But that product has been one that has grown a lot. At first, when we brought it out, we thought it would probably be more of a retail-focused product. We'd see a lot of individual investors buying it.