Paul Marino, Themes ETFs
China AI, Humanoid Robots, and the Next Wave of Thematic ETFs
Paul Marino spent 25 years in asset management before landing at Themes ETFs as Chief Revenue Officer. He started as a wholesaler at Federated Investors, managed distribution teams at Pioneer Investments, and did a stint in journalism at Newsday, the sixth-largest daily newspaper in the country, before any of that. At Themes, he handles sales, marketing, and PR for a firm that built its entire product line around one question: where is the white space before it fills up.
About Paul Marino and Themes ETFs
Themes ETFs is built around speed and specificity. When a trend develops without a clean ETF wrapper, the firm moves to be first or second with a product. Paul's job is to translate that into advisor conversations: what the index holds, how the screening works, and why the exposure is distinct from what advisors already own. The journalism background shows in how he frames the funds: direct, specific, no filler.
DRGN: Chinese AI as a Separate Return Stream
DRGN is Themes' China-focused generative AI fund. The thesis: the AI buildout inside China is a distinct return stream from U.S. tech exposure. Most advisor portfolios are already weighted toward U.S. mega-cap technology. DRGN gives them access to the Chinese AI buildout without adding to existing positions.
Index construction required a step most domestic thematic funds skip: sanctions compliance screening. Before a Chinese company gets into DRGN, it runs through a filter for U.S. export control restrictions and OFAC lists. Paul walked through why that matters practically: advisors need to know their clients aren't holding names that could get frozen out of U.S. markets. The screening manages compliance risk and makes the product usable in an institutional context.
BOTT: Robotics Beyond the Factory Floor
BOTT is positioned as a humanoid robotics ETF, but the portfolio is broader. Holdings span factory automation components, autonomous vehicle systems, specialized semiconductors, and industrial machine parts. The geographic footprint covers South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and the U.S., pulling in companies that don't show up in most domestic tech-adjacent products.
The fund uses equal weighting with semiannual rebalancing. That structure prevents BOTT from becoming a concentrated bet on one or two companies, which is a real risk in a theme where a handful of names absorb most of the attention and media coverage. Paul compared the robotics adoption curve to commercial aviation: the technology develops faster than the infrastructure and adoption patterns around it. That gap between technology readiness and broad deployment is where early positioning has historically mattered.
How Advisors Are Using Thematic Sleeves
The conversation covered portfolio mechanics. Advisors running DRGN or BOTT aren't replacing core equity exposure. They're adding targeted satellite positions to express a specific view without restructuring the portfolio. That framing matters because it sets accurate expectations: these aren't low-volatility core holdings. They're high-conviction, narrow exposures meant to do a specific job.
Paul's argument on timing: early positioning in themes like Chinese AI and humanoid robotics is where the return premium lives. Once a theme reaches mass adoption and broad distribution, the compression has already started. The advisors who captured the AI trade weren't late to it.
Speed to Market as Strategy
Themes built DRGN and BOTT as separate products rather than a single China-and-robotics blend. Advisors want precision, not aggregation. When a theme is generating advisor questions without a clean product answer, that is the signal to move. Being first or second in a category is a different business than being third or fourth. The product roadmap is built around finding what's missing, not improving what already exists.
Key Takeaways
- DRGN targets the Chinese generative AI buildout with sanctions compliance screening built in, separate from existing U.S. tech exposure
- BOTT covers factory automation, autonomous systems, specialized semiconductors, and industrial components across South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and the U.S.
- Equal weighting and semiannual rebalancing prevent BOTT from becoming a concentrated single-name bet in a high-attention theme
- Paul draws the robotics adoption comparison to commercial aviation: technology ahead of the surrounding infrastructure is where early positioning has historically paid
- Themes builds products around gap identification: advisor questions without a clean ETF answer are the launch signal
Listen to the Full Episode
This article is based on an episode of Behind the Ticker, hosted by Brad Roth, Founder and CIO of THOR Financial Technologies. For the full conversation with Paul Marino, including the mechanics of DRGN's sanctions screening and why equal weighting in BOTT matters for advisors building thematic sleeves, listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or watch on YouTube.
Full Transcript
6,035 wordsMachine transcribed from Brad Roth's conversation with Paul Marino, Themes ETFs, with speakers identified automatically. Timestamps link to that moment on YouTube. Lightly cleaned, otherwise unedited.
Welcome to Behind the Ticker, the podcast where we go beyond the symbol and into the strategy. I'm Brad Roth, founder and chief investment officer at Thor Funds. And in each episode, I sit down with ETF managers, CIOs, and industry leaders to break down how these funds are actually built, how they behave in real markets, and how advisors use them in real portfolios. Most people just see a ticker symbol, but we know much more goes on behind the ticker.
Hey, Paul, welcome to the show. Hey, Brad, thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.
So before we get started, why don't you just take a little bit of time, tell everybody about your background and how you went from distribution and ETF sales, now your current role over there at
Themes ETFs. Yeah, sure. So I've been in the asset management space for 25 plus years and started out in wholesaling at a mutual fund company. And I spent a big portion of my career in the wholesaling space early on at large mutual fund companies. And the original place was at Federated Investors, learned a lot, and then wanted to get on the management side. So I got a great opportunity at then Pioneer Investments, which has since become a Mundi Pioneer and then ultimately victory now. And I got to manage a team and think about more than just wholesaling, but think about how to build teams, coach teams, and then drive revenue for an organization that was meaningful.
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Had a lot of success there, went to some other firms, but then saw the trend in the industry and where it was going. And it was obviously going to the ETF side. So when I got an opportunity to jump on the ETF side, I took it, took all the things that I had learned along the way in building teams, and then applied that to the entire organization. And besides that, before I ever even got to the business world, I was a writer, I was a journalist for Newsday, which was the sixth largest daily newspaper in the country right out of college. So as a CRO, it's more than just being on the sales side. It's marketing, business development, PR, media. And I think that early training and
Communicating a message and delivering a message really, really helped me in my role as a chief
Revenue officer on the ETF side. So you've had some unfortunate experience of having to hang out in Pittsburgh, probably too much working at Federated Investors.
Let me tell you something. I loved it. So getting to go to Oakmont for the US Open, the Field Club, the Duquesne Club, I really fell in love with the town of Pittsburgh. And the one thing I know is that every time I visit, before I hop into a cab, I better know what the Pens are doing. I better know what the Steelers are doing. And I better have an intelligent response to any question
That I get on either one of them. That's great. Yeah. I live basically across the street from the Field Club. So that is my neck of the woods. And yeah, it is a fun place. And you're right. if you're not a Steelers fan in this town, you've got a problem.
Well, I'm not a Steelers fan, but I tended to not reveal that too often.
Smart man. So before we get into the nuts and bolts and a couple of the ETFs, I always like to ask people, what do you like to do for fun when you're not behind the desk working?
So number one thing is I'm a workout fiend. I played college baseball back in the day. So I love everything around athletics. I love to live a healthy lifestyle. And so, the good news is I have three kids, two boys and a girl that are my youngest is 17. My oldest is 20. And so they're my workout partners. So we get after pretty hard. Love being by the beach. I live in Connecticut on the shoreline. So that's something I do not, not in this weather, but when it gets a little bit warmer, I'm trying to get to the beach first thing every morning at about 6 a.m., get a little sun on my face and get in the water. And then last but not
Least, I love to cook. I'm Italian-American. My grandmother passed down a cookbook to my mother and to me. So I love making pizza by hand, pasta by hand, great steaks and chops, and just sitting around with my family and enjoying life.
You and I just became really fast friends. Those are all my favorite foods. There you go. But let's get into the ETFs. We've got two of them I want to talk about today. I think it's perfect timing with what's going on in the world. Let's start with DRGN, which is your China Generative Artificial Intelligence ETF. So what specific market gap did you guys see over there that was not being covered by these broad China tech ETFs?
Yeah. So specifically, AI is the new paradigm of everything that's going to happen in technology in the future. And a lot of people in the US have easy exposure to AI through US companies. But as China is isolated, and they're not able to do business with the US. And so it's a very tech savvy country. They know the importance of artificial intelligence, and they are now set forth to do it on their own. They're great manufacturers, again, very technologically savvy. And when you hear the experts in the US talk like Jensen Wong or Lisa Su, they talk about the Chinese AI prowess. So because they're isolated, because they have to build it on their own. And because the market is so huge, and there's so much investment that's being made
Inside of China, we wanted to create an ETF that offered US investors exposure to that important growth area of the market to complement their US AI exposure. And it's a separate return stream. It's all Chinese listed companies, that aren't on the sanctions list. Of course, we take very, we're very careful about that. And we're giving you that AI return stream from China, which is, in our opinion, a tremendous growth opportunity for US investors that they don't currently have today. And we're doing it in a US ETF on, US exchanges. So you don't have to worry about, what Chinese companies are going to pick, you don't have to worry about how you're going to gain access to them. it's the beauty of
The ETF world, we can package that for you, do it at a very low cost, and give you that return stream that you currently don't get in your broad-based tech holdings today.
Got it. And so at a high level, can you just walk me through kind of the index construction behind this? Like, what companies are you sorting for that are going to qualify as a true Chinese AI
Company? So it has to be in mainland China. It is US listed or on the Hong Kong exchange. So it has to be publicly listed. And these are companies that are driving their revenue from, generative AI activities, to name a few, AI modeling, application software, infrastructure and hardware, and application software. And so we're looking for names that are, generating the majority of their revenues from those activities and a part of the ecosystem that's driving the AI movement in China.
So when you're putting the index together, you mentioned all of those kind of separate facets of AI. How are you balancing kind of the more upstream names like semis and infrastructure versus like the layer of companies that are probably closer to, the end user demand? So is there, are you, I guess the question really simply, is this a market cap weighted ETF? Is there some active component to how you're weighting these names, individual names inside the portfolio?
No, there really is no active component where we're equal weighting them and then we're rebalancing it on a semi-annual basis. And so we wanted to keep it very simple. We don't want to pick the winners. And I think what you'll find with the NCTFs is that we're not trying to pick the winners. We set the index criteria and then we let the companies that win, win. And then obviously we don't want to get too far out over our skis because like any other investment, if something runs a lot, we don't want them to become the majority of the portfolio. And that's the reason why we rebalance regularly to make sure that, we're dollar cost averaging in where we need to and we're not getting, two out in front in certain names so that we can,
Manage some risk. But we try to keep it as simple as possible.
Yeah. So how do you guys view though? investing in and through China can be somewhat difficult, right? There's state policies, there's export controls, there's accounting transparency risk, I guess we can call it. How do you guys view that? Is it a part of your screen? what are some of those roadblocks you got to get over in investing in China directly?
So first it has to be a publicly listed company. Number one, we think that that has some merit. And again, before I even get into that, like there's always risks in investing in foreign countries and especially when you think about China. So the number one thing that we tell people is like, we tell them the story, the reason why we're there. And we think it's a big piece of the AI puzzle besides the US and we think it's a compliment. But if you're uncomfortable investing in China, then this is not the ETF for you. Like the first thing you have to be interested in is investing in China and comfortable with investing in China and knowing some of the risks that go on with disclosures and accounting and things like that. To mitigate that,
Like I said, they have to be listed on an exchange. So the Hong Kong, Shanghai or US exchange. The second thing is we make sure we're very careful about the sanctions list and about all the rules that go around like what US investors are able to invest in. And anything that is not allowed, is not even entered into the universe. And then we keep it to a small number of companies. So that's kind of the way that we sort of screen it. And like I said, we're on top of it. We work with a great partner in BIDA that really, really helps manage that for us. And so far, things have been really good. There are some interesting things, anomalies around China,
Like when it's the Chinese New Year, and everything closes down. So you'll have a little bit of less liquidity around those periods of time, you can still trade in and out of the fund. But we, we're very careful to let advisors that invest in it and investors that invest in it, know everything. And so the best thing that I would say is do your due diligence, be comfortable being in China, go to our website, look at the product page, check out the index and all of the various and the prospectus and all the documents around it. And if you're comfortable on that, and you want to get a piece of that Chinese AI investment return, which is pretty, which has been pretty good over the past couple of years, this is a really nice
Place for you to do it in the US on a US exchange in a US ETF wrapper.
So Paul, let's, let's pivot a little bit out of China, but stay in the same lane, right? We've got BOTT, which is your humanoid robots ETF. First of all, I want one. My least favorite thing in the world to do is, seems like I have to unload the dishwasher twice a day with, and I have two little kids as well. So they dirty every dish, this dish that they touch. But how do you, when you're, when you're constructing this index, how do you kind of define a company as a legitimate humanoid robot exposure? We all know Tesla is probably leading the drive here, but can you just walk me through how you guys are putting this together? So, interestingly enough,
Tesla's not leading the drive in this portfolio. It's part of the portfolio, but it's not leading the drive in the portfolio. What we found is that a lot of robotic companies are outside of the US. And we learned that only through the US. So we're not, we're not making a bet on a specific country. Like, we have the index criteria. The index criteria picks the 30 largest companies with a positive total return over the past 12 months in factory automation, general processor and specialized semis, industrial machine parts and programmable logic. Okay. So when we put that index together and we did that with a selective, it's the selective global humanoid robotics index, what we found is there are amazing companies in South Korea that are, involved in generating
Profits and revenue from this type of activity. The US obviously is a big part of the portfolio, I think somewhere around 26%. And then you have a component in Hong Kong, in China, in Japan, a small part in Canada. So again, we're, we're not looking at the country and saying we want to be there, but what we're finding out is it's not just about the US. There's a lot of robotics activity happening in various different parts of the world, specifically where I mentioned, and that's what you're getting in this. So again, when you think about your, your exposure to tech in broad-based US ETFs, or even in mutual funds, you're not getting the exposure that you're getting here. So we, the return stream again, again, past performance is indicative of future performance, but the return
Stream has been amazing on this portfolio. And it also is a different return stream from what you're getting in your current portfolios in the US. So we think it's, again, another really nice compliment to what you, you currently hold today. You're getting access and exposure to companies that you don't have in your broad-based portfolios. And then you're getting, a very solid return over the last few years from, investing in these types of companies.
So when you're picking companies, and I'm assuming they're kind of all over the, as you just mentioned, they're all over the place. Is this portfolio also equally weighted or? Yes. Okay. So everything you pick in here is equal weight. You're not looking for winners. You're saying this is the marketplace, regardless of market cap, we're going to give everybody an equal shot.
Yeah. These are passive indexes. And so what we wanted to do was create the rules around the index that we were comfortable with. we rely on our partners to help us put that together. And then once we set that criteria, we are a pure play in that space. So what you won't see as any kind of active management, we're not going to throw something in there to try and juice returns. We don't really care what anybody else says is a robotics company. Like we want to make sure that it hits the criteria. And then we're the pure play in that space. So the winners win and the losers lose. We think that's a really great way to get exposure to these types of environments. And what we find is,
Generally speaking, that in up markets, we do really well and we capture that. And in down markets, it mitigates some risk for us because we're concentrated enough where you get that really nice upside move, but we're diversified enough so that when certain names get hit in certain, because either, it's, it's, or certain sectors of the market is, is not being rewarded in one way, or there's a lot of noise in the marketplace that's driving that sector down. You don't get that, massive drawdown because there's just enough diversity to mitigate some risk. So this is more of a philosophical question. You know,
What do you think are going to be the key adoption signals to watch and judge whether or not this humanoid robotics thing is something just that's cool, or it's something that actually has legs and we're going to, a lot of households are going to have something in their house automated rather than just a Roomba running around, but something that could actually do something for you.
I'm going to steal, uh, an anecdote from, uh, Michael Saylor that I just heard recently when he was talking about, the adoption of Bitcoin. And he said, when the first airplane, a commercial airplane, uh, was developed, there were the early adopters that, were gung ho. They wanted to buy a ticket, get on this plane, uh, travel very efficiently and quickly. Uh, and they were early on, but that was just like a handful of people, uh, because everybody was nervous. They were afraid. They didn't understand aerodynamics, aerodynamics. And, it was hard to believe at that point that you could get in a plane, take off, go 30,000 feet, land in California and be safe. Right. But what do we know now? Like
It's a very safe way to travel and it's actually safer than being in a vehicle. And, it's a convenient way to get back and forth, uh, efficiently and effectively and, and, and, and at a low cost. I think that's, what's going to happen with robots. Like a lot of people are leery. A lot of people are leery with AI. you look at a company like NVIDIA that just reported the greatest earnings call that has ever been recorded in the history of mankind and the stock is down, right? Because everybody's looking for the buck. Um, and so it's going to take a little bit of time to adopt, but I'll give you another sort of analogy. Like, I've seen these humanoid robot robots that are being used to like clean public restroom
Facilities. Right. So if you think about, I grew up in New York, you go to grand central station, that place is a mess. And there are human beings that have to clean that up on a regular basis. Wouldn't you rather have a robot that just goes in there in 30 seconds, completely cleans the whole thing, sanitizes it, and doesn't have to worry about all the grit and the grime, like having to do that job. Like robots are here, they're coming. Um, they're going to be a meaningful part of our life. So they're going to take care of all the dangerous jobs, the dirty jobs, the really tough jobs, uh, that humans, uh, do now and put their either life or sanity at risk to do. Um, and they're going to do
Them better and more efficiently than we can. And it's going to allow humans to actually have a more meaningful life and do things that are more important to them. The other part of humanoid robotics that people, always forget is autonomous driving. That's part of the humanoid robotics movement. And I can tell you that, um, I can't wait until autonomous driving is perfected and in a place where, I can go out with clients or, with friends and have a couple of drinks and not have to worry about either getting an Uber or getting, uh, in my car and driving, which I would never do. Right. You, the, the, the, the, for people that say like, they want adoption tomorrow. It takes time. Like there's a lot that has to go into perfecting these things, not even
Just the technology of building the robot, but then building the simulations. Like how does the robot know how to clean that area in grand central station? Well, you got to build a simulation and then you got to train the robot on the simulation and you got to perfect that. And we're in the early stages of that, but that train is, is all is going and it's not stopping. And so, I get people are, speculative, they're worried. Uh, I'm not speculative. They're skeptical. They're worried. Uh, they're wondering, where this is going to go. But I think one of the blessings that we have in this entire space is a guy like Jensen Wong, who not only is an unbelievable entrepreneur, an unbelievable
Executive, but he's got a high level of integrity. And so I, I try to listen to him speak whenever I can. And, uh, I really do trust him. And so, um, when I hear him talk about it, when I hear a guy like Elon Musk talk about it, when I hear somebody like Lisa Sue talk about it, I really believe that robots of the future, I'm like you, I can't wait. they're not going to, they're not going to need my dough. I'm going to do that by hand still. Uh, and they're not going to make my pasta because those are the meaningful things that give me, that, that bring me close to humanity that I love to do. And I love to provide for my kids, but they will clean my
Bathroom. They will mow my lawn. They will do all that stuff that takes me away from time for my family. And I think that's, uh, a great day when that ultimately happens. And, uh, it's amazing really to be alive at this time where that's like a possible, like when I was a kid, I used to watch the Jetsons and they were like robots and you go and you hit like, the button and your favorite sandwich pops out. Like we're not too far away from that.
Yeah. it's, it's funny. And you said a couple of things that I want to go back and, and touch on, but, uh, it's funny. You three weeks ago, we got two feet of snow here and I was online trying to find a snowblower robot because I was sick of going out there every few hours. But you, you said something up there about autonomous driving. Um, I agree with you. I, I'm a car guy, uh, and I like fast cars, but I bought my first Tesla. I got a, I bought a Tesla model. So my favorite feature of the car is super. it's supervised right now, but the autonomous driving and it is, it's incredible. And I can turn it off when
I want to drive, but I'm finding myself almost 80% of the time I'm in that car. Now I just let it take
Me. Yeah. But think about what robots are going to be able to do when it's most important. You can get that Tesla and feel really, really safe. But when you want to, you can literally like work on that, high performance sports car that you have, and then take that out for a cruise and enjoy it and not have to worry about like, anything else. Like that's just your enjoyment time. And that's great. And the cool thing about that is, is when you are manually driving that car, you're going to have lots of autonomous vehicles that are on the road that are going to keep you safer than you were. If it was just a lot of people out there, like I think about
When you think about autonomous driving, I think about some of the horror stories. Um, and when the U S hockey team just, uh, beat Canada recently, that was like a very like enjoyable time. And I was watching a lot of the coverage and they were, talking about, uh, one of the players, um, that, was recently killed, like last year, him and his brother were in Philadelphia, riding their bicycles. I think they were at a wedding or, uh, some kind of, celebration for the family. They went out for a bike ride and got hit by a drunk driver. It's like terrible. Right. And, and he doesn't get to experience that and it's tragedy in your life. And, perhaps we can minimize that or even eliminate that, through autonomous
Driving at some point. So like, why wouldn't we be excited about it? And we have some really brilliant people that are, building all, like I said, I mentioned Jensen Wong, Elon Musk, at least like it, the list goes on and on of these brilliant minds, uh, that are working on these things to try to, make life better, uh, for humanity. And then to get us back to, not having to do all these menial tasks, but maybe having a little bit more time so we could take a walk or go down to the beach or, work on a classic car and, uh, get some, uh, fulfillment out of that. So I'm super bullish.
I don't think we're turning back. There's massive investment. If you ever want to know whether or not this thing is actually going to happen, just look at the massive CapEx investment that's going into all this stuff. It's happening. Um, and it's going to take a little bit of time and the, in my opinion, I don't give investment advice, but in my opinion, uh, the earlier you get into it, the more it's going to pay off for you. Yeah, I would agree with that. No, I just want
To make, I want to talk at a high level about, your distribution plans and some of the things over there. Um, when you guys are thinking about launching a product, but I want to go back to one thing on bot really quickly, because I just want to clarify this for anybody. The humanoid robotics ETF isn't when I think of a humanoid robotics, it's, optimists and full humanoid experience. If I understood you correctly, like anything that is going to be maybe replace human intervention, like autonomous driving, that technology is also included in the CTF. Correct.
Yeah. Cause like you said, humanoid robotics means taking the place of a human task. Right. And so that could be flying an aircraft that could be driving a car that could be working on a car that could be mowing the lawn. That could be just a humanoid robotic, a robot that's in your house dusting for you or vacuuming. Like there's so many different things that that could mean or personal assistant. So, uh, like I love optimists too. Tesla is included in the portfolio and we're really excited about that. I'm specifically excited about something like an optimist in my life when that happens at some point, but like, yeah. And like you're in Pittsburgh, you must be a Steelers fan. Right. So like, I don't know if you saw that, um, robot that kicked the 40 yard field goal, like it was nothing
Like he, he got the ball off the ground on his own, spun it, got it to a place and they kicked that 40 yard field goal. Like that stuff's incredible. imagine having that as your, uh, partner around the house, uh, helping you get everything that you need done. It's truly amazing.
Yeah, no, it is. It's going to be weird for a little bit, but I think we're all going to, uh, end up embracing it because it is going to make our lives. Uh, I think, I think a heck of a lot better, but for advisors who are listening to this, right, they've, they've got these two very specific paths. How should they look at putting both of these names inside of their portfolio? And I, and as well with that, is there any overlap between the two or are the names inside of these pretty
Separate? There's very little, there's very little overlap between the two because they're so specific and that's how we like to be. We like to be very specific, pure plays. Um, so there's very little overlap. The way that our advisors, uh, are looking at these is in a couple of ways. So just to go back a step, um, for a long period of time, uh, investment theses were like low cost ETS, broad portfolios. You're not going to be able to beat the market. And that's great. Um, but over time, what you found was like, even if you were in the SPX, there were like seven names that were driving that return stream. And then the rest of it was sort of like just not doing much.
Right. And what you also found where there were these massive pockets of long-term growth that people weren't getting exposure to. So I think what, what investors and what advisors are doing right now is they have their core portfolios, right? And then they're adding in like satellites and sleeves to try to add in places where they have high conviction of growth. And so everybody is a little bit different. Everybody has a little bit of a different risk tolerance and everybody has a different perspective on, whether they want to be U S centric or whether they want to, invest in, um, overseas. Um, so like, that's the first thing you have to decide like what you, what you want. But what we see is investors taking on additional sleeves into their portfolio and using
These to, to gain access to high growth areas of the market, not only because it's good for the portfolio and good for the performance and good for performance, good for long-term growth, but because they're getting it demanded from their clients. their clients aren't blind. Their clients are watching CNBC. They're reading the wall street journal. They're all over there. They're on the internet, on social media, and they're hearing about AI and they're hearing about robotics. Uh, and they're hearing about, all sorts of different types of investment opportunities, whether that's cryptocurrency or Bitcoin, and they haven't had exposure to that. And so what they're saying is like, even if you're in an SPX, you don't have exposure to gold, but what gold's done.
Right. So they're saying like, Hey, we want at least some kind of exposure to this. So advisors are carving out sleeves, um, and they're using thematics and sector-based ETFs inside of those sleeves to compliment their exposure. Now you always have, high growth advisors that are more aggressive, uh, especially when, um, they're working with certain types of clients that want high growth. And so they'll adopt us at a greater rate, but it really just depends on, what you're looking for, what your client's looking for. Uh, but that's what we see a lot of. And we're hearing more and more of that as we have, these conversations.
So take me under the hood, if you would a little bit with the process over there at themes, like how did, how do you guys keep a pulse on the market, figuring out what it needs? Um, and then moving pretty quickly and getting product out there. So can you just talk about like, I guess the product construction life cycle from beginning to end, like, are there, is this like a daily conversation and you guys are coming up with ideas and, voting on them and moving? can you, can you just open that up for me a little bit?
So we're a little bit different than most companies that are young like us, because we, we really have, uh, first of all, a very experienced staff. Our management team has been around for a long period of time. We have a vast background at much larger shops. Um, we also have that entrepreneurial spirit. So that's where it begins. Um, from there, we, we are highly resourced. We've put made an investment into, into building resources that, uh, make a difference. So we have a research team. If you go to our website, um, we have a research team that does a ton of research on the industries, on the markets, on individual stocks, and that's all on the website for free. Uh, so that's, we, we get a lot of idea generation from that. I'm a student of the markets. Uh, you know,
I do a lot of commentaries and things like that. I write a weekly, um, uh, newsletter that's free that people could subscribe to or get it on LinkedIn. It's called thoughts from themes. So we're constantly in the marketplace looking at what the market's doing, uh, what's innovative, what's exciting, and then where we can actually make a difference. Like, if it's an area like a Bitcoin where, all the big players jumped in and like, that's not for us. Like you'll get your exposure there. We want to do something that's a little bit more niche, a little bit more esoteric, but, but, as important as those types of, uh, exposures from there, I have a very close relationship with our, uh, head of product, Calvin Tsang. So we talk on a regular basis about,
What I'm hearing from advisors. I'm also out on a lot of podcasts. So I hear from the retail public about what they're looking, looking for. So we talk about that as well. Uh, and then we get together informally, but as a committee, uh, with, uh, Jose Gonzalez Navarro, who's our, uh, founder and CEO. Um, and so, and then we just make a general decision, some things we get right and some things we get, adoption for other things we don't, but if we have high conviction of it, we're, we're, we're not worried about getting immediate lift because we're fully capitalized. We're growing this thing for the future. This is not, uh, uh, a short-term thing for us where we feel we're, we're building
The next great thematic and sector-based, uh, ETF firm. And so we have a, when we have a firm commitment, we stick and then we go out and we tell the story. Um, and then, um, what we find is that over time, um, we find our audience and, and it's worthwhile. Well, Paul, I re I really
Appreciate you taking some time to hang out with me today before I let you go though. Where can people learn more about themes? Where can they learn specifically about these two ETFs? Yeah. So the best
Place to go is to our website. So www.themesetfs.com. And then you could drill down into any of the products. I, I would always recommend going to the product pages, looking at the prospectus, uh, looking at the index criteria, but all the information is there. And then what you'll also find, like I said, is a wealth of knowledge. We have tons of research pieces, um, both on the macro markets, uh, on individual securities and then, uh, on our, uh, strategies as well. So that's really the best place. And then you can follow us on social. We're on X, we're on LinkedIn, um, so on and so forth. So, um, we, we do a lot, uh, we're, we're, we try to be everywhere that we can. And, um,
Like I said, it's just been a great ride so far and I look forward to the future. We're, we're building something great and we're having a good time doing it. Well, again, thanks for being here. Oh, thanks for having me, Brad. Have a good one.
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