Sam Rahman & John McNamara

Sam Rahman has been in the investment industry for over 30 years, 25 of those managing portfolios. He spent 15 years at Baring Asset Management, a British firm tracing its roots to the Napoleonic Wars and funding for the British Empire, where he started by sitting next to the Chief Investment Officer learning how bonds, equities, currencies, and commodities fit together across global markets. His real passion was always stock picking, and when the head of the U.S. team in Boston noticed his research for the global strategy team, he got pulled into equity analysis. From there he moved to the buy side, eventually spending a decade running billions of dollars for one of the wealthiest families in the world. John McNamara started on the trading desk at Deutsche Bank, moved to the buy side at a macro long-short fund where Hedgeye was their largest research input, and then partnered to build the asset management arm.

On this episode of Behind the Ticker, Sam and John join Brad to discuss HGRO, the Hedgeye Quality Growth ETF. It's a concentrated large-cap growth portfolio built on Hedgeye's research process, designed to deliver institutional portfolio construction in an ETF wrapper anyone can buy.

Hedgeye's Research Machine

Hedgeye was founded in 2008 by Keith McCullough after managing a hedge fund. The original vision was to provide institutional-grade research to a broader audience. Think of it as letting anyone see what a hedge fund was doing every day. The research side has built a massive following: the Hedgeye Twitter handle has roughly 280,000 followers, Keith himself has about 250,000, and there's an active community tuning into the daily macro show every morning. The asset management arm was the natural next step: if the research is that good, why not package it into strategies people can actually invest in?

John described the thesis simply: Hedgeye puts out tremendous daily research, so how can they take that and provide institutional-grade management strategies to the masses? He started down this path back in 2018, and the initial launch has been strong. The fund was sitting just north of $20 million in AUM in less than a month and a half. "I think to some degree, the thesis is really showing up," John said about the early asset growth.

Portfolio Construction: Not Just Another Growth Fund

Sam made the case that the growth ETF space has a significant gap. On one end, you have broadly diversified products that hug the benchmark. On the other, you have highly concentrated thematic funds like ARK and "Granny Shots" that raise a lot of money and dominate media, but lack real portfolio construction. "If you look at what they own and how they hold it, there's not much going on there. There's no construction of any sort," Sam said.

HGRO sits in between. It's a concentrated portfolio built around three themes: deep-moat compounders, innovators, and special situations. The difference between HGRO and the thematic funds is that Sam brings decades of institutional portfolio construction to the table. He went from managing billions for one of the world's wealthiest families to delivering essentially the same strategy in a wrapper anyone can buy for about $25. "To be able to deliver that kind of product, where you have experienced institutional managers that build a fully constructed portfolio that is going to weather all sorts of markets, that's what we're trying to do," he explained.

The fund benchmarks against the S&P 500 rather than the Russell 1000 Growth, which gives them flexibility to find ideas across sectors. The Russell 1000 Growth is heavily concentrated in two or three sectors. With the S&P 500 as the benchmark, they can move from technology to energy to financials to utilities to industrials, wherever the opportunities are. "As I did at the family office, where I was benchmarked against the S&P 500, we could find good ideas in any sector at any given time," Sam said.

Sam's Background: From London to the Family Office

Sam's career trajectory is worth noting because it explains the caliber of thinking behind HGRO. After his early years in London at Baring Asset Management learning global macro from the CIO, he moved to Boston to become an equity analyst and eventually a portfolio manager. His last role before Hedgeye was running money for a single family office, one of the wealthiest families in the world, for about a decade. Managing billions with that level of concentration and accountability is a fundamentally different experience than running a diversified mutual fund. The risk management, the construction discipline, the accountability to a single family that's watching every move, that all flows into how HGRO is built.

Distribution Through the Hedgeye Ecosystem

The marketing strategy leans heavily on Hedgeye's existing audience. With hundreds of thousands of followers consuming daily research, John believes the built-in distribution gives them a significant advantage. The plan is to reach the scale needed for dialogues with platforms and larger investors through that organic reach, then let assets and performance speak for themselves. "From there, assets and performance are going to speak for themselves and we're very confident in that," John said. More ETF launches are already in the pipeline, with the trust board and lawyers actively working on new filings. The focus remains on delivering institutional-quality management in accessible wrappers.

Key Takeaways

• HGRO is a concentrated large-cap growth ETF built on Hedgeye's daily research process, targeting quality growth names across three buckets: compounders, innovators, and special situations.
• Sam Rahman brings 25 years of portfolio management experience, including a decade running billions for a single ultra-high-net-worth family office.
• The fund benchmarks against the S&P 500 rather than Russell 1000 Growth for broader sector flexibility across technology, energy, financials, and industrials.
• The fund raised over $20 million in under six weeks, leveraging Hedgeye's combined audience of 500,000+ social media followers and daily macro show viewers.
• More ETF launches from Hedgeye Asset Management are in the pipeline. The firm's approach focuses on institutional-quality construction, not thematic bets.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.