Paisley Nardini, Tema ETFs

Paisley Nardini is back on Behind the Ticker for her second appearance, this time in a new role. At the beginning of September 2026, she joined Tema ETFs as Head of Investment Strategy — a firm founded in 2022 that has doubled its assets in 2026 to roughly $4 billion and now ranks as the second fastest-growing active ETF issuer year to date, driven largely by NASA (space) and VOLT (electrification). Paisley's career started in fixed income trading and portfolio management before shifting into multi-asset investment strategy across liquid alternatives and derivative income, giving her the macro and cross-asset foundation she now applies to Tema's thematic equity lineup.

In this episode, Paisley walks through DICE — the Tema Trading and Prediction Markets ETF — which launched on September 9, 2026 on CBOE at 75 basis points. The episode starts with the distinction that matters most: DICE is not an event contract ETF. It does not trade the binary outcome contracts themselves. It invests in the infrastructure, platforms, and ecosystem powering prediction markets, which currently see approximately $50 billion in monthly volume — roughly double where the year started — and are forecasted to grow 20x to $1 trillion in annual volume by 2030. The September launch was deliberately timed to coincide with the NFL season and the runway into the 2026 midterms, both major catalysts for prediction market activity.

The construction of the fund is roughly 85% publicly listed companies — Interactive Brokers (which is integrating prediction market contracts directly into its trading interface), Coinbase, Intercontinental Exchange, Robinhood, Circle, and others — plus a 15% sleeve of pre-IPO exposure to Kalshi and Polymarket through an SPV, held at approximately 7.5% each. Paisley walks through how the private positions are priced in the fund's daily NAV, why Tema acquired them at 10-13% discounts to their most recent private valuations, and why these are strategic long-term positions rather than pre-IPO trades — the same discipline Tema applied to SpaceX inside NASA, which they've kept even as the position appreciated substantially. She also explains Tema's "systematic sandwich" investment process, which pairs an upfront quantitative screen with fundamental bottom-up analysis to ensure purity of exposure in a concentrated portfolio, and gives her framework for how advisors should size DICE inside a thematic sleeve at 5 to 10% of a portfolio.