The line between hedge funds and retail investors has begun to blur in recent years, and a new ETF is further bridging the divide. The Opportunistic Trader ETF, trading under the ticker “WZRD,” launched on Wednesday and quickly surpassed $15 million in assets. The fund is run by Larry Benedict, who was one of the traders featured in the “Market Wizards” series of books by Jack Schwager. Benedict is a former hedge fund manager who later founded The Opportunistic Trader, an information and education service about his strategies. He said the new fund will use many of the same strategies — often including equity options — that he relied on when running billions of dollars of capital. And he’s not the only hedge fund veteran trying out products that are open to retail investors. Pershing Square’s Bill Ackman filed in February to create a closed-end fund with no minimum investment required. With an expense ratio of 0.99%, WZRD is significantly more expensive than the passive index funds that have pioneered the ETF industry, but is cheaper than what many hedge funds cost. Benedict and others are betting that smaller investors will happily pay to gain access to strategies that had previously been available to only the ultra wealthy. “I think this could potentially be the wave of the future, where you getting the hedge fund manager … for basically under 1%,” Benedict said. The WZRD ETF won’t be a buy and hold strategy common among ETFs, according to securities filings and the Opportunistic Trader team. Its holdings will include equities, other ETFs and options, with the ETF trading in and out of many of those positions within a week. Rise of active ETFs The rise of hedge-fund like ETFs is part of a broader trend toward more active funds. While passive funds still make up the vast majority of ETFs in the United States, active funds punched above their weight in terms of inflows in 2023. Some of this could be simply the next step of the shift away from mutual funds, with active fund managers moving toward an area that is growing. But another factor is a 2019 rule change by the SEC that made operating an active ETF easier, as well technological changes, according to Opportunistic Trader COO James Hickey. “In the last few years, the underlying technology supporting ETFs has really evolved to the point where it can support an actively traded options strategy,” Hickey said. The top holdings in WZRD as of Friday morning include the SPDR S & P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) , the Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ) , Nvidia and JPMorgan Chase . Benedict said the fund will often focus its trading on the areas of the market with strong momentum, like technology. “It’s the hotter area in the market, obviously, and for what we do we like volatility. So I kind of search it out,” Benedict said. To be sure, even active managers with strong track records are not always worth the fees paid for their expertise. Many studies have shown that few if any active managers can consistently beat the market.
