John Kim joins the broadcast now down here on the trading floor.
He is the co-founder and CEO of Reckoner Capital Management.
Great to have you here on the show and joining us here at the New York Stock Exchange.
Thanks for having me.
Give us first and foremost a bit of an introduction to your work at Reckoner for anyone a bit unfamiliar.
And also, John, what would you say are some of the firm's top priorities here in Q1 of 26?
Yes, so we're.
We specialize in structured credit and other areas that are being brought now to the retail markets across the country.
We launched 4 funds last week on the New York Stock Exchange.
They are all ETFs based on CLO bond portfolios, so we have a flavor that is more safe, AAA rated.
We have That's a little bit more high yield B rated, and then we have some interesting dividend frequency funds that sit on top of that, and that's where the interest lies, I think, from a lot of retail investors and also advisors because some of them you will be able to sort of determine what frequency you want to receive your dividends in.
Most of the competitor funds are monthly.
So they're going to be income taxable if you don't get a dividend or you can at least control when you receive that dividend or take advantage of your gains, you can potentially get better treatment.
How do you go about determining the type of ETF products to issue?
Is it contingent on macroeconomic conditions?
Is it general market conditions?
Is it feedback from would-be retail investors or a little bit of all those things?
It's a little bit of all those things, but it's mostly the third one because we.
Trying to listen to our investors and bring them funds that actually make a difference in their portfolios.
We do not want to issue the 18th, you know, XYZ fund in a certain area.
We'd like to bring some innovation and solve some issues for the ultimate investors in our funds, and that's what we feel these new funds do from a taxation of course we do you think had been most among the biggest pain points that those retail investors have that you felt like you could.
Address in the market by providing them ETF products that maybe they could not quite get anywhere else.
So there's two things with our funds.
The first one is we're bringing a product that historically was only institutional, and bringing that to the retail markets really allows people access to risk adjusted yields that they were not able to get before.
The second thing that we're bringing is, you know, people ask us like, is there any way that I cannot get a 1099.
Monthly dividends and we're trying to address that by saying no, now you can choose your dividend frequency and you can reinvest all of your dividends if you want to.
Just keep it in the fund, buy the stock, it will accrete up in and you can sell it when you want.
What do you view as being among the next frontiers for Reckoner in the general alternative credit space.
I'm sure you're all working on a lot of exciting things here for 2026 in addition to the suite of ETF products you've already rolled out.
We have a lot of plans, a lot of Ideas.
The first thing we're going to do is concentrate on our netting, our core, which is structured credit, and we're going to continue to make more structured credit asset classes available to the general public in a very easily consumable wrapper.
So everything is about ease, access, making sure that people are getting good risk adjusted yield for what they're bringing to the table, and we want to continue to do that.
What does it tell you overall that we're seeing such strong demand for ETF.
There are actually more ETF listed.
Products and there are underlying publicly traded companies today.
It is definitely the future.
People want to choose a specific kind of exposure that they're getting to the market.
ETFs are clearly a very, very good way to do that, and I just think that's going to continue to grow.
I mean, as more people come up with more ideas, people will find better ways to invest ultimately.
John Kim, co-founder, CEO of Reckoner Capital Management, thanks for joining us here at the Big Board and for being on the broadcast.
It's great to have you.
Thanks.
