New ETF Shop Snags Former Janus Henderson Exec
Reckoner Capital Management, which added its Leveraged AAA CLO ETF in July, has aspirations of building out a global credit business.
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Without being koi, sometimes it’s nice to be a big fish in a small pond.
Richard Hoge, a former COO of Janus Henderson’s ETF business, recently landed at Reckoner Capital Management, and has been tasked with building out its exchange traded fund suite (currently, the firm has one). The firm, which launched in February backed by Redbird Capital Partners, rolled out its $33 million Leveraged AAA CLO ETF (RAAA) in July. ETFs are a central piece of the company’s plan to build out a global credit platform, CEO John Kim said.
“The aim is to bring alternative assets to various client bases in very easy-to-access wrappers,” he said, adding that the ETF market “is the most easily accessible for the vast majority of investors.”
Pond, Meet Ocean
The ETF business is booming, continually breaking sales records, while a flood of new products come to market. But it’s dominated by a few massive players (ahem … BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street), and finding a niche for differentiation is becoming harder. Reckoner’s broad requirements for new ETFs are that they be strategies that belong in the format and aren’t the latest iterations of products that already exist, said Kim, who prior to the company’s founding was CEO and CIO of Panagram Structured Asset Management. On the first point, private credit is a no-go, given the liquidity constraints, he said. “We are very conscious of daily liquidity.”
Hoge’s background could help with that:
- He previously held executive roles at Natixis and KPMG.
- The firm he co-founded in 2009, VelocityShares, was bought by Janus Henderson in 2014 for $30 million. At the time, it was seen more as a play to acquire talent rather than an easy way to enter the ETF business, ETF.com’s Dave Nadig wrote.
Let’s Get Real: Hoge, who has backgrounds in law and taxation, “knows the ETF market extremely well,” Kim said. “He has a lot of different viewpoints that he can bring to bear on new product creation… We need someone to be the realist in the room.”
