It’s Part of the Game: Matt Tuttle on Closing ETFs and Looking to the Stars

Matthew Tuttle isn’t necessarily looking to be in most portfolios. 

In fact, he said his company’s strategies are better fits for clients seeking high risks and high rewards, and they often speak more directly to Reddit day traders with Robinhood accounts than moms and pops with IRAs. Tuttle Capital Management has a slew of 2x single-stock funds, and tries to avoid strong correlation with major indexes. It’s also not afraid to bet on out-of-this-world ideas. “The S&P 500 is great, but launching an S&P 500 fund is never going to work from our standpoint,” Tuttle said.

ETF Upside sat down with Tuttle recently to discuss his approach to ETFs, what happens when a fund doesn’t work out and what has him so interested in alien technology.

ETF Upside: What’s the philosophy behind your ETFs?

Matt Tuttle: I’m an active trader, so a good idea is something I would buy. I’m not going to launch a product that I wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole. It’s also got to be something that I can market. My space is with self-directed investors and some independent advisors. I can’t compete with BlackRock, so I’m never getting into Merrill Lynch, UBS or anything like that. A fund needs to be different from what’s already out there. Being first is huge, especially for us. BlackRock can be 10th, and it doesn’t matter. For me, we’ve got to be first. If we’re not first, I’m probably not interested.

The UFO Disclosure AI Powered ETF turned some heads. What prompted filing for that fund?

This is something I’ve been fascinated with since I was a kid. Where that fascination turned into a product started in 2017 when The New York Times broke a story about a secret Pentagon group that was tracking UFOs. They provided footage of fighter pilots chasing these Tic Tac things that moved in ways that theoretically are impossible. Everyone’s asking, “Are they aliens? Are they Chinese? Are they this or that?” which are all great questions. But I’m looking at that and saying, “What energy source are they using?”

We’ve been having these Congressional meetings where people are testifying, saying we are reverse-engineering some of this technology. This topic has so much disinformation in it that it’s hard to know what to believe, but if that technology were to ever surface, it would be a game-changer. I was trading in the early days of the internet. I’m now actively trading AI stocks. If a source of free energy were made available, it would be the biggest thing ever, so I filed an ETF for it. 

I had serious people, not the tinfoil hat people, but serious people reaching out to me — people high up in big investment firms, reporters, venture capitalists, academics, those who had been in the defense industry — saying this was really cool and the tech exists. Also, if we’re ever going to get the truth, I think this [Trump] administration is going to be the one that does it. 

You’ve filed for and issued a lot of single-stock or single-asset funds. What advantages do you see in those?

We’ve really created an ecosystem with them. When we first started doing this, it was Tesla and Nvidia, and that was it. But now there’s more and more money going into more and more stocks, and post-covid, that market has gotten more thematic. 

There’s a group of stocks today that I think people would call meme stocks, but I don’t like that. Yesterday’s meme stocks were AMC and GameStop, which were crap companies that hedge funds would short, rightfully so. But then a bunch of retail investors banded together to crush the hedge funds. Now you’ve got a bunch of companies that are positioned to take off tomorrow. You could argue these are companies that don’t have any earnings, but they’re also positioned at the forefront of where the world is going. A lot of these stocks are not crap companies, they’re just early.

Covid changed everything because you had these guys working from home, no boss over their shoulders, and they started trading stocks. They got fed up with just putting their money in the S&P 500 and earning 8% to 12% a year. They started connecting on social media, and they’re a powerful force. I just got back from Korea, and they love this stuff. You’re not allowed to gamble in Korea, so I think this is their gambling. There’s also a lot of places where people can’t buy Bitcoin, but they can buy a 2x long in MicroStrategy, so that’s what they do as the alternative. There’s a lot going on that has contributed to the rise of these 2X long single-stocks.

What happens when an ETF just doesn’t work out and has to fold?

It’s part of the game. As long as I have the vision of getting the fund to $15 million, I’m going to launch something. But sometimes, that doesn’t come to pass. The one that really bothered me was the inverse [Jim] Cramer fund. A lot of it was timing. If I had come out with it in 2022, we’d have billions of dollars in it, and it would’ve been awesome. I came out with it in 2023 a few months before Nvidia shared its earnings, showed the world AI is here, and the Mag 7 basically quadrupled. Everything else he calls turns to crap, but he got the Mag 7 right, and he wasn’t moving off of it. I can’t have an inverse Cramer fund and be intellectually honest about it when my personal account is loaded to the gills with the Mag 7. That one sucked. I really wanted to make it work.