Animal Spirits Podcast - Talk Your Book: Option Income Is So Hot Right Now

Episode Date: July 14, 2025

On this episode of Animal Spirits: Talk Your Book, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Michael Batnick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ben Carlson⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠���⁠⁠⁠⁠ are joined by Garrett Paolella, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of NEOS Investments to discuss losing upside to cover downside, surviving bull markets, volatility across indices, fitting these strategies within a portfolio, and much more! Find complete show notes on our blogs... Ben Carlson’s ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠A Wealth of Common Sense⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Michael Batnick’s ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Irrelevant Investor⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Feel free to shoot us an email at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation. Check out the latest in financial blogger fashion at The Compound shop: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://idontshop.com⁠⁠ Investing involves the risk of loss. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be or regarded as personalized investment advice or relied upon for investment decisions. Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson are employees of Ritholtz Wealth Management and may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this video. All opinions expressed by them are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. See our disclosures here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ The Compound Media, Incorporated, an affiliate of ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ritholtz Wealth Management⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, receives payment from various entities for advertisements in affiliated podcasts, blogs and emails. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. For additional advertisement disclaimers see here ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ritholtzwealth.com/advertising-disclaimers⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's Animal Spirits Talk Your Book is brought to by Nios Investments. Go to neosfunds.com, that's N-E-O-S. To learn more about their whole suite of high-income products, they have a high-income ETF on the S&P 500, the NASDAQ, the Russell 2000, Bitcoin, all these different strategies. Check it out at NiosFunds.com. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching.

All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben are, solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ridholt's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Ridholt's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. On today's show, we are joined by Garrett Pay-O-Lella. Garrett is the co-founder and managing partner at Neos Investments. I went for a drink. with our good friend Tom Liden, who made an investment into Nios about a month ago. And I never heard of Nios.

And I'm with Tom and Garrett and we're talking, catching up, whatever. And Garrett tells me, so tell me your story. What are you guys doing? And it comes out in the conversation that they were at $7 billion in assets. And I said, holy moly, incredible. And then today, after the recording, Garrett said, hey, Michael, remember we were together about a month ago. Today we're at, we crossed $8 billion. So the client demand for these sort of strategies, which are transforming a lot of the total return from price into, they're chopping it

up into a big portion of the total return coming from income. And what can I say? The people, people just love, love, love income. And the options-based income, too, it's just exploded in popularity. And going to, we said on the show, it's going to continue to grow in popularity because you get this, I've had multiple conversations over the years with the retirees who say, I don't want to touch my principle. I want to live on income. And I think these kind of strategies, for those people who have that psychological hurdle, these types of strategies make that happen. And for people who want to live off of their portfolio now who aren't retired, but just want to have throw some income, I think these products are actually popular with younger investors now, too. It's not just retirees. Yeah. So, of course, there is no free lunch in investing. On today's show, we get into some of the red flags that people should be aware of as this, I don't know if it's a nascent category, but it certainly is newish. And the growth is seems to be accelerating. So as more of these come to market,

Please do your homework. Make sure that you understand the trade-offs because, like, everything else in investing, there is a trade-off. And so we get into all of that and more on today's show with Garrett Paiolella. Garrett, good morning. Morning, guys. Thanks for having me today. You're welcome. Thank you for coming on.

A congratulations are in order. You guys won the best new active ETF, which is a very competitive category I would imagine for the Neo, is it Neos or Neos? Neos. Okay. I don't know why I said Neos. That would be weird. For the Neos, NASDAQ-100, high-income ETF, the ticker is triple QI, QQQI. Why did you get that honor? Yeah, listen, I think overall is we look to help investors through generating income and tax-sufficient ways. This product is unique in that sense that we're really focused in leveraging the NASDAQ 100, which historically hasn't had a lot of income thrown off of it in ways to generate that tax-sufficient income. I think performance was certainly part of the category in considerations

as well. And obviously, the adoption, the fund's around $2.5 billion right now, which is about only 15 months into launch. So certainly client adoption as well. Whoa. It's such a hot category these days of clients wanting income and advisors having the tools to deliver it. So I'm looking at the performance of the triple Qs versus your product. And it tracks fairly close. I mean, very closely, not fairly closely. It tracks very closely. Not exactly one for one. But effectively, they do the same thing. And so I'm guessing that as you just mentioned, you are giving a similar return profile, except you are transforming some of the price return into income return. Yeah, I think that was said well. The longer term will give up some of that upside.

You've got to, you know, can't always have your cake and eat it too. You know, so the idea is you give up a little bit of that upside in order to generate that current income through the use of, right, selling, you know, call options on the NASDAQ 100 against your NASDAQ 100 position. Right. So you're, you would imagine, especially in a rip-roaring bull market, you're going to, you're probably going to lag a little bit just by the nature of the strategy. Exactly. If you're in a rip-or and bull market, you know, being long only is obviously going to be a place to be, we should have some job. general lag to that. And it's more looking at it on a month-over-month basis than it is, you know, really longer term, you know, than that. So some of these strategies will actually sell options on the individual security. Some use the index. It sounds like you just use the index. Is that for, is that right? Yeah, we use index options everywhere we can here at

Nios and specifically on this product, because you get favorable tax treatments on using index options. They can't be called away from you. They're cash settled. So in our opinion, there's a variety of benefits for the end investor to use an index option wherever you can. With a caveat that we're not tax professionals, what are the tax benefits here? Yeah. So when you look at index options, first and foremost, they get taxed at a 60% long-term capital gains rate and a 40% short-term. Come out.

What? Yeah. 60%. All right, say that's slowly one more time. I'm sorry, that's surprising to me. I didn't know that. Yeah. So regardless of the investor's holding period, if the position could be a day, it could be a

month. It could be even longer than a year. The index options get taxed at a 60% of allocation to long-term capital gains and a 40% to short-term because they're cash settled. So that, in theory, if you want to think about being in the highest-income tax bracket, right, in the nation, it's going to get you a tax rate of like around 27%. So really advantageous than ordinary income, short-term, you know, obviously when we think better is going to be, you know, long-term capital gains right on the whole piece plus, you know, Medicare and all the other stuff you got to pay. So that's 60% no matter the holding period. That sounds like a cheat code. Is this, is this something that you discovered or is this just like out there and other people are

just maybe unaware? Like talk to us about what you're doing versus what a lot of the other people in this giant and grown category are doing. Yeah. So the index options, certainly no cheat code. It actually falls, if you want to really nerd out section 1256 of the IRS tax code. kind of goes through futures and index options, since they're all cash settled, the IRS taxism in that 60-40 way. So not unique to us. What is unique to us is given the fact that these are all income-bearing products for us, we want to have the highest net after-tax return. So we do embed tax loss harvesting in our investment process also. So there's another layer of

things that we look at on the tax structuring, but from the index option standpoint, much more favorable, but that's not unique just a NEOs. Anyone who trades an index option that's got the capacity to, right? I mean, if you think about a NASDAC 100 index option, it's worth about $2.2.2.3 million for just one option contract. The regular retail investor can't trade, usually that amount of size. If you were trying to do something similar, but at the individual stock level, I would assume that the tax treatment is different. That's correct. Single stocks, ETF options, swaps, equity-linked notes, all of those get taxed at 100% short-term, which ultimately is ordinary income. So how often are you doing the tax-loss harvesting piece? Is that a regular

ongoing thing? Are you more proactive depending on the market environment? How do you, how does that work? Yeah, so it's just a regular thing. So it's embedded in our role process. So as we roll our options, traditionally, especially we're talking QQQQI, that's on a monthly basis. And so we're going to look that, think about this. The easiest way to explain it, market runs 10% in a month, right? And we had sold short call options against our portfolio that gave us maybe an upside capture of 7 or 8%. We're going to capture all that 7 to 8%. But that 2 to 3% we didn't capture is going to come in the form of a loss against the options. And so when we go to roll our options, we can take a loss of 2 to 3%. And the the best part about the ETF structure is those losses get carried forward indefinitely. So

we're able to then, for that month, the investor's up 70% total return. Let's just call it 8%. We distribute 1% out to them. So NAV appreciated 7%. They got a 1% distribution, but we were able to take 1% of that 2% upside that was capped as a loss for the portfolio. And so you get to just simply in standard gap accounting, you offset a loss versus a gain. And the gain is the distributable part of the portfolio. There's probably no way for you to know this, but what do you think it is about income that clients are finding so attractive? Because I suspect that most people in this product, they like to see the income hit their

account. They're not necessarily using this product to fund their living. Like, they're probably not taking the distributions and living on them. I'm sure there are some people that are. but there's something about seeing that distribution come in that is very seductive, I suppose. Sorry, it's a monthly distribution. Is that right? Yeah, everything is a monthly distribution. I think my going to answer your question, too, is like, it's actually unique. We see, so nobody's done this longer than us overall.

My co-founding partner and I, Troy, brought out the very first option-based income portfolios and ETFs back in 2013. So under a different company at that point, But as we've seen the market and the adoption shift from income investors, they actually, a lot of them like to take that income on a monthly basis. So it's unique in the fact that this used to be focused more on retirement later stage investors that are looking for income. Now we have people in their 20s easily adopting the products because they want to find alternative passive income sources, right? You know, people who are real estate agents, right, or they're out doing something in their core day-to-day business. they're finding this is a way to supplement their income and their lifestyle, you know, on an ongoing basis.

We see all walks of life of who are investing in these types of products. And they want to get that in the most, you know, tax-efficient manner, especially if they can get, you know, income monthly distributed out to, you know, their investment account and swept into their bank account at a much lower tax rate than ordinary income. I guess that door-dash bill ain't going to pay itself. Yeah, that's right. So you have that, depending on like where you look, the distribution, you of the QQQI is, you know, 14 or 15 percent right now. Some are in that range,

depending on where you look. How volatile is that payout yield? Like how often, because obviously that's not the same thing as a yield on a bond. This is, these are, you know, this is not like a bond substitute. But how much does that fluctuate? Yeah. So it doesn't fluctuate actually that much. That's part of our investment process. So a little different for us than the rest of some of our competitors out there, we're not focus on distributing way more than we need to. So when vol spikes and you can generate more income, our concept is actually keep a consistent distribution rate so that people know and understand what they're going to be receiving on a monthly basis. And if we can smooth that out over low vol and high vol times, then that just

makes the product that much more consistent for an investor. Some of our other folks that compete with us in the space, like when vol's low, they really reduce their distribution. all spikes, they throw out crazy numbers that are just astronomical. In our opinion, let's kind of smooth this thing out for income investors knowing that they can rely on a pretty consistent basis. How are you able to do that? It seems like Alchemy. Yeah, so we look at things a little different. Like we target these yields. So as Ben was just talking about, right, we're looking for kind of a 12 to 15% annualized distribution rate for QQQI. Some of our other products might be in the 10 to 12% range for equity indexes that have a little bit lower volatility. But really to keep

but simple for today is when Vol's low, that means the equity markets are rallying, we tend to write our options a little closer and on more of the portfolio. As soon as we hit that income threshold, that's because you get reversion of the mean. You tend to get an equity market sell-off. You get that equity market sell-off, VAL goes up significantly. You can generate income on an easier basis, so we're writing those options further out and on way less of the portfolio because you get that bounce back. And the key and more the risk that we like to talk to investors about is,

is how much of your upside are you capping to generate a high amount of current income right off the NASDAQ 100. And so we on a monthly basis, our models are shifting the options to really take into account meeting that income need first that the first investment objective of the prospectus states. And then secondarily, we want to capture as much upside as we can by shifting those options. So Michael asked about the yield thing. And we've been saying for years that we think yield is probably the easiest sale to make, right? There's not a lot of, obviously there's some explaining to do and some education behind it, but people see the number and sometimes that's all it takes. Do you think that your investors are okay with giving up some upside because they

have that more stable yield coming in? Is that the right tradeoff that people are making here? Yeah, absolutely. We're very forefront in working with investors and advisors and where these products fit in their portfolios. They're complements. They're not replacing your whole Q's exposure, right? They're not replacing your whole equity exposure. So you blend this in as part of your portfolio to generate a really above average and tax fission, you know, yield above what you're getting from dividend paying equities. But it's not your whole equity sleeve. And so I think with that, it's really around like messaging. It's around working with clients within their allocation framework. And so that it's a part of your portfolio. No one investment, regardless of what it is, us or anybody else,

should be your entire portfolio thinking that it's going to be the holy grail. This sort of investment might drive some quants nuts because they're like, well, you could just do X, Y, or Z and, you know, do it yourself or whatever. And I think that the fundamental misunderstanding or what they might not be understanding is that people are willing to pay for an easy button. We're lazy. I mentioned DoorDash earlier. Like people pay 26 bucks for a Caesar Sal if you delivered because they don't want to go out and get it themselves. And this is a very similar concept because there are ways to do this. Why don't you just sell some of your cues and just generate income that way.

But this is consistent. It's easy. It's reliable. It's automated. It doesn't break. Talk about the behavioral component of this. Yeah. So I think you get the nail in the head.

One, it's easy. And I think people like to have that easy button within their overall portfolios as a complement to their other investments. They're not just looking at one product. If you're going to do this in your portfolio, there are some structural difficulties. Yes, you can do it. What's different. The main ones I'd point out is it's not putting the position on.

once a month for you. If you're trading, you know, QQQEF options, those can get called away. And that can call your whole position away. So let's just say you owned, right, 10 grand worth of the queues and you sold a call against it, right? If the cues run, that person could exercise against you. And now you have a taxable short-term gain, not only on the option, but also on your underlying position. Right. So there's operational. There's a lot of work to it. But then there's also the tax consequences that trading that ETF option is ordinary income. Getting your whole underlying position called away from you could be a significant taxable, you know, gain on your broader part of your portfolio.

So this is a way that you can just lay that all off. Let us do it in an institutional manner, be able to trade those huge institutional contract sizes that give you tax efficiency plus the tax loss harvesting because that ETF structures I mentioned before gives you that capability as well to carry losses forward, you know, longer than other types of, you know, holding structures. How proactive do you have to be in trading the options? Because obviously, we know the, you know, one of the things I've always thought is you can't, it's hard to do is set it and forget its strategy with options because the prices are

changing based on interest rates and based on volatility and where the stock market is. So how proactive does your team have to be when making these trades? Yeah, so it depends on the products. These types of products actually are on more of a monthly cadence. We've spent decades of years managing these types of products and strategies outside of ETS for major institutions. And we've done tons of research and analysis, building out our models of what's the best worst reward. So on some of the products, they're monthly, and some of them are weekly. We don't go into the dailies because ultimately you're kind of in a synthetic equity

exposure. And in our opinion, not getting as much of the juice and the volatility reduction that you want, right? You do want some vol reduction given their income strategies. But to answer your question, monthly and weekly are our traditional cadences across our products. Right. Because you do have a strategy that works on the S&P 500, that's Spy Eye, the Russell 2000, and then are those similar, I guess, in nature in terms of how the strategy are those different because of the size of those markets? Yeah, no, they're all the same. The model runs slightly different just because the volatility levels of those indices are different. But yeah, we're trading an S&P 500 index option, a Russell 2000 index option. But yeah, generally the same concept, just some subtleties of differences,

really because of the underlying indices. Okay, so you also have a Bitcoin high-income ETF, which I would imagine is relatively new. What movie is the line from like, you want to get nuts? Let's get nuts. What is that from? Is that what the Bitcoin option is, I guess? That's what the Bitcoin one is.

I imagine this one is a little different, but maybe I'm wrong. How does this one work? How does the Bitcoin income product work? Yeah, so generally same concept in the sense. But in order to get the Bitcoin exposure in a 40-act structure, not like a 33 act where all the ETPs live because we can't trade derivatives and spot Bitcoin all in a 33 act. So there's some structure behind it, but not to go down a rabbit hole.

We're essentially giving you exposure to spot Bitcoin through long one of the ETPs as a portion of the holding to what we're allowed to. The other side is creating a synthetic where you sell a Bitcoin index option, put option, and you buy a call option. It gives you delta one exposure. So full up and down exposure. being linked to spot Bitcoin. And then just like the QQQI or the other products we talked about, we're laddering out short, covered calls using Bitcoin index options to generate.

Biggest difference, Bitcoin VAL, 60, relative to an SMP at 15 to 18, a NASDAQ historically at 20. So you're generating 25 to 30 percent a year in distributable opportunity just because you're leveraging that Bitcoin VAL is just incredible. So are you able to keep that relatively constant too, or is that a little harder in a strategy this volatile? No, same thing. So we're shifting our options. I mean, just so for like a quick example, those options can be positioned 15 to 25 percent out of the money. We've seen since we've launched this product and had it out in the last like nine months. And so we're just shifting the amount of overlay percentage and where those options are positioned to keep that consistent. So when Vol spikes

again, we don't want to overgenerate. And when Vol and Bitcoin comes down a little, bit. We got plenty of opportunity to still generate income and have upside. By the way, it was Michael Keaton and Batman who said that. I forgot about that, but now I'm reminded. All right. So, wow, 25% annualized-ish, give or take the market environment. Again, it's the same type of deal where you are transforming the price return, at least a large portion of it, into income. And listen, some people might say, well, why would you want to do that? Well, Well, maybe you don't. But the proof is in the pudding because you just launched this.

At least the proof is in the pudding in terms of like, you know, adoption, user demand. You guys launched us in October and it's already at $347 million in AUM. Like, holy, people love income. There's no denying it. I guess if you want, if you wanted like to, you know, some people want to dip their toe into Bitcoin or crypto, I guess this would be a way to do that if you were really nervous about the other aspects of it, right? Yeah, no, we've seen that, especially more from the advisor side of, like, client demand

pushing, like, I want to own some crypto in my portfolio. And, like, you missed it at 60, then 80, then 100, you know, random 1-10, you're like, what's the deal? This is a way to kind of dip your toe, get a little bit of that exposure for clients. But know that at least you got, you know, some income being generated off the amount of volatility if it trades sideways or slightly goes down. You got something there, and you're not just, you know, betting on it going to 200,000 or a million depending on whose price targets you follow.

Yeah. And this goes without saying, but it's obvious that these yields aren't based on par. So the price of the underlying goes down. Yes, you're getting a high yield still, but you're not getting as much income. Just had to fill that out there, obviously. Yeah, yeah. Well, wait, you are getting as much income. It's just the total return is going to go down because the price is getting that crushed.

Well, that's what I mean. Okay. The percentage of, if Bitcoin goes from 100 to 50, then you're still getting a 30% yield, your income gets cut in half. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, think about like the best way I've explained this to some people over the last decade or two has just been like, think about it like a real estate position, right?

Your building your house is going to fluctuate, but your rental income is going to be able to come in. And so, right, over long periods of time, your underlying appreciates, you know, but over short periods of time or different time frames, your underlying can fluctuate. That's the same in any one of the 12 products that we have here is, right, you're using that volatility as a way to generate the income from the underlying. but that underlying exposure core holding S&P NASDAQ Bitcoin rate will fluctuate with the price, you know, of those reference assets. We were talking with Todd Sown the other day and he was, he has a great chart showing some of these single stock levered ETFs. And listen, if you want to trade with leverage Apple and then a product like that makes sense, right?

like it's it's less complex it's the easy button it's easier than than than uh buying options but is there not a line where it's like come on guys so there are not only so he so the chart that i'm describing is it's it's market cap versus date launched and the big boys the apples the invidia's that the levered ETFs were launched a while ago and now they're going downstream and the market caps are getting smaller and smaller to the point where you see like uh levered Raghetti and some of these quantum names, it's like, all right, like, so with that, I ask you, is there no limit to what sort of price stream you will turn into income? Short answer is no.

There is a limit, right? I mean, as an institutional manager, right, you have to be cognizant of underlying liquidity of that underlying reference, you know, asset that you're exposed to. And at some point, you're going to max out liquidity. The single stock levered, you know, is not something we'd ever play. plan. We just don't view those, you know, as something that ultimately is as beneficial as, you know, building more structural long-term wealth. But for us, I mean, yes, we're exposed over 12 products right now from gold to Bitcoin to real estate. You know, and when you think about

those, like we're still in very broad core building blocks of portfolios. We'll continue to offer more solutions. You know, we filed for an international product. So like as investor demand and people want to expose reviews, that's our goal here. It's not a product, you know, pitch for us. on, like, what's a solution to help you build your overall asset location? But there is going to be a limit to where you can ultimately go in market cap size to make sure you have exposure and tradeability. And ultimately, that means liquidity, you know, in that underlying. So no high income on pudgy penguins.

Yeah. Not from us. Looking at the, obviously, the explosion of these strategies, it seems like a lot of it has come this decade. And I would imagine the demand is still going to be there, especially since we have so many retiring baby boomers who the income piece is going to be huge. for, right? Again, the psychological hurdle. A lot of people have a much easier time spending that income portion than the principle. Where are we going to go with these strategies? Are there

a million other places we can go, or is everything just going to be a derivative on a derivative now? Listen, it's a really good question. I think as Wall Street, and if you look at anyone who's an ETFishore, they're going to go anywhere and everywhere they possibly can, right? I mean, you've already seen that, right? A three-x levered, you know, penguin trade is just, you know, that doesn't make sense in my book. But ultimately, I think for us is there's an adoption, there's an opportunity. I think one of our major competitors, one of the largest ETF issuers in the U.S. or arguably in the world, right, put out a recent report that $650 billion in option-based products, you know, should be there by 2030. Right. So I think it's only going to grow.

And I think if you think about us in particular, we're the first ones that did this back in 2012. And so before the charts, before the flows, I mean, being. 99% of every inflow because we're the only products. We view it as more the institutional, but solutions base. So we're not going to jump into gimmicky things and try to do it on everything. It's going to be on where's your big structural allocations in your portfolio. And for us, I mean, I think that's where it goes. But you're right. We sold yield in a zero interest rate environment. We've sold yield and helped clients get, you know, above average income. And now a higher interest rate environment, higher than we've been, you know, from the last 24 months. And so,

you know, with that being said, I think you're right. I think there's a huge. structural tailwind of people always needing income. And one anecdotal thing I could add is, right, when we were doing this over a decade ago, it was 50, 60, 7 year old investors looking for income almost at retirement or in retirement. Now we have a tremendous amount of investors in their 20s looking to generate passive income outside of just their daily, you know, job and paycheck. So I think it's only going to continue. Unfortunately, there's going to be plenty people that throw ridiculous things at the wall. You know, but for us, we'll stick with your, you know, core structural institutional allocations in your portfolio that really meant to be wealth building

and not quick trades that unfortunately people might get on the wrong side. So Garrett, you've been doing this for over 10 years, but the asset class is really only starting to explode in popularity. I guess it's been a few years now, but it's really, it's hockey sticking. So what things should investors be aware of? What questions should they ask as they seek to evaluate what the best option is for them. Yeah, this is actually a huge thing might we talk about. Like not all option strategies are created equal. And the biggest thing I would say is do your homework on what you plan to invest it and make sure it fits your risk tolerance and understand the product. There's a lot of products out there. We've seen NASDAQ 100 products with 60, 80, 100% yields. It's just

not possible, right? The underlying reference assets not up 60, 80, 100% every year. So I think as you think about it, don't get confused with maybe some just very gross yield. that can be kicked off of a product and ultimately make sure you do your homework to understand what the product does and doesn't do. So you're putting it in your portfolio as a complement to where it should be and it's not used in some incorrect way that's ultimately you're going to wake up and be like, oh man, I'm in trouble on that. I thought it was this and it was not at all. For advisors who haven't really used these solutions in their portfolios, how are you helping them educate their clients in terms of explaining how these things can fit into a portfolio?

Yeah. So we spend a lot of time on advisor education, making sure that the advisor understands it, but also keeps things like incredibly simple. We also focus on a lot of content, a lot of very simple content for the average investor to understand. And then ultimately working through hypotheticals and saying, hey, give us a proxy of your portfolio. What are you thinking? What are you looking at allocating towards? And then we'll show you exactly how it's performed based on the live ETF performance and what it's going to do within the portfolio. So So education, education, education, and follow the Kiss model. Keep it as simple as possible.

And then if people want to peel back that onion, we'll go as deep as they want to go, but keep it simple. Garra, for people that want to learn more about Nios, how do we send that? Where do we send them to find some educational materials? Yeah, best is our website. Neosfunds.com. We got a ton of information there, videos, content. And then those are also ways for people to engage with us and reach out for someone to respond to you.

All right, Garrett. Appreciate the time. Yeah, thanks, guys. Appreciate the opportunity. Okay, thanks to Garrett. Remember check out NiosFunds.com to learn more. Email us, Animal Spirits, at a compound news.com.