This ETF Is Betting Against Jim Cramer’s Picks

about Matt Tuttle of Tuttle Capital Management. Before he was on the program to talk about Inverse Tesla, he teased a Jim Kramer ETF and that's what we're talking about today. Jim Kramer, of course, the host of Mad Money on Scene, which is a very entertaining show to watch, filled with lots of stockpicking, lots of calls, kind of active management at its finest. Eric, what about the Jim Kramer idea? Do you love most? Yeah? I mean, look it. The guy just has a knack for not being wrong, but

being spectacularly wrong on occasion. He's got somewhat of reverse Midas touches, how I put it, and I think that it's all over Twitter in the Internet. There's many, many examples will go through some of the episode, but I think he's just sort of late to the party a lot. He'll get his loudest and most boisterous after the price action is really good for like two or three years. I think the price gives him confidence to be loud. So he's almost like the last guy at the party

or on the bandwagon. And that's why he's a decent reverse indicator of a big collapse or a run up. And it seems to work, and it's you know, look, we're all looking for a return, so why not try something that looks to have a proven track record. So this will be a fascinating experiment in the ETF world. Okay, Joining us Matt Tuttle of Tuttle Capital Management where he's the CEO, as well as Katie Greyfield of Bloomberg News, this time on Trillions saying money Matt, Katie, welcome back

to Trillions. Thanks for having me. Thrilled to be here, Matt, what took you so long? So this was not easy? You know, when you launch an ETF, first off, you've got to get a board of a trust to say yes to it. Then you've got to get it through the SEC, and boards in SEC tend to be more conducive to like SMP four ninety nine than they are to you know, going short the recommendations of a media pundit. So, you know, convincing a board it was a lot of fun, not as hard as I thought it would be, but

certainly not a slam dunkum. And then convincing the SEC. You know, whenever you're doing a first of its kind type of ETF, you know you're you're you're dealing with a larger pool of people at the SEC than you are when you're doing something simple. So took a took a lot longer than I had wanted it too, but

we're finally here, So that's all that matters. Who all was on that on that board, I mean, it's just it's it's a board of directors at the trust that you know, I had got to approve an ETF, and it's like, you know, twenty people, a lot of who have been in the industry for like five hundred years,

so you know, they're used to hearing pitches for normal stuff. Um, I would probably venture to guess they weren't used to hearing pitches like like I gave them, uh so you know they had to kind of noodle on that a little bit before saying, hey, let's let's do it. And what was the pushback? I'm really from the board level there, there wasn't. It was just wrapping their head around it,

you know. From the sec level. The biggest pushback we had was just putting Kramer the name into the ETF, from the argument of if you've got someone's name in an ETF, but they're not actually involved in the running of it, which I would argue he kind of is, but you know, not by choice. Then you know that's kind of an issue. So we threw Tracker on the end of it and took him a couple of weeks to think about that, and they were cool and I like Tracker better anyway. So there we are. So what's

the official name? So we've got the inverse Kramer Tracker and the long Kramer Tracker and let's dig in here. So it's actively managed. We'll go with s Jim, which is the inverse Kreamer Tracker, which I think is the one most people are interested in. Posi plaine. How it's gonna work. It's long, short, right, it's not just going long the stuff he doesn't like or short the stuff he does like. It does both can just go through

how it's gonna actually function. Yeah, and you are correct, it's gonna be long short, and you know, and probably the way it's gonna look and smell is as the market is going down, it's gonna be getting more and more long, and as the market's going up, he's it's

going to get more and more short. So basically what we're looking at is three things we're looking at when he comes on in the morning, which is typically like eight forty five to ten, where looking at tweets he puts out during the day, and then we're looking at mad money. And if he specifically says either bye bye bye a stock, then we're gonna go short that stock at the next practical moment. So if it's mad money,

we'll do it, you know, sometime around the open. If he says that at forty five, then you know, probably we'll do it at nine forty five. And if he tells you he hates a stock or sell cell cell or something like that, then we're gonna go along that name again at the next kind of practical entry point. So that sounds like a massive amount of work. That sounds like a full time job. Sounds like you're just

that's like so many hours spent watching this man on television. Yeah, and so I've got there's three of us who do it. You know, at the end of the day, you know, I'm the final arbiter. So sometimes you know he's not one hundred percent clear. So you know, David Faber might say, hey, Jim, what do you think about alphabet earnings? And I'll sell they had a great quarter. So I want to be the guy who's like, all right, is that? Is that going to be enough? Or is that not? So I've

got to watch it. I've got a team who's watching it. I am very concerned about the long term impact on my brain cells. You know that that has not been adequately stuck buddied um. But luckily my team is younger than me. So if you know, I go off the screen, well but yeah, but if I go off the deep end, you know, I've got two people to kind of take up the mantle and you know, put me in a home or something like that. So have you dabbled with this just on an ad hoc basis, Like just to

see how it how it works. Yeah. So, I mean I've been running this on paper since January first, in expectation of the launch, because we need to get the you know, I have an actual portfolio on launch day. So yeah, I've I've watched every episode of Mad Money for the past two months. I can't say it's getting any better. Um. Yeah, And like you know, walking over

to the studio, I'm watching Cramer. Um, you know other things I would have rather been doing on the walk over here, but it's I mean, I chose to do it, so it is what it is. So when you go and you decide this is a convicted Cramer call, this is where we're going to do the opposite. You know, I'm thinking of like Meta, remember when he kind of almost he cried a little bit on TV because he had recommended Facebook for so many years. He loves zucker Burgundy,

and he had a Mia Kolpa. I was wrong. I'm sorry, this stock is awful. That's when you would have bought right, because yeah, we would have gone long then, I know, And I wished I wished we were up and running because that would have been a great long So it's up sixty percent since then, which this is why, in my opinion, this ETF could could really do some damage, because all you need is a couple grand slams for

an ETF to overcome some wishy washy ones. We've seen this in a couple of ETFs, and again there's definitely grand slam potential here. Sixty percent in a couple of months is really good. I mean that that could power over three or four dogs. I mean, you know, no offense, we may put you out of business on all this vogel stuff. Yeah, that tunnel just making shots all over the place. Thing. So you've been watching a lot of television for several months now, How how big are these portfolios?

How many names are actually in them? So my goal is to have you know, s gim between thirty and

fifteen names. I don't want to get any above fifty because then you start deluting it um and lgem will be you know less typically, you know, we've been running it around thirty ish names or so, and again I don't want to get any more than that because you start really deluding the portfolio as of today, what are so what we want to do is we want to equally wait the whole things, and yeah, so we're gonna equally wait it unless there's like meme stocks in there,

you know, so then they'd probably be a lower weight, just because I don't want, you know, amc ripping fifty percent in five minutes to to mess anything up. But you know, it's it's the names. You'd you'd reckon eyes, you're Navidias that he I've guess named his dog. He's all over that one. You know, we'd be long crypto because he still hates crypto, you know, eli Lily is one that he keeps saying he loves, you know, so

stuff like that. So if he doubles down and keeps coming back to things, what do you do then, So we're not going to add to it. But the way it's working is every night he's there's new stocks and we're lopping off the old stocks. But if he keeps doubling down on something like Lily is a name that he mentioned, you know, on Mad Money, you know what was a Tuesday night, But he also mentioned it, you know, a week or so ago, So that's a name we

just wouldn't lop off. And if he keeps mentioning it, we'll just keep it on there until he stops, and we need that room for for something fresh, because I want to keep it fresh. So this is a little meta. What happens if he mentions either of your tickers, then the universe probably explodes and we're all dead. So it really doesn't matter, you know, none none of us are here, and so I'm really hoping he doesn't do that. What happens though, for real? I mean, we would ignore that.

But I've had people tell me, Hey, I'm calling into Mad Money and saying, hey, Jim, what do you think of asked Jim, like, all right, do it. I think he's too proud to actually say go along as Jim, but it might be a fun joke. I know he tweeted it when the filing hit. He had a little tweet storm on this. At first, I think he tried

to ignore it, but then I could tell it. A couple of days he was just lashing out a little bit about it, and I think it One of his tweets was what if I just recommends Jim, that'll show him or something like that. So he's had a few things to say. Have you had a conversation with CNBC or with Jim? So I have not. I've heard through the grape vine that CNBC is angry and maybe a little bit scared, which makes sense. I mean, if s Jim from a performance standpoints up like one hundred percent

every year, that's probably some explaining to do there. And you know when David Faber might you know, hey Jim, you know what's going on? And yeah, I would love to have a conversation with Kramer. I mean, I know some of the other guys over there. I know some people who know him. I've tried to tried to arrange that, and they've been a little bit frightened to arrange it. But I mean, hopefully one day. Here's the thing, though,

he should embrace this. Um this is his livelihood. He believes he's making great calls, and I think one of his tweets early was bring it on, you know, and I would have the same attitude. He should want to see this fail and he has a chance to be the hero. The thing, though, is this idea of just just shouting out about stocks like every other day. It

really isn't a great way to invest in general. It's very hard to beat the market with this kind of run and gun shifting gears all the time, especially if you're so bullish or bearish at the end of the cycle. You know, if you get bearish on Meta after it's had a really really bad run, well of course that's not a great time. It's already passed. Like with Crypto, he's so bearish and hating on Crypto after it lost seventy percent, whereas you kind of want to be bearish

before that. And I think that's why this has a shot to work legitimately. But I would I would think he'd want to sort of prove it wrong. And I think it'll be an interesting thing. And I think it'll be tempting for him to to tweet about it and you know, challenge it, and that would probably be good marketing for you. I would not mind him talking about it all day every day, yelling at me, calling me names whatever. You know that I think that is called

free publicity. That uh, you know, money can't buy, So what's your goal? So and and Eric hit on on the main point. A lot of people will think, oh, you know, this is just gimmicky. It's not. I mean, this to me is an awesome portfolio diversifier, because you know, I've noticed over the years there's a factor out in the marketplace that there's probably a technical term for it um. If not, I'll make it up, but it you know, for lack of a better term, it's you know, most

investors are pretty much clueless. And you know we see it with sentiment numbers and analysts calls and trying to call the market. And Kramer a as Eric said, has that mightas touched, but b he swings at every pitch, and that's not a criticism he has to. I mean, you can't call mad money and be like, hey, Jim, what do you think of Navidia? Oh? You know that could go up a lot, but it also could go down a lot. Oh well yeah, thanks Jim. So by swinging at every pitch, what you've got it? And again

Eric hit on it. You've got this portfolio that is shorting stuff, you know, right at the top, buying stuff at the bottom. And I mean people are looking for ways to diversify their portfolio now that sixty forty had a let's say, a bad year last year. To me, this should be in every portfolio and got to be in mine. Well, realistically, I have to imagine it would be mostly grassroots retail, though right, Like, I can't see like a financial advisor, Yeah, a financial advisor maybe not.

That would have to come from their clients. What is interesting, it will be interesting to see is on the institutional side, you know, are their institutions fading what he's doing. And just anecdotally, as I've been running this, I've seen some weird stuff. Like he tweeted out about oil stocks a couple of weeks ago, and right after that tweet, oil stocks had been going up. Right after that tweet, they started selling off, and they sold off for like an

hour and then they stabilized. And I'm looking at that, I'm like, was that a coincidence? I mean, maybe it's as mightas touch. I mean, he tweets it, they go down, or are there institutions that have algoed that? And you know, is this a product that maybe you know, you've got some of them sitting there watching Mad Money saying, Hey, Tuttle's going to do it. Let him freaking burn his brain cells and we'll just buy s Jim. I mean,

we'll say. One time, I think I saw him. There's a couple people on Twitter who track his calls, and they pointed out that he said buying Navidia at like nine thirty am, and then he was hating on it like four hours later. And I guess, how are you going to deal with the flip flop? Or do you wait till he is completely bullish or bearish, say two or three times in a row. No, I mean, what'll flip flop with him? I mean, you know, we're sitting there. I got a trader who's in front one of his

computer all day. So if he says buying a video in the morning, we'll buy it. And if at the end of the day he flip flops and it's a clear flip flop, then you know, then then we're then we're out of that position. So I have no problem with that. We're ready for that. I think one of the things that I'm curious to see how this work because long short is the one variable of this fund that isn't unknown, because the market tends to push a lot of stocks up or down depending on what the

FED does. So if you have long short, you're probably going to have a lot of offsetting. And I agree that will give you a nice lower volatility and a lack of correlation, so you're almost you could be like an alternative that said it might limit the shiny object potential. Did you think about that? Yeah, and maybe maybe not. So I'll give you an example why we've been tracking it.

So a lot of people were coming up to me because Kramer was bullish on the market in the first part of the year in the market went up, and they're like, hey, Kramer got that right. I was like, well, no, look at the details. What he was saying is don't buy tech, don't buy NASDAC, don't buy Fang, and buy

all these value stocks. So if the portfolio had been live, we would have been you know, long Fang, long Tech, long, a bunch of the NASDAC names, and short some of the value stuff, and that still would have done pretty well. Because you know, he was completely wrong. Yeah, he was right to be bullish, but he was wrong about what to be bullish about. You know, but could that limit you know, like, are we going to be up three hundred percent in a year like we could be if

it was all long or long short? Probably not. But if I'm going back to this whole theme of this as a portfolio diversifier, then that's not really what I'm looking for anyway. I mean, I you know, I don't want to put a ten percent allocation in something that could be up three hundred percent or could be down like eighty percent. So I'm curious about the back testing here because you said he had been experimenting with this since January. Hey, I was performed in that in that time,

which has been an interesting time in the market. And then like, I mean, sort of impossible to go back test for you know, three five years. But you know, how did you attempt to do that? So I probably can't comment on performance stuff that'd probably not be a good thing, but you know, certainly there was would have been some names like coin base was kind of a double U, you know, so there would have been some interesting things in there. I know other people have done

back tests. I think the problem is, you know, I mean, you don't always know when to enter because again, if he says, you know, hey, Alphabet's quarter was good, one guy might say, right that to buy, I may not. And then when do you get out of something, you know, because he may say, you know, hey, I love Meta, and then he may never say I hate metah. So I think it's very difficult. All the anecdotal stuff I've seen. I mean there's some guys on Twitter who posts some stuff.

I mean that all looks extremely interesting. Um, and you know, and and obviously you don't get this type of reputation if you're like the best stock picker ever. So I'm not worried about it. So, Um, when we had the Twitter spaces back then, there was a section of that call where some of the listeners called in and asked you. And this is a a theory here a lot when I

tweet on this topic. Is the reason he's so he's good at being spectacularly bad is that he's actually in cahoots with his hedge fund pals and this investing club you have to pay for. And so what he does is he does the real investing there, and then he purposely gives bad advice on air so that the other people can go the opposite way. I know that work. I know I don't buy it, but that's a that's

a I guess a conspiracy theory out there. But I guess your question is the difference between his picks on air and the club. So and I've heard that theory. I mean, I had a guy calling me up a couple of weeks ago telling me that that's fact, and again, who knows. It does sound like a lot of work. To me, it seems like a guy like that's got a lot to lose. I don't buy it. I purposely am not a subscriber to the club. I don't want

to know what's in that portfolio. I don't care. My sense is that that's probably stuff that's fairly well thought out, long term in nature. And what I care much more about is the stuff he wakes up in the morning and wants to talk about, or the stuff that you know, the retail guys are calling in and want to ask him about. That's the real interesting stuff, you know. I don't care about the club. You know, if you want

the club, you know, buy the club. You know. To me, L Jim is better because we're going to be, you know, we're gonna be a lot more active, you know. So if you're a Cramer fan, I buy L Jim over the club. What's the turnover going to be? Like? Turnover is going to be a lot, you know, on a typical mad money there's at least five things he's doing, and so I'm adding, you know, five names and subtracting

five names. How long do you think things will long as something could stick around in a portfolio then, I mean, again, it depends if he keeps talking about it, it's going to stay. So like you know, bitcoin would be something that would have stayed around for a while, because every time you ask him about it he's negative. But typically stuff is going to cycle out and you know within two weeks. I still can't get over the fact that you watch so much TV. I mean, you have other

funds to manage as well. Is that a process that you could see automating somehow? I mean, AI is so much in the news right now, this actually seems like place where natural language processing could come in handy. Yeah. I mean, if AI gets to a point where they can discern, I'll totally do it. It's not as bad. I mean it's bad from the standpoint of I'd rather watch other stuff, but I can't sleep past like four or five in the morning, so I'll wake up, I'll watch,

you know, the Mad Money tape. The cool thing is you can fast forward through the CEO interviews because that's that's a total waste of time, So you get rid of a lot of that stuff and then you're really just watching from eight forty five to ten. You know, yeah, there's other stuff going on, but I got three people watching and but yeah, I mean, if someone's got an AI tool that can discern between they had a good

quarter and bye bye bye, I'm all for it. So so best case scenario, we have you back out in a year, Let's say, what do you think and flows we're gonna look like. So, I really have no idea. I think this is the type of thing where you're getting get a lot of people people saying, hey, they're going to look at it as a gimmick and say I'm going to buy a hundred chairs. See what happens. I think my idea of this being a portfolio diversifier is going to take a while for people to be like, wait,

you're right. I mean, this is totally uncorrelated from everything else I have in my portfolio. Again, what I don't know is you know, institutions, you know, are they going to be interested in this or not? So I mean I could see this at twenty five million, I could see it at five hundred million, and either one wouldn't surprise me. I am very curious to see what this is in a year, because I really have no idea, Eric,

what do you think put your analysts head on. Yeah, I mean a lot of times these kind of ETFs, especially ones that are going right after direct retail performance will rule. I mean this one is special because of the type of media attention it will probably get, specially if it starts out perform. I think the media pounces on this. There's not I think there's a it's like low hanging fruit for a story. Right. If this thing starts to do well, that's where you get to the

five hundred million mark. I think if it's you know, sideways or struggles, yeah, I could see more like twenty five million. So if you really break this down, it's not that different than other trackers. Right, there's Hedge Fund, thirteen F trackers. People like to track stuff. And what ETFs really do which people forget is there making things convenient. So, as Matt just said, he's doing a lot of legwork for you to be able to sort of just have a little trade on that goes opposite of this guy

who is wrong a lot. So that convenience will appeal to people if they're into this idea. And so yeah, I don't know I would if I had to bet. You know, in a year, I could see this at about one hundred million. That'd be my guest. But you know, we will see be interesting. The long Cramer tracker that's also long short. If that happens to work, will that get assets? I don't know, because obviously the sentiment is much more on the other side. But performance is a

big deal. So that be the one sort of weird variable is if elgim starts working, and maybe the fact that you launch this it completely turned around his philosophy and he starts being right all the time. I don't know that would be interesting. I don't think so. I don't think you teach an old dog new tricks. But I'm open to everything. Now. I want to go back

to one thing you said. You know, your belief is that this is something that would work in a lot of portfolios as a diversifier, that it's not a gimmick. But I am curious now that you're launching the Creamer suite, you also have, you know, the cathy Wood suite that you were behind. Do you worry at all about getting a reputation for gimmicky products? I mean a little bit,

but you know, at the end of the day. You know, I'm a traitor at heart, So I want to design products that I'm sitting there saying, wow, I want this, and so like you know, Sark for example, to me, that's just a better hedge if you are negative about the market. I'd rather be short Teldoc and Rowe coup than Apple and Microsoft. Um. And you know here, I've been wanting to figure out a way. I mean, how do you know, monetize the idea that the investors are

clueless and take the other side of it. And to me, this is just a better way to do that. Okay, I had to say, I think this is a really fun idea. Do you think is there any more fun products in the market than this? Oh? No, this is the most fun product in the market by far, until I come up with the next one, which we'll say. I'm always thinking. It's like when you, you know, write books, it's like, what do you do next? What do you

do next? And it's like, here's how string here, Joel, I have the next big fun idea animal shares, where each ETF is based on an animal that picks the stock. So if you're into porpoises, the porpoise picks the stocks. This is based on that sort of monkey throwing a dart theory, and it's just all about animals picking stocks, and um, you get to pick which animal does the picking for you. I want to crow a crow each.

I mean, I'll test it with my dog, see, I mean he likes to sit in front of my Bloomberg terminal. There have been people kicking around the sort of monkey dart and random idea for years, but I thought it might be cool to expand that to some different animals. I gotta I gotta say, Uh, Matt's Kramer products seem a little bit more successful than the animal one are. Yeah,

I'm thinking probably. Yeah, people love animals, show kids, and animals will always upstage everybody, so all right, but yeah, that's probably more of a half joke than a real product. But all this is probably going to be the one for a while. Matt. We look forward to seeing how these perform, and congratulations on putting in a lot of hard work to bring this idea to market. Thank you, Matt Katie, thanks so much for joining us on trillions. Thanks for having us, thanks for having me, Thanks for

listening to Trillions. Until next time, you can find us on the Bloomberg Terminal, Bloomberg dot com, Apple podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you like to listen. We'd love to hear from you. We're on Twitter, I'm at Joel Wepper Show. He's at Eric Balcina's. This episode of Trillions was produced by Magnus Hendrickson, but