Bilal Little:

Welcome to another edition of ETF Central. I'm your host, Bilal Little, and I'm really excited about today's guest. We're going to move the conversation past active management, and we're actually going to bring it back to a unique aspect of index investing. Today's guest is Carlos Diez. He is the CEO and founder of MarketGrader. And with that, Carlos, welcome to the show.

Carlos Diez:

Thanks for having me.

Bilal Little:

Excited to have you, man. I'm really pumped about this conversation.

Carlos Diez:

Thank you. So am I, actually.

Bilal Little:

When was the last time you were here at The Exchange?

Carlos Diez:

It's been a while. I haven't been here too many times. This is maybe my third or fourth time.

Bilal Little:

Okay.

Carlos Diez:

Last time was, oh, eight-ish years ago.

Bilal Little:

Okay, good.

Carlos Diez:

So it's been a while too.

Bilal Little:

Well, we got to make it memorable then.

Carlos Diez:

Yeah, it's good to be back.

Bilal Little:

All right, awesome. Well, I think it's important for the guests to tell their own story. You have a background in this business, and I think it's a nice way for us to segue right into a little bit about what you're doing, but just want to hear from you in a very open forum. How would you tell your story and how you got to where you are?

Carlos Diez:

Yeah, I think it's worthwhile maybe going back really far back when I was actually growing up where I grew up. I grew up in Colombia. And the reason I mentioned that is I, from a very early age, I had a very keen interest in business, business, but in the sense of how does business happen? How do businesses get built? Who builds them? And I remember I would always drive around and ask my dad, "Who owns this? Who owns that?" And I'm talking when I'm six, seven, eight, 10 years old, and you learn over time that actually in places like Colombia, it's changed quite a bit back then. A lot of the big businesses that you knew, like the newspaper, the main airline, the main beer company and so forth, were owned by just a handful of people, a handful of families, and everybody else was just working for them. Right?

Bilal Little:

Mm-hmm.

Carlos Diez:

And obviously, there's a lot of other private businesses mostly, but there isn't anything like a large group, publicly traded companies that anyone can own. So I think that was a big part of what got me thinking into, "There's got to be a different and better way." And as I started learning about how capital markets work in places like the US where there's broad participation by a lot of people in the stock market, and basically savers are really just investors that are owning all these companies, then that's really what I wanted to be involved with.

So I left Colombia when I was a teenager. I finished high school actually in Philadelphia, then moved to LA, and went to Pepperdine as an undergrad. And that's when the idea for what I do today really started clicking, and it reconnected me back to those roots that I was just describing. So think of, I was at Pepperdine in the late '90s, so in the middle of the dot-com boom.

Bilal Little:

That formed your market opinion, for sure.

Carlos Diez:

And when I was in my junior to senior year, a lot of my friends, some were older, some my age, as they started to either graduate or thinking about what they were doing, a lot of them were going to work for dot-coms, and companies that, I don't remember their names, they didn't exist for long.

Bilal Little:

For sure.

Carlos Diez:

And I would ask, "Why are you going to this dot-com instead of going to corporate job or consulting or something like that?" And they didn't really have a good answer for it. And I also played on the soccer team, and a lot of my teammates were investors. Investing for yourself was becoming a thing. Online trading was becoming a thing at least from an access perspective.

Bilal Little:

Yeah, for sure.

Carlos Diez:

So people were trading in stocks. And inevitably before every practice, a lot of the conversations were around, "Hey, I just invested," we were college students so, "$500 in this dot-com." And, "What do they do?" "I don't know." 'Why did you buy it?" "Well, it's up 20% this month or something like that."

So that sort of made me think there's got to be a better way for the average investor to own publicly traded companies without having to have an accounting or a finance degree and having to really download the income statement balance sheet and do hardcore security analysis to understand if it's worthwhile owning or not. But there has to be some level of analysis for you to understand how good a company, that is from a fundamentals perspective.

Bilal Little:

Absolutely.

Carlos Diez:

Aside from the story, maybe you might like the company because of the product that they built, because of the people that founded it, but you should, alongside that, have an idea for how good the company is or not at what they do and at what price you're buying, right?

Bilal Little:

Yeah.

Carlos Diez:

What you're paying for that company relative to their size, their sales, their income, and so forth. So that's how I got into what I do today, which basically that was the idea for building MarketGrader. So I started MarketGrader. I graduated from Pepperdine in the spring of '99, and I started the firm in December of 1999 and I-

Bilal Little:

I actually love that. Not to cut you off, but I think I really love that because you tell a story that sounds very similar to what a lot of young people are doing today, meaning they're very excited about investing for whatever it is, their socioeconomic background and/or their life experience. They're like, "Hey, the markets are open? I can participate?"

Carlos Diez:

Yeah.

Bilal Little:

So that's a beautiful thing. And then they build a lot of innovation around that, which seemingly you've done. I want to get into what is MarketGrader and obviously how did you start it, but what is it today and what is the business, obviously, objective?

Carlos Diez:

So the business today is really not that dissimilar from what the original idea was. It's obviously expanded quite a bit. Our business is primarily built around providing ratings of publicly traded companies today from around the world to investors of all stripes. So individual investors, professionals, institutions. So we provide data and ratings around those companies, and that accounts for maybe a third or so of our business.

The other two-thirds or so is our indexing business. So we use those ratings, we use all the data that we've been now producing daily for all these companies for over 20 years to build indexes and investor portfolios. So indexes that are obviously different from the traditional, just very passive market cap weighted indexes. I'm a fan of those, but these are different because they're focused on company selection around our ratings.

And that started back in actually 2003. 2003 is when we launched our first rating system, and the focus was really on giving an investor a buy, hold, or sell rating. So going back to what I said about Pepperdine and all those years, I just wanted to be able to tell you, "Hey, you like this company for whatever reason? It's a buy, hold, or sell, and here's why." You know?

Bilal Little:

Yeah.

Carlos Diez:

"It's growing, it's not growing, it's unprofitable. It seems to be managed well or not," all purely from the perspective of the company's financials. So that's our business today, and it just grew from that idea.

Bilal Little:

I want you to stay with that for a minute because it sounds like from some of the research that I was doing, that you were very early with artificial intelligence and adopting technology to help you scale with some of that insight and research. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Carlos Diez:

Yes. So when I started the company, I didn't know what I didn't know. I think if I knew a fraction of what I know today, there's no way I would've started it. You're just excited. And so I raised a little bit of money, and that's actually how I ended up in Miami. My investors were mostly Miami-based. I was 23 years old. I think they felt a little more comfortable if I was closer to them then. So I moved to Miami, but it could've been New York. It could've been anywhere.

Bilal Little:

Yeah, for sure.

Carlos Diez:

And so I realized when I started figuring out all that I needed to build, and it's just software that I was going to build this thing, because basically I said, "I need to figure out a way to ..." For every publicly traded company, their financial statements are public information and accessible to anyone. I can go on the SEC's website today and download the income statement that someone just filed or reported on last night.

Bilal Little:

Absolutely.

Carlos Diez:

But for you to do that at scale, and then for you to extract the data from those statements and then to analyze them and interpret them and present them in a way that makes sense to the investor, all those steps take either a lot of people doing a lot of manual labor or technology to leverage that. So I said, "Well, technology is the route."

So I started figuring out what I needed to build, the software we needed to build to do everything that I just described. And so that's when we became early technologists. So if you said MarketGrader's a technology company that does financial services, that would be pretty accurate, but if you also say it's a indexing company that leans heavily into technology, including AI today, that would also be accurate.

So technology is just a means for you to ... It's a tool for you-

Bilal Little:

For sure.

Carlos Diez:

... to go wherever you want to go. And that has been in our ethos because we always grew with relatively little resources as a company and we wanted to do so much and we were so ambitious in our scope. Technology was the way for us to level the playing field. And that's the case to this day, which makes me super excited about where the world is today because it allows not just me or companies like us, but anyone to just build so much.

Bilal Little:

Yeah, yeah. It's really an empowering tool. I think that's a great way to think about it.

So I want to stay with this for a moment and I want to talk about who your customer is. Is it the trader? Is it an institution that's buying the rating data?

Carlos Diez:

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Bilal Little:

And then also, who's the client for that index business? Is it asset managers or is it also investors as well?

Carlos Diez:

So I'll start with the latter. The clients for the indexes are primarily asset managers and wealth management firms. In the early days of that business, so we licensed our first index around late 2003, early 2004, it was mostly asset managers. We had something differentiated that didn't really exist. There were a few companies that were doing things similar to us, but not many, and it resonated with some asset managers so they started licensing MarketGrader indexes to build venture moats, ETFs around those.

Now, wealth managers as well. I think there's been a blurring of the lines between asset and wealth management. There's a lot of investment management happening inside the wealth managers, in some cases in a really good way. In some others, not so much. So to the extent that we can empower those wealth management firms to equip their advisors with better tools to access, in this case, equities, we do that. So we build both indexes and ... So we have a whole library of indexes, MarketGrader indexes that people just license from us, or oftentimes we work with the client to build something that has the MarketGrader DNA in it, the selection, grounded on company fundamentals and quality and all those things, but tailored to a specific exposure they might be looking for. And we work with clients to build exposures to Chinese onshore equities, Indian equities, global equities, Australian small caps. So that's on the indexing-

Bilal Little:

Index, yeah.

Carlos Diez:

... and portfolio side.

And then the research is still available and accessed directly through our website. We have a series of apps on marketgrader.com. People subscribe and they have ratings on today 41,000 stocks globally, 93 stock markets. We cover virtually every US-listed equity ETF. And the audience there is individual investors, financial advisors, financial professionals at large, I think, that are either using it in their practice, in their workflows or for their own accounts. And we have clients from about 40 countries accessing this data every week. We also send data feeds and the ratings directly to institutions that then either use it for their own purposes or give it to their own clients.

Bilal Little:

Okay. No, that's good. That's helpful.

Now I want to switch gears a little bit. I want to talk a little bit about active and passive. There's a big conversation, it's a big narrative, obviously in the entire market, from products that are launching to, do we have too much concentration in a lot of the index funds? I want to get your perspective on that because most of the managers, most of my guests have been active managers. And I want to hear from you on the passive side on being able to build a differentiated product that can compete.

Carlos Diez:

I've always been an indexer at heart and everything that represents, and I'm happy to discuss that further. But at the same time, I've always been a big fan of active, which sounds like a-

Bilal Little:

It makes sense. It makes sense.

Carlos Diez:

And what do I mean by that? And actually, that's what we do. If you go back to how I describe the origins of MarketGrader, it was around rating companies and building indexes of the highest-rated companies. So we are selecting companies, not unlike an active manager selects a company. The only difference is that the inputs we use are just quantitative, by the numbers, which are the highest-rated companies in all the US market among large caps or in Australia, whatever. An active manager has a hypothesis, "I like this industry," or, "I like these companies for whatever reasons," and they invest in those.

So I think the big difference between the two is that in what we do, there's no inherent human bias in the selection of those constituents at the construction of the portfolio or the indexes. Whereas in the active management, in the traditional sense, there is. And you should naturally expect it to be that way. It's natural that the manager or managers or the person selecting the securities develop feelings for that investment.

Bilal Little:

There's a gut. There's a gut, yeah.

Carlos Diez:

They get attached to it or they have a gut feeling that this might work out. And there's nothing wrong with that. I think there's a place for that. So what we do is we straddle both, right?

Bilal Little:

Mm-hmm.

Carlos Diez:

We are active equity in the sense that we are actively reconstituting and rebalancing our portfolios according to our ratings that are always changing and fluctuating.

Bilal Little:

For sure.

Carlos Diez:

But it's fully transparent, completely rules-based. So Carlos has no say on what gets picked here or there, nor does anyone on my team. It's very transparent. It's truly an index in that sense.

Bilal Little:

Yeah. Look, I think active management has evolved to that point. Better tools, more technology. It's still active if you have the brains and the talent and the people that are building the way the models react. In many cases, that's still an active component to it. So I don't want to harp too much on that.

I want to get your sense, the market has completely shifted, man. It's completely changed. How are you building tools today, or how are you thinking about the market today given the velocity on which risk parameters seem to change so quickly? How is your team thinking about some of the complexities of these changes in the market, just generally speaking?

Carlos Diez:

Yeah. So when I think about the speed at which things happen these days and the velocity of the rate of change, I think it's incumbent upon us to be somewhat of a speed bump on investors' behalf. And what do I mean by that?

You might be tempted as an investor, whether it be you're professional asset manager or an individual investor acting on your own account, to act on the story of the day. "I can't fall behind on these AI stories or on these companies or on these trends." Nothing wrong with that, but you are acting on emotion.

Bilal Little:

For sure.

Carlos Diez:

If we are able to help you get emotion out of the way and provide that speed bump where, okay, you have a portfolio that is professionally built based on or built from very high-quality companies, whatever segment of the market, whatever market in the world that is, then that should be a ballast that can help you with X percent of your portfolio go out and take moonshots or buy some of these other things. So I think to the extent that we could be a counterbalance to that behavioral part of the market, I think that's part of our responsibility.

Bilal Little:

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You know, I want to lean into that just with a comment. I think investors today actually are looking for more than just the AI story, and it's actually being displayed in an evident manner through the performance of various sectors that are completely overlooked by this AI narrative and theme that's completely dominated. So kudos to you and your team for at least thinking about that and trying to slow things down a little bit.

I want to talk a little bit about your perspective on this convergence between digital and physical. I believe the information age is this massive change agent. I'm currently reading a book called The Sovereign Individual, which is really interesting, just talking about that narrative. But I want to get your general thoughts on what's happening right now.

Carlos Diez:

I think this is, and there's probably a lot of people that say something comparable to this, but I really feel that we are at a historic point in time. I think what lies ahead of us is incredibly exciting. In everything that we do as humans, I think AI is going to empower us to do a lot, to create. Humans are creative beings, and sometimes we're limited by resource constraints or specific limitations that AI is going to help us overcome.

So when I think about it from an investment perspective, I don't think about AI as a trade. I don't think AI as a segment of the technology sector or industry. I think of AI as an incredible empowering tool that is going to help us all build new things in every sector in ways that we don't know today. So today people ask a company, "What's your AI strategy?" You don't ask a company today, "What's your electricity strategy," or, "what is your computer strategy?" It's understandable.

Bilal Little:

For sure.

Carlos Diez:

You assume that every company today consumes electricity and uses computers for whatever they do. It could be a retailer, it could be a financial services firm, it could be a mining company. So AI is no different than that. It's how are we all going to use it? You're going to use it in your business differently than I do or than anybody else does.

So going back to your question about the convergence of the digital economy and the physical economy, I think where we are at an inflection point is in the fact that AI cannot continue to grow and develop without real support from physical assets. We're seeing it obviously in the build-out required.

Bilal Little:

100%.

Carlos Diez:

And those physical assets are how do you convert power? Because in the end, we are converting power and electricity into units of labor. That's really what's happening. So for that conversion to happen, you have to have raw materials at a scale that you didn't think you needed three or four years ago. You need to have power generation at a scale you didn't think you needed. You need to have all the build that goes around that, right?

Bilal Little:

Mm-hmm.

Carlos Diez:

And it's not just ... We tend to think about the handful of companies that are building the models or doing these things or the hyperscalers that are putting all this capital into building the data centers. It's so much more beyond that. And I think it also happens to come at a time where the world, it seems like the world woke up the last couple of years to all these things that need to get done, and now they're getting done. So I think there's a massive amount of CapEx happening globally, not only around AI, but I think that's being turbocharged by AI. And I can talk about that further, but overall, I'm incredibly excited about what lies ahead.

Bilal Little:

No, I love it. I love it. Look, I think that's the industrial revolution experience of what's happening in AI, obviously for everyone. I mean, you're talking about technology and payments. As an example, if I walk into a retailer and they don't take MobilePay, I don't carry cash. What are you doing here? It's assumed that you have technology or at least some infrastructure to do business in today's society.

Carlos Diez:

Absolutely.

Bilal Little:

So I want to talk a little bit about the ETF that you launched here at the New York Stock Exchange. Give us the commercial and then unpack what the strategy is.

Carlos Diez:

Yes. So I'll start by saying that we are not an investment advisor. MarketGrader's not an investment advisor. So the fund you're referring to is the Barron's 400 ETF. MarketGrader is the strategy inside the Barron's 400 alongside with our partner, Barron's. And I'll explain how that came to be. The advisor to the fund is ALPS Advisors, so it's their ETF. We're very intimate. Obviously, we build the index. We were very intimately involved in how the ETF was put together and launched, and we support it regularly through thought leadership, but it's the Knop's ETFs.

Having said that, I think it's worthwhile maybe describing how the relationship with Barron's came to be. So going back to the early days of MarketGrader, I met the, in maybe 2004 or so, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal at the time and I was able to present to him what I was doing. And he loved ... I showed him the actual MarketGrader platform with the ratings of companies. And I said, "Is there anything that you think we should be doing together? Because obviously you have an audience of investors and we're looking for one."

Bilal Little:

Yeah, for sure.

Carlos Diez:

And I said, "I don't think this is a great fit for The Journal. I love what this is, but I think this is a perfect fit for Barron's." And then he introduced me to the editors at Barron's back then, and they took a very close look at MarketGrader and I explained a lot of the things that I described earlier, you know?

Bilal Little:

Yeah.

Carlos Diez:

Our views of investing around high-quality companies, long holding periods, and the power of compounding interests and so forth. And it lined up closely with the way Barron's has always seen the world of investing and how they've always supported investors through thought leadership and so forth. And so we struck a partnership where we started providing our ratings on their website back in 2005, I think, yeah, 2005, to their readers and subscribers. So that way you can pull up an article about Apple, and alongside you could pull up a rating from MarketGrader.

Bilal Little:

Which is amazing.

Carlos Diez:

And so as we were growing in the index business and expanding our footprint in the index business, because I felt that was the best way for investors to really capture the value that MarketGrader was providing, they wanted to build a broad index that could have the Barron's brand associated with it. So we started working on what became the Barron's 400 Index.

So the Barron's 400 Index is the 400 best companies in the United States based on MarketGrader's rating system, where I should mention, by the way, that historically in the US, only about 15% of all the companies that we've covered have been rated buy. So it's like the opposite of what traditionally Wall Street has done in terms of how they cover companies and rate them, right?

Bilal Little:

Can I jump in right there for a second?

Carlos Diez:

Yeah, yeah.

Bilal Little:

Can you talk a little bit about the buy, sell, hold rating system, and then how often does that change? I'm just curious.

Carlos Diez:

Yes, so we follow an investment philosophy that we call GARP + Quality, you know?

Bilal Little:

For sure.

Carlos Diez:

None of that simply to do, nobody knows-

Bilal Little:

You wrote that a reasonable price, but you don't want to overpay. Absolutely.

Carlos Diez:

Yeah. That's exactly what has been in the MarketGrader DNA from the start.

So we have 24 indicators, 24 factors that are looking at very traditional metrics of financial performance. Growth, is the company's top line growing, operating income growing? What are the margins like? Are earnings growing and how fast? In value, how much is this company worth relative to those sales, to the rate of change in earnings growth and so forth? And then that's anchored on ... That's the guard part of the analysis. And then in the quality part, we have 12 indicators of profitability and cashflow. How is this company being managed? What's the return on invested capital? Are they using too much leverage to maybe buy market share, and how's that affecting margins? Things like that, all done through the numbers.

So we take all those analyses, all those indicators that are recalculated daily, and we sum them up into a final numerical score between zero and 100. So think about a company in a perfect world. The company has A+ across all the 24 indicators that I described, they get a hundred. If they have an F in all the indicators, they get a zero. And then everything above 60 is rated buy, and then everything below 50 is rated sell. It's that simple.

So I mean, I'm glad you asked the question because now it makes sense for me to explain that only around 15% of companies, doesn't matter the size or the sector or their business model, it's just based purely on the fundamentals, only 15% have been rated buy. When you look at the global universal companies we covered today, 41,000 from all over the world, historically only 13% have been rated buy. So then it makes an investor wonder, "Are the companies that I own in that top 15% or are in the bottom 85%?"

Bilal Little:

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, for sure.

Carlos Diez:

And that's essentially how the indexes get built.

Bilal Little:

So how often does it change? And meaning inside of the fund, like the holdings? What's the frequency of either a rebal or something like that?

Carlos Diez:

Twice a year. So we reselect the constituents to the Barron's 400 every March and September. And then we rebalance the portfolio on the reconstituted portfolio and then we're returning to the target weight. The Barron's 400 ETF, BFOR listed here, tracks the equal-weighted version of the Barron's 400, which is really important.

Bilal Little:

I agree 100%.

Carlos Diez:

Because it gives investors broad access to companies of all colors and stripes, irrespective of their size.

Bilal Little:

If you could, can we just drill down on this? I think because of our listeners, one of the things that I try to stress is the significance of portfolio construction dynamics. Where does this fit? Is it a core equity holding? Is it a compliment to the large megacap US companies? Where does it fit in a portfolio?

Carlos Diez:

I think it's a core equity holding. So the fund itself is classified as a mid-cap blend fund in Morningstar's database, although it's an all-cap. It selects companies of all sizes. And it has some of the largest names. It has the NVIDIAs and the Microsofts of the world, and it has billion-dollar market cap companies as well. When you market cap that portfolio, it looks like a concentrated portfolio like we have today in the S&P or some of the other well-known indexes. When you equally weight it, it looks mid-cap. It looks mid-cap in the sense that if you do a returns attribution going back in time, a regression, it looks like a mid-cap exposure. And then every company gets only one-quarter, 1% of the weight in the index.

So it could be your mid-cap allocation. I know there's people that like to invest following sort of a traditional style box. I'm not one of those. I think it's more of a core investment where it allows you to express your interest in how you own US equities, depending on maybe a specific moment. And actually, the moment right now is a specific moment in time because it could be a really good compliment to traditional beta, more cap-weighted beta where you're taking a lot of risk in just a handful of names so there's a lot of concentration risk. This allows you to stay invested, own very high-quality companies, own some of those names that everybody likes, but spread your risk out across the entire portfolio.

Bilal Little:

Thank you. That was really helpful.

I want to get your thoughts on something really quickly. We're at a very tough time in the market where it seems to become a bit of a trader's market, where companies, they're no longer just fighting for the earnings picture. We've moved past just what the earnings are and we moved into the perception of earnings and then how is the market interpreting that? And you've seen that this week obviously with the volatility around the Mag 7, but also companies that are being rewarded versus those that aren't.

What's something that you're telling your team, the communication around what you guys are doing? Obviously it's data-dependent, but how are you communicating the message that either now is the time for what you guys are doing versus maybe short-term volatility or concerns to keep the perspective on that long-term picture?

Carlos Diez:

Yeah, so the framework that MarketGrader follows is in place and has been in place for a long time. So that provides the guardrails for us, for the products that are built around MarketGrader indexes to not deviate based on what might be happening today, right?

Bilal Little:

Yeah.

Carlos Diez:

Based on volatility, based on sectors or individual names that are going up or down maybe too quickly.

In the construction of the indexes and the portfolios, including the Barron's 400, there's specific guardrails to make sure that it's a balanced portfolio or that the volatility's not out of hand, if it's a long-only core holding like the Barron's 400 is. So those things are in place. I think what's important for us is to be able to communicate to investors when and how to use a specific MarketGrader index like the Barron's 400, which brings me back to the discussion we were starting to have around AI and people wanting to be in the AI trade. You know?

Bilal Little:

Yeah.

Carlos Diez:

It is, like you said, it's become a trader's market where a company that people thought was terrible two days ago or semiconductors where they're so overpriced, a couple days ago they were all up in double digits. People are trading around those names. And so if you own those names, and we do, or our indexes do, the Barron's 400 has a very healthy serving or helping of semiconductors, we don't like them less one day because they sold off. We probably like them more.

Bilal Little:

At a reasonable price, right?

Carlos Diez:

That's exactly right, yeah. So we're likely to maybe, if they sell off, by the time we rebalance again, we're likely to buy more of them than otherwise if they seem fully priced, where when I say, "We," the index is likely to take some profits off of them and deploying someplace else. Or even if a constituent has gone from a quarter of their portfolio at last rebalance by definition to maybe 1% because it has appreciated a lot, but it's still a highly rated company in MarketGrader that we keep, we trim the weight back down to one-quarter, 1%.

And it's a smart way to redeploy profits within the portfolio in a fully tax-efficient manner without you, the investor, having to make those allocation decisions. It's impossible to say, "I should sell X percent of the NVIDIA stock that I have and redeploy that to this other company." That's where mistakes happen and that's where we get attached to investments.

Bilal Little:

I think that's helpful.

I want to give you a second to land the plane on who MarketGrader is and the differentiated approach that you guys have in the market or differentiated value proposition that you have in the market. I think this is important for you to tell that story, but also, my goal with these conversations is to really broaden out the narratives around what's available in the market. And I want to hear directly from you.

Carlos Diez:

Yeah. So we are trying to help investors own the best companies in the world, especially and hopefully through our indexes and our clients' products that track those indexes. That's really our mission. In some cases, investors want to use MarketGrader to individually own or invest or trade certain names. Fine, at least we are equipping them with the tools, the information to understand those companies. But ultimately, we're trying to help anyone access markets in a more informed and a smarter way through MarketGrader indexes. The Barron's 400 is the perfect example of that. The Barron's 400 is, in my view, the best tool today to own US equities broadly without having to worry about a lot of the volatility and the concentration risks that you're describing.

Bilal Little:

Thank you. So we got to the end of the show where I ask a question. This question you don't know. It's not something we've discussed. I've literally just though about it based off our conversation. And this question for you is important for me because I'm curious to humanize exactly who you are. If tomorrow is your last day on this earth, how would you want to be remembered?

Carlos Diez:

Oof, I hope it isn't. I would like to be remembered as someone that did right by everyone that I came across in everything. Because in the end, I think what matters most in what we do, business or everything else, is how we treat other people. And so there's one thing that I want to be remembered by. It's not business-related. It's not the Barron's 400 index, although I hope people remember that. It's by how I treated others every single day of my life.

Bilal Little:

Carlos, thank you for joining ETF Central.

Carlos Diez:

Thank you for having me.