In a recent episode of Behind the Ticker, Bob Elliott, co-founder and Chief Investment Officer of Unlimited, discussed the firm’s mission to democratize hedge fund strategies through innovative ETF structures. Drawing on his experience managing strategies at Bridgewater Associates and running a $125 million venture capital fund, Elliott launched Unlimited to address what he sees as fundamental inefficiencies in traditional hedge funds—high fees, limited access, and tax-inefficient vehicles. Unlimited’s approach uses proprietary technology to replicate hedge fund strategies at lower costs, inside liquid, tax-efficient ETFs.
About Bob Elliot and Unlimited Funds
The firm’s latest offering, the Unlimited HFGM ETF (ticker: HFGM), seeks to replicate the returns of global macro hedge funds, offering a 2x exposure to the strategy at just 95 basis points. Elliott explained that global macro is one of the most attractive and diversifying hedge fund styles due to its flexibility across asset classes—currencies, commodities, rates, equities—and its historically low correlation to traditional 60/40 portfolios. By leveraging a machine learning-driven process, HFGM infers the positioning of roughly 500 macro hedge fund managers in near real-time, using public market data and return streams to replicate their exposures.
Investment Strategy and Approach
Elliott emphasized that HFGM is fully systematic, with daily updates to inferred manager positioning and weekly average rebalancing. The ETF primarily uses futures contracts for efficiency, allowing both long and short exposure across global macro markets while benefiting from tax-friendly ETF structuring. Elliott stressed that the firm avoids “black box” opacity by grounding its machine learning in intuitive, transparent modeling—essentially scaling the same logic any investor might use to reverse-engineer a manager’s trades, but with far greater accuracy and breadth.
He positioned HFGM and Unlimited’s broader ETF suite as part of a shift in portfolio construction—from the old 60/40 model to a more modern 50/30/20 framework, where 20% is allocated to alternatives, including both liquid and illiquid strategies. HFGM, with its manager-diversified exposure, ease of execution, and lack of paperwork or K-1s, offers a compelling way for advisors and institutions to gain hedge fund-like exposure without the drawbacks of traditional LP structures.
Deeper Dive: Insights from the Full Conversation
Beyond the headline strategy, the full conversation between Brad and Bob Elliot covered several additional themes worth highlighting for advisors and investors.
On Process and Philosophy
Today we have on Bob Elliott. He's a chief investment officer over at unlimited funds and we are talking about their newest ETF, the unlimited HF GM global macro ETF, ticker HF GM. It is a global macro hedge fund replication strategy, although it offers two X leverage on that index. We talk about the benefits of alternatives in the portfolio and we talk about how Bob and the team over at unlimited runs their entire process. There is a small section of this podcast.
It's not how hedge fund managers operate and the reason why that is is because there are transactions costs that they have to deal with and so what it means is they can only move so fast if you're managing any reasonable amount of money. You can't instantaneously shift positions and so that actually gives a real advantage because what it allows us to do is to look at the path of returns and infer what set of adjacent portfolios must have described that path of returns that we're seeing given the market action.
Market Context and Positioning
That is a good compliment to the rest of the portfolio which in a lot of ways in one form or another is a long are long only strategies. Right so I'll let you make the list here but just for the listener. What is the benefit of doing this in an ETF wrapper getting I'm saying getting hedge fund or alternative exposure in an ETF wrapper rather than going direct to an LP and getting that exposure directly like what are the main benefits.
Bring those to market in an ETF wrapper. But instead of just taking the returns out of the boxes, the managers offer them what we're doing is we're targeting a two X return. So using the same position, the same position understanding targeting a two X return. And also doing that at a much lower fee point than two and twenty at ninety five basis points. And so that HFGM, which is our global macro product is the first one of those that kind of gives you a whole sense of it.
Hey Bob, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much for having me. So why don't you just give everybody a quick refresher about who you are, what you do, and what all unlimited ETFs is trying to accomplish their clients. Yeah, I've been in the 220 businesses. I like to call it for a couple of decades now. I spent the majority of my career at the world's largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates almost 15 years, where I was creating investment strategies across a wide range of different asset classes.
Notable Insights
"Yeah, unfortunately since we launched our first product we got it idea I've had the opportunity to talk to."
Key Takeaways
- The firm’s latest offering, the Unlimited HFGM ETF (ticker: HFGM), seeks to replicate the returns of global macro hedge funds, offering a 2x exposure to the strategy at just 95 basis points.
- He positioned HFGM and Unlimited’s broader ETF suite as part of a shift in portfolio construction—from the old 60/40 model to a more modern 50/30/20 framework, where 20% is allocated to alternatives, including both liquid and illiquid strategies.
- HFGM, with its manager-diversified exposure, ease of execution, and lack of paperwork or K-1s, offers a compelling way for advisors and institutions to gain hedge fund-like exposure without the drawbacks of traditional LP structures.
What This Means for Advisors
For financial advisors evaluating options for client portfolios, this conversation with Bob Elliot highlights important considerations around etf structure. Understanding the strategy behind each fund—not just the ticker—helps advisors make more informed allocation decisions and better communicate the rationale to clients.
The themes of etf structure and quantitative investing discussed in this episode are particularly relevant in the current market environment, where advisors are increasingly looking for differentiated solutions that go beyond traditional benchmarks.
Listen to the Full Episode
This article is based on an episode of Behind the Ticker, hosted by Brad Roth, Founder and CIO of THOR Financial Technologies. For the full conversation with Bob Elliot, including additional nuances and details, listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or watch on YouTube.