The team at a Georgia boutique is about to launch their sixth and seventh ETFs.

George Bradley "Brad" Ball Liquid Strategies, LLC Managing Member, CEO, PM

Brad Ball, CEO of Liquid Strategies [profile], confirms that the plan to roll out a pair of new ETFs this week as part of their Overlay Shares series (nicknamed "OVLs"). Looking ahead, watch for the Atlanta-based shop to launch additional ETFs.

"We have at least one more strategy that we're incubating right now, and we have a couple other ideas that are in the hopper," Ball tells MFWire.

As for the two about-to-launch ETFs, one is meant to replace Liquid Strategies' sole traditional mutual fund, the $45-million-AUM Theta Income Fund. The ETF will be OVT (standing for "Overlay Theta"), and after they launch it they'll wind down the mutual fund version. Once that happens, Liquid Strategies will only offer ETFs and institutional separate accounts.

"We anticipated that being a possibility as we launched these five initial ETFs [in 2019]," Ball says. "We wanted to battle test them, see what the marketplace wanted."

The other new ETF, OVLH ("Overlay Large Hedged"), will be similar to their flagship OVL ETF, with an overlay strategy on top of the S&P 500. Yet OVLH will add a hedging component, using the overlay premiums to buy protection against drops in the index. They've been running a separate account version of the strategy for about a year and a half, Ball says, and they're please that the strategy has given investors nearly all of the S&P 500's upside, but with half the standard deviation and less than half the max drawdown.

The firm has nearly $500 million in AUM, including nearly $300 million in its five ETFs. They have a team of ten people, including a four-person investment team. 

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