Next on was Joanne Hill, chief advisor of research and strategy at Cboe Vest, who has an extensive history within the ETF industry and was one of the first ETF analysts in the business. Hill explained that some of the first major buyers of ETFs were actually hedge funds that were shorting them during the bear markets of the early 2000s, and that for a long time ETFs were only popular with institutional investors and not retail ones until the mid-2000s. Looking ahead, Hill sees active playing a continued role within the industry. “As I was talking about kind of evolution of products and ETF packaging, it’s been a long time coming, but I think we are now in this current phase, it’s not just active strategies but the opportunity to put options-based strategies in ETFs,” Hill said. Last on was JD Gardner, founder of Aptus ETFs, an issuer that currently has five ETFs, all utilizing options, and $2 billion in assets. One of the most popular of their lineup is the Aptus Defined Risk ETF (DRSK), which acts as a bond replacement in portfolios. “The reasons that you held bonds in the past are not the reasons you’re going to hold bonds in the future, and I think we needed something to help directly replace bonds,” Gardner explained. “We wanted to launch something that can have similar risk metrics as a typical bond fund but have much better upside.”