Fairlead Asset Management

Founder Katie Stockton directs all investment decisions and research. She developed the firm's proprietary technical framework over two decades as Chief Technical Strategist at firms including BTIG and MKM Partners. Her daily market notes and model guidance drive the signals that govern Fairlead's ETF portfolios.

Fairlead uses purely technical, price-based inputs rather than fundamental company analysis. Its models scan momentum, moving-average relationships, and relative strength across sectors or asset classes to determine allocations. Portfolios can shift entirely to defensive positioning — including cash equivalents — during broad market downturns, prioritizing capital preservation over tracking any benchmark.

The firm's flagship is the Fairlead Tactical Sector ETF (TACK), which rotates across US equity sectors and defensive assets using technical signals. A companion product applies similar rules to a multi-asset universe of ETFs. Fairlead also licenses model portfolios and offers tactical overlay services for financial advisors managing client accounts.

Fairlead structures its strategies as exchange-traded funds, which can be bought and sold through any brokerage account. The ETF wrapper makes its systematic technical approach available to both individual investors and institutional allocators on identical terms, with daily liquidity and transparent holdings.

Stockton began her career in technical analysis at Wit SoundView, later joined MKM Partners, and spent more than seven years as Chief Technical Strategist at BTIG before founding Fairlead in 2018. She is a Chartered Market Technician and has been a regular contributor to CNBC and Barron's on market-timing and sector-rotation topics.