Hull Tactical

Blair Hull is the founder, chairman, and chief investment officer. He brings more than four decades of quantitative trading experience, starting on the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange floor in 1976 and extending through the 1999 sale of his automated market-making firm, Hull Trading Company, to Goldman Sachs. Day-to-day portfolio management of the ETF is handled by a small internal team under Hull's direction.

HTUS uses a proprietary machine-learning model to generate daily six-week-forward directional forecasts for the S&P 500. When the signal is positive, the fund holds a 100% long equity position and sells out-of-the-money put options. When the signal turns negative, the fund moves to cash or short-term Treasuries and buys protective put options. The strategy is entirely systematic with no discretionary override.

Hull Trading Company was the automated market-making firm Blair Hull founded and later sold to Goldman Sachs in 1999, not Hull Tactical. The quantitative expertise and options-pricing knowledge Hull developed over twenty years at Hull Trading Company directly inform the algorithms Hull Tactical uses today. Hull Tactical is a separate entity focused on asset management, not market making.

Hull Tactical Asset Allocation is registered as an investment adviser and lists an ETF among its offerings, but the firm does not publicly detail its full client book or separate account mandates. The Hull Tactical US ETF (HTUS) is the only vehicle it actively promotes and the only one widely tracked.

The firm's edge derives from Blair Hull's proprietary experience in options pricing and quantitative modeling accumulated over four decades. The forecasting model is built in-house and is designed to exploit Hull's core insight — that options markets embed information about future volatility and directional expectations that systematic models can isolate and act upon daily.

The Hull Tactical US ETF carries an expense ratio disclosed in its prospectus, which includes the management fee charged by Hull Tactical Asset Allocation. Because the strategy involves active options trading, transaction costs and bid-ask spreads on options contracts represent an additional implicit cost beyond the stated expense ratio. Allocators should review the current prospectus for the most recent fee schedule.

Blair Hull founded Hull Tactical Asset Allocation after the sale of Hull Trading Company to Goldman Sachs closed in 1999. The firm launched the Hull Tactical US ETF more recently, though the exact founding date of the registered investment adviser is not prominently published. The firm has maintained a consistent presence in Chicago throughout its operating history.