Name: WisdomTree CEO on ETFs, IDing Macro Trends, and More
Uploaded: 2026-03-12T16:58:00Z
Duration: 23 min 23 s
Description: Jonathan Steinberg, founder and CEO of Wisdom Tree, sat down for an interview with Barron's editor at large Andy Serwer.

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Jonathan Steinberg, founder and CEO of Wisdom Tree, sat down for an interview with Barron's editor at large Andy Serwer.

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WisdomTree CEO on ETFs, IDing Macro Trends, and More

Hello everyone, and welcome to "At Barron's." I'm Andy Serwer, and welcome to our guest, Jonathan Steinberg, founder and CEO of the investment company, WisdomTree. Jonathan, great to see you.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. So WisdomTree is a publicly traded investment company known for its ETFs. How else do you describe the firm though, Jonathan?

We're an asset manager, so you know, we call ourselves an innovator within financial services, but truly we're in the asset management space.

And how did the firm get started? I mean, you've been in business for many years now. We both have been. You had a company and it sort of morphed and I think 20 years ago is sort of when WisdomTree was founded. Michael Steinhardt was an investor, if you remember him. Jeremy Siegel from Wharton's involved, still involved.

Still involved.

So tell us about the genesis.

So I started the company as Individual Investor Magazine back in 1988, and our idea was unbiased, independent research for the masses. And we took it from something like 20,000 to a half a million subscribers. And I loved my journalism. I was editor in chief and CEO and the research department reported into me and we had passionate investors. But that's 1988. I think in 1993, Netscape came out and I could sense, you know, free information. And so I knew that I had an issue, really long-term issue. I did a story in 1997 on ETFs when the wrapper only had $40 billion worldwide. And as a research company, I built my own indexes. And so I went about, I sold my media assets, I held my indexes. It was a hard journey. I was already public. I had to raise some additional money. I raised it from Michael Steinhardt, Jeremy Siegel, and Jim Robinson, the former CEO of American Express. But to make that transition, I actually had to sort of de-list from NASDAQ to the pink sheets. I ended up selling control to that consortium, to Michael, and Jim, and Jeremy. I sold them straight common at 16 cents a share. I raised $9 million. And on the announcement we went up 38000% in a day. I still didn't have any customers or SEC approval for what I did, which was self indexing. But I was able to take that money and that group of men gave me credibility in the market. And from there, fast forward to today, we manage $160 billion of, it's a better business than old line publishing. And so I made my transition.

So tell us about the specific strategy early then, we can talk about how you pivoted and the new things you're doing. But early on, Jeremy Siegel and you kind of worked up something that was sort of a specific model, right?

So Michael Steinhardt wanted to back me and what he needed was someone to validate the IP and Jeremy Siegel validated what I created, which was dividend weighting. So we dividend weighted the world. If you think about what the S&P 500 is, it's cap weighted, it's an active construction. What we did was self indexing and that I had to get through the SEC approval. But if you take what all dividend pairing companies in the United States, we would call that the dividend stream. If you weight it by every company's proportional contribution to the dividend stream, if that's how you weight it, what we found was it raised your yields and it really gave you better after-fee returns or better returns. When you're cap weighted, you're always overweight, the most overvalued stocks or sectors. Now, beta and cap weighting has been a very effective strategy. When Michael asked for someone to validate Jeremy Siegel, who was a, one of the original, near original investors in Vanguard, but this was sort of at the top of the.com bubble and he realized that there was a flaw in the methodology. So when he saw what I was doing, he said to, and he reworked all of my back tests. The numbers actually got a little bit better. And he said, "Michael, this is the best approached indexing I've ever seen." Michael said, "I'm going to then back him. Would you like to be involved?" Jeremy said, "Yes." And we're off to the races. Jeremy's still involved. He's now our senior economist. He's retired from teaching.

Yeah, a Wharton guy.

Yes.

You're a Wharton guy too.

Yes, but I never graduated.

Oh, you didn't, all right. But the strategy, that original strategy, as you suggest, has its ups and downs because, you know, when you have like a go-go growth, big weight, then you'll get a little bit in the doghouse there and it sort of like ebbs and flows with that specific strategy. I know you do different things, I wanna talk about that, but that core strategy does have its ups and downs.

So first of all, we did 20 funds in a day. Now, in the US, using dividends that would make you more value oriented.

Yeah.

And since, when I launched, since I've launched, value has been out of favor almost exclusively until recently, okay?

Yes.

Internationally, almost everyone pays a dividend. And so it wasn't value there. Now when I got to ETFs, I launched my funds. So we're about to celebrate our 20th anniversary in June.

Yeah.

So we did 20 funds in a day. Six of them were domestic equities, 14 were international. The strategy has really served well, worked well, throughout the period. It was never my idea that that's all I would ever de, ever.

Right.

But what I was able to do, I had one methodology that allowed me to compete with Vanguard.

Right.

Globally. A lot of leverage to this idea. And so we did something, you know, very quickly, like 30 funds in, you know, in 90 days or something.

Yeah.

And I went very aggressively. I had a lot of conviction that the ETF was a better wrapper than the mutual fund. Because I was already public, I was a very, I had nothing to hedge myself against. I didn't have to, you know, I didn't have my foot in both camps. So I really played a very large role in trying to educate the market on the superiority of the wrapper. And today, obviously that wrapper has won, you know, universally

It's ETFs. I mean, you were right there. So, okay, so let's talk about some of these other areas you got into initially and then gradually, and then now you're into some very, you know, new things like blockchain, farmland, privates and stuff. But between that and the early days, what were you doing?

So I started with those. So in one day I did the developed world.

Yeah.

Then I did emerging markets. Then I did more in the US. Then we started adding growth. Then we started adding currency hedging. So I mean, it just kept evolving. And again, it was never about having just that one idea.

Right, right.

It was about building aggressively a franchise that was really ETF focused. And it's just worked out so well. You know, 20 years later we're $160 billion.

Yeah, how many ETFs do you have and what's your global footprint? How many countries are you in? How many people work there? Give us some metrics in case.

So we ave about, globally, about 400 ETFs. We have $90 billion, $92 billion coming outta the US. We have about 65 billion coming out of Europe. And then we have about a almost a billion dollars in tokenization and $2 billion in farmland. So that gives us this $160 billion footprint. It's a very good business model. So we are 350 employees worldwide, and 40 of those are in digital assets. So if you put them to the side, we're managing 160, $159 billion with, you know, 300 employees roughly. I mean, it's amazing.

And Jon, what is the most popular ETF right now? Or what are the most popular ones?

I mean, you know, are you saying what is most popular today? Or what is largest?

Both.

So what's most popular today would be our European Defense Fund. So early last year, let's say in March of last year, we launched the first pure basket of European defense stocks. And it's raised about $5 billion. It's been explosive. As Trump spoke about the need for NATO to fund more of their own self-defense. It really invigorated that theme. And so we've now launched around that theme, European defense, Asian defense, and global defense. And we've done it not just in the Europe, but also in the United States. So that's my sort of something that's very hot right now. In the US, y largest flowing ETF right now is my Japan, my Japan fund, which is, you know, Japan has been a niche market for most investors, but it's been very helpful since Warren Buffet started to really buy. And you know, Japan had been down for 30 years. They, you know, what I did was called fundamental weighting. The actual first fundamentally weighted exposure in the world is someone, GDP weighted EFA. And there was a moment back in the eighties when Japan was larger than the US, so it was 80% of EFA. So GDP weighting of EFA brought it down to a more normal weighting. In the US, actually my largest fund is floating rate treasuries. It's about a 17 or $18 billion fund.

I'm fascinated that European Defense Fund idea, and it makes so much sense. So, you see a macro trend unfolding, you identify it, and you say, wow, I can do an ETF based. How quickly can you go soup to nuts on that?

So one thing that really separates us from everyone else. In the old days, if you had an idea, you would go to an index provider and you would license from them IP. If you had an idea, you could go to them, you could ask them to create something. What I did 20 years ago, what I got unique exemptive relief at the time was for self indexing. So we are able to put a fund in the market. The fastest we've ever done it, my global CIO was on the road and he met a Texas pension fund, and we had a very large footprint in emerging markets. He said, ""ell this is all interesting, but what I want is X state owned emerging markets." And we thought about it and did some research. Found that, if you're state owned, you have more than one, you're serving more than just the shareholder. So we launched that fund in a hundred days and it's a couple of billion dollars. But that pension fund never came in.

That was a good idea,

But it was a good idea.

Yeah, yeah. That's amazing. So Europe continues to be hot. I mean, it was a great market last year and I heard that the market continues to be hot and the ETF market there is exploding as well.

So, there's investing in European companies. It has not been at, it's done better. It hasn't had explosive flows, But, it is more in favor than it's been in many years. I mean, you were talking about value and small caps, they've been out of favor for, you know, almost since I launched my company. International equities have been out of favor almost until just recently also. So again, one of my initial overweights out of favor, you are seeing right now investors trying to diversify away from US equities. And so that's one element driving flows into European exposures. But, if you're thinking about the ETF industry globally, really there are two markets. There's the United States and there's Europe. There are some local markets like Korea, but it's a closed market for the Koreans or the Japanese market is solely for the locals. No foreign person or entity is really going into Japan and getting an exposure from the Japanese listed ETF.

Jon, I read that metals now represent over 25% of your AUM, both physical and overlay products. First of all, explain what that means. And then secondly, is this a boom that's gonna go bust.

So gold, we manage about, let's say 25 or 26 or $7 billion in physical gold.

So what does that mean? Is the ETF is backed by the gold.

Yes, a hundred percent backed. So every, so I've actually visited the gold in the HSBC vault.

In New York?

No, it's in.

You're gonna tell me.

London.

Oh, it's in London, you can tell.

But you can't see it. I mean they, it's secret. They put a bag over your head, they take you to it.

Get outta here.

The people that work in the vault tell people they work in archives and it is very, very secret.

No, you know, you're kidding about the bag thing though?

No.

Seriously?

But I did bring them donuts.

Okay. But you can't.

Wow.

I mean, it's really secret.

Yeah, okay.

It's one of the.

It's like MI6 or something, right?

Yeah, it's very exciting. Now, so we are the, I think the fourth largest manager of gold in the world. So State Street's the largest, iShares is the second, Invesco, now WisdomTree. So that's physical gold. What we've also done though, is, so if you think about gold, it's an alternative store of value. Often, it does better in inflationary movements. It also does well as an offset to sort of global political crisis, right? What's really been driving gold for the last few years is central banks around the world are trying to diversify away from their dollar exposure. They saw what we did during, when Russia invaded Ukraine, they were cut off from the financial system. So under a Trump world, the central banks have no desire to stop buying gold. They are really buying gold. They're buying gold more than the retail investor globally. So, I mean, you understand markets, you know, more buying than selling, gold goes up. So gold has been trading incredibly well. I think the underpinnings for gold, which has a store of value for centuries, isn't going anywhere. And they seem to have some very interesting characteristics, which makes us bullish on it. Now there are a couple of other things. Bitcoin, which is also an alternative store of value, they actually did a better job of selling the role of Bitcoin in the portfolio than gold did. But they serve a very similar role in the portfolio. So that's another thing that, like there is now, there was always a relationship between gold and silver. There is also a relationship between gold and Bitcoin. And Bitcoin cannot go to, you know, a half a, you know, $500,000 a coin without gold trading up as well. So, now, Bitcoin's been down, but gold has been soaring, I think partly because for the last 15 years it was all Bitcoin not gold. So gold has caught up. You asked an interesting question, though, about the gold overlays. If you are trying to buy into alternatives, what do you, the question any advisor is asked is, what am I gonna sell to buy this? So we've created funds. We have a family of funds, efficient capital. So within it, a very consumer friendly use of leverage, a basket of 500 equities that uses a gold overlay, 20 basis points. So it's an alternate, comes out of your sort of your S&P 500 exposure. And in a market where gold is the best performing asset class, this fund has beaten, it's three years old, it's raised about $600 million and has made it very easy for advisors to allocate. What's interesting, if you look at, you know, if you go back to sort of Jack Bogle, the founder of Vanguard, and his approach to investing, own the world of liquid assets proportionally to their market cap. That's his idea. So under that scenario, gold would be about 12% of your portfolio. Most people have never bought any gold. So we've tried to create a product for advisors and for retail that would make it easier for them to allocate to gold. We just recently launched tips plus a gold overlay as well.

Wow, I want to change gears here a little bit. Jon, I wanna ask you about your personal side a little bit.

Yeah.

Your father.

Yeah.

Saul was a financier. Pretty famous guy here in New York City on Wall Street. What did you learn from him?

So first of all, my dad was instantly successful. He created the computer leasing industry. It was out of a paper that he wrote at Wharton. So that's when IBM had like near Monopoly. So he went to the judge who wrote the decree that forced the allowance of third party leasing on the mainframes. So he, and there it was just paperwork. You already had the computer, it was at your desk. So he was instantly successful and went public very, very early. So one, all I knew was financial services and being public. So my dream was to run a publicly traded financial service company. But he was also just a very creative businessman. He created Telemundo, we own Days Inn. He did a lot of interesting things. We would talk business and study what is a great business. And there are very few great businesses, and there are very few businesses that don't have to evolve over time. I, my dad was an operator, but he was also transactional. He did a lot of M&A and things, you know, and he had like a conglomerate, right? So he was different. When I created WisdomTree, I saw that it had characteristics to be a great business, and it's people like capital light. It's on the right side of, you know, it has a, you know, we're not brain surgeons, but we are fiduciaries. You know, it has a moral compass to it. And so I've, you know, been doing this now for 20 years at WisdomTree, and it's just this wonderful experience of building a great business. One other thing that my dad did, he did acquire, he was the first to acquire an insurance company before Warren Buffett or Larry Tisch. For the float, right? But the company he acquired went back to 1792. It was one of the oldest companies in America. And it always struck me, how could a company lasts for centuries? Now, I started in 1988, so I'm 40 years in on this. But to actually go for centuries, a lot of elements have to happen. You have to scale, which is the biggest thing. You have to have a culture that can evolve business. You know, not everyone's Heinz ketchup or something where you don't have to evolve at all. Think about our historical past, right? Print. If you didn't evolve, you got, you know, innovated outta business. So I've been very, I've pushed on innovating along the way, and so he really gave me a background of appreciating the, all of the different elements. As CEO, I have to focus on the customer, the employee, and the shareholder.

Final quick question. The stock is publicly traded, as I mentioned. You've got about, what, a half a billion in revenues market cap of 2.2 billion. Stock's been on a good run, got a PE of 22. Why should investors buy this stock now?

Well, we are one of the fastest growing, organic growth asset managers. So that's one element. We've been growing our earnings per share for the last five years at about a 25% CAGR more recently, like at a 50% CAGR for the last three years. I think we are, you know, we're in the right areas. Our footprint, global ETFs, tokenization, privates, we're in a very attractive area. And so for the last five years, we have actually done better as a public company than BlackRock, every year for the last five years. But it isn't so easy as a small public company, two and a half billion dollars, to get investor attention. But we've been doing, we're doing better and better. We're scaling. We've really hit a level of scale. So it seems very timely right now.

Jonathan Steinberg, CEO of WisdomTree, thank you so much for joining us.

Andy, great to see you, thank you.

This is "At Barron's" I'm Andy Serwer. We'll catch you next time.