Animal Spirits Podcast Talk Your Book: Juicing Your Returns
32 snips
Apr 20, 2026 
Matt Kaufman, senior product strategist at Calamos who builds ETF and structured-product solutions. He walks through auto-callable ETFs, memory growth notes and how laddered weekly notes with a memory feature work. Conversation covers liquidity, tax treatment, partners and the tradeoffs between capped upside and protection.
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How ETF Innovation Brings Structured Products To Mainstream
- ETF innovation now adapts strategies from insurance and structured products into liquid, tax-efficient ETFs.
- Calamos evaluates liquidity, tax efficiency, scale, and perpetual viability before converting complex derivatives into ETF wrappers.
Calamos' Protected Bitcoin Experiment
- Calamos launched a Protected Bitcoin ETF offering tiered downside buffers and upside caps to give bridged exposure to Bitcoin.
- Ben Carlson bought into two buffer levels; the product showed how protection worked during Bitcoin's pullback.
Origins Of Autocallable ETF Strategies
- Autocallable strategies come from the structured note world and use long-dated put-writing with bells and whistles.
- Calamos partnered with JP Morgan to price and ladder these into the market as the first auto-callable income ETF.