Behind the Ticker: Why Insider Ownership Matters Behind The Ticker Mon, November 9, 2026 at 4:07 PM EST BRK-B +0.39% ^GSPC +2.35% OWN +2.26% Haren Bhakta talks with Brad Roth on Behind the Ticker In this episode of Behind the Ticker, host Brad Roth sits down with Haren Bhakta, CFA, Founder and CEO of Inside Ownership Index, to talk equity investing that targets companies with where owner-operators actively participate in running the company while retaining shares. They dig into the Inside Ownership 100 ETF (OWN) and what backtesting reveals about this particular approach to ownership investing.
Haren Bhakta got hooked on stocks at 18, broke into finance selling insurance during the 2008 downturn, and later managed money at Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley before launching his own firm in 2017. The spark for his newest idea came at the 2024 Berkshire Hathaway meeting, when he realized something odd: because the S&P 500 weights by free float, it will actually buy more Berkshire once Warren Buffett is gone and his shares start trading freely. To Bhakta, that's backwards, since investors should want the most exposure while visionary owners are running the show. So he combed through roughly 21,000 proxy filings to build the insider ownership history that no data provider had.
The result is OWN, the Inside Ownership 100 ETF, which takes the 100 S&P 500 companies with the highest dollar value of insider ownership and weights them by that value. Bhakta calls it market cap viewed through the lens of skin in the game, a third way to index alongside equal weight and cap weight. His favorite illustration is Intel versus Nvidia in 2020: same size, but Intel had better trailing numbers while Nvidia had a founder who lived and breathed the company, and Nvidia has since soared more than 2,000%. History backs him up too, with GM, IBM, and GE all fading after their dominant owner-leaders stepped away.
The back test to 2005 shows about two points of annual outperformance and shallower drawdowns in 2008 and 2020, which Bhakta credits to owner-operators moving fast and accessing capital when others can't. He's upfront that OWN is more volatile in normal markets, and he likes to contrast the hired CEO as a well-fed zoo lion with the owner-operator as a wild lion that has to hunt. Unlike founder-focused ETFs, OWN only requires insiders to sit on the board, which captures companies like Alphabet and builders like Buffett who weren't technically founders. His advice to advisors is to use OWN as a replacement for S&P 500 exposure, potentially trimming a 60/40 portfolio toward 50/50 while keeping pace with the market.
You can learn more about Inside Ownership Index at their website or find Haren Bhakta on LinkedIn.
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