A veteran proprietary trader just entered the mutual fund business with his own ETF.

This summer Hull Tactical Asset Allocation debuted the Hull Tactical US ETF. It runs on a hedge-fund-like, long-short, market-timing strategy. It can go up to 200-percent long and up to 100-percent short, balancing between SDPRs and cash. Watch for Hull to work on a similar offering that incorporates bonds, too.

"We have a diversified portfolio of strategies," Blair Hull, founder of Hull Tactical, tells MFWire. "This is just one of those strategies."

Hull estimates that it would've taken about four years to go through the SEC approval. Yet with help from Exchange Traded Concepts, it took him two and a half years instead. Hull Tactical is technially a subadvisor to Exchange Traded Concepts.

For now, Hull is mainly worried about performance, not distribution. He also teamed up with Xiao Qiao of the University of Chicago to pen a paper, "A Practitioner's Defense of Return Predictability." Hull describes his shop's approach as "a big leap ... [that] requires a contrarian spirit." Trying to time the market, Hull says, used to be stigmatized.

"We didn't have the predictive techniques, and people didn't stick to it," Hull tells MFWire. "If people used this contrarian, disciplined approach, we believe that markets would become more stable."

Hull previously worked at Hull Trading Company, a proprietary trading firm bought by Goldman Sachs in 1999. 

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