Behind the Ticker: WRTH & Worth Charting

In this episode of Behind the Ticker, Brad Roth, CIO of Thor Financial Technologies, sits down with Carter Worth, Co-Founder and CEO of Worth Charting to talk the firm’s approach to options investing around earnings season and the Worth Charting Options Income ETF (WRTH). 

You can also listen to this episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any of your preferred streaming platforms.

An Options Strategy That Doesn’t Bank on Directionality

Carter Worth got his start as a junior analyst at Value Line but his career led him to doing fundamental work for a strategist at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette where he began incorporating the study of prices into his process. Eventually Worth abandoned the fundamental inputs entirely, sticking with price and price only ever since. In 2021, after roughly 35 years across major sell-side firms, he founded Worth Charting as a research boutique serving the largest institutional capital pools across North America, Europe, and Asia. He also appears regularly on CNBC’s Fast Money. 

The investment conversation opens with Roth questioning where technicals still have a place in a market dominated by quant and AI. Carter's answer flips the usual framing. Quantitative analysis is pattern recognition; rather than undermining technicals, the rise of quant actually validates the underlying premise, that there is wisdom in price, and price action contains information worth studying. The US government itself, he notes, uses stock prices as one of the inputs in its leading indicator index.

The Worth Charting Options Income ETF (WRTH) launched on April 28, 2026, is actively managed, and is sub-advised by Tidal. The fund is positioned as an income-generating vehicle for conservative capital, with a stated objective of S&P-like returns (roughly 9 to 12% annually), max drawdowns under 6%, and no down years. Carter is direct that this is the holy grail of investment performance and openly acknowledges no fund has ever achieved it over a full decade, but it's the goal the fund is built around.

The strategy is meaningfully different from what most option income ETFs are doing. Most products in the category either buy options or sell covered calls. WRTH sells both calls and puts on the same underlying at the same time. It's a short strangle strategy, deployed with very specific filters that compound the probability edge. Start with all short-dated, out-of-the-money options (that expire worthless up to 75% of the time) and then restrict the universe to large cap stocks only. By doing so, the odds move to about 85%. Further restrict to options that are 10% or more out of the money, and you get to 88%. 

Then add the final filter: only sell strangles in the days following an earnings event that produced an outsized move (the gap-up or gap-down). At that point, premium is inflated because directional traders are pricing in continued volatility — but historically that volatility crushes and the stock consolidates. Stacking all four filters together, the strategy targets options that have approximately a 93% probability of expiring worthless.

WRTH is one of the few options strategies that takes no directional view. The fund isn't predicting whether a stock goes up or down. It's predicting that the stock will stay in a range for the next 15 to 20 sessions after a significant move. That's a fundamentally different statistical question, and one Worth argues is far more answerable than direction. The fund holds approximately 40 positions, each at roughly 2.5% weight. The strategy can write strangles against equities, index ETFs, gold, silver, oil, or any underlying with sufficient liquidity, because the methodology is agnostic to what the underlying actually is. 

Tune into the full conversation that covers how the fund handles collaterals and what it actually owns, how it handles risk management, and how advisors and investors are using the strategy in their portfolios. 

For more information about Worth Charting, visit their website. 

Disclaimer: The market insights, projections, and investment strategies expressed in this article are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of ETF.com. This content is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or legal advice.