Meet Fran Rodilosso, Head of Fixed Income ETF Portfolio Management

My interest in the field really began in college, even though I was not a finance or business major. I majored in history. But my freshman year advisor was a really interesting professor of Latin American history. So he got me interested in Latin America in particular.

But coming out of college, the job I got in finance was actually on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange in the commodity pits. To be more specific, the energy pits. I began that job the Monday after Iraq invaded Kuwait. So it was an instant lesson in market psychology, market crazes, oil prices over the next 12 months were arranged from I think low 20s dollars per barrel to the mid 40s and 10 or 15 dollar swings in a single day. It was quite exciting.

So on the Mercantile Exchange, I learned a lot about market psychology. But I also learned a lot about what I didn't know. And that is, to me, that's always something I look for motivation. And having been a history major, I knew I didn't know a lot about finance. So I actually went back and got an MBA with a concentration in finance.

And after business school, I went got into a really, really interesting area, which was fixed income arbitrage. So we're applying math in some really interesting ways to find and exploit mispricings between cash bonds and bond future prices or between swaps and cash bonds. It was a really, really interesting area. That was at a European bank. And after two years on that desk, the opportunity actually came up to transition to their emerging market debt team, who were really a bunch of bankers, really smart credit people without a lot of bond math sophistication.

So I was a trader on that fixed income arbitrage desk and then emerging markets desk for about five years. When in 2001, I joined VanEck, as I like to say, for the first time. And that was my first job on the buy side on emerging market debt active strategy, it was actually a hedge fund. We focused on distressed debt and did hands-on work in a lot of restructurings in the corporate and sovereign debt areas throughout emerging markets. Interestingly, it spun off from VanEck in 2005, a little-known part of VanEck history.

So I worked with that group for several years after the spin-off and then actually went back to a capital markets role on the sell side, focusing still on emerging markets. But the opportunity came up via Jan van Eck to rejoin in 2012 and start managing some of the fixed income ETFs. And it's really, really been a lot of work, but really a fun place to be.

The thing I've loved the most though is getting to spend a lot of time with VanEck clients as I try to educate them on asset classes within fixed income and how they work inside of ETFs. I've learned a whole bunch more about how they do asset allocation, how they manage money for their clients and it's been super interesting.