So, International Women's Day was last week. The flowers have wilted, the social media posts have scrolled away, and corporate America is back to business as usual. Here's a quick, stark reminder of what "business as usual" looks like at the very top: in a basket of 50 large U.S. companies deemed to have superior leadership, only five are run by women.
That's the snapshot from the Wedbush ReturnOnLeadership U.S. Large-Cap ETF (EXEQ). The five CEOs breaking the mold are Jayshree Ullal of Arista Networks Inc (ANET), Lori Koch of DuPont de Nemours Inc (DD), Martina Cheung of S&P Global Inc (SPGI), Ashley McEvoy of Insulet Corp (PODD), and Debra Cafaro of Ventas Inc (VTR). Ten percent. That's the number.
Now, this ETF isn't trying to make a statement about gender. It's trying to make money by investing in companies with good leadership. Its methodology, developed by a firm called Indiggo, tries to quantify something famously squishy: how well a company is led.
"The ReturnOnLeadership model evaluates corporate leadership as a whole and is individual leader agnostic. One of the benefits of this is it allows us to maintain complete objectivity in the way we measure and rank corporations," Janeen Gelbart, co-founder and CEO of Indiggo, told MarketDash.
Think of it this way: instead of judging the charisma or track record of a single CEO, they look at the organization's execution. "Elements such as strategic clarity, leadership alignment and focused action are all conduits to superior leadership execution and optimal outcomes," Gelbart said. She added that leadership has historically been a black box for investors—hard to measure but obviously important. The idea is they've cracked the code.
So, How Do You Invest in Leadership?
The ETF tracks an index and follows a rules-based system. Cullen Rodgers, chief investment officer at Wedbush Fund Advisers and the ETF's portfolio manager, says this is different from your typical factor investing.
"Traditional factor strategies typically rely on financial ratios or market characteristics such as profitability, balance sheet strength, or valuation. Those approaches measure the outcomes a company produces. The index underlying EXEQ looks at a different layer of concrete signals, organizational execution," Rodgers said.
This is why you find giants like Alphabet (GOOGL), Nvidia (NVDA), Microsoft (MSFT), and Delta Air Lines Inc (DAL) in the portfolio. They're not there because someone likes Sundar Pichai or Satya Nadella; they're there because a model scored their company's overall leadership execution highly.
"Because the methodology is rules based and passive, the portfolio reflects the outcome of the index ranking rather than subjective assessments of individual executives or personalities," Rodgers explained.
His closing argument is simple: "Leadership is not a trend. It is an eternal, highly influential driver of outcomes." It's a factor, like value or momentum, that you can supposedly systematize and bet on.
And the systematic bet, at least right now, shows that in a group of 50 companies celebrated for leadership, 90% of the corner offices are occupied by men. The data tells its own story, agnostic of the individuals sitting in the chairs.
