DBMF is the ticker that does the heaviest lifting in the “Crack-Up Boom” pitch, the fund Dan Ferris and Ron Paul describe as “a ticker whose returns are largely uncorrelated to stocks and bonds, and which actually MADE money in 2002, when markets fell.” It is the iMGP DBi Managed Futures Strategy ETF, and it trades around $31.99. The pitch sells it as the diversification answer to a currency crisis, and there is a real product underneath that claim, one that is worth decoding before anyone clicks through.
What DBMF Actually Is
DBMF is not a typical ETF. It does not hold stocks or bonds, and it does not hire its own traders. It is an emulation fund, a product built to replicate the average portfolio of the twenty largest managed-futures hedge funds, using publicly available data and a time lag. The firms it tracks are commodity trading advisers, the systematic trend-followers who trade everything from oil to currencies to interest rates and have historically generated returns that do not track the stock market.
The design is what makes it accessible. Real managed futures funds are expensive and hard to buy, with performance fees and high minimums. DBMF approximates their collective portfolio in a single, cheap, exchange-traded wrapper. It is, in effect, an index fund for a strategy that never had an index, and that is a genuinely useful innovation for a retail investor who wants diversification.
The Emulation Trade-Off
The innovation comes with a trade-off: tracking error. Because DBMF follows its target with a delay and an approximation, it will never perfectly match the returns of the funds it emulates. It is always a step behind, and its reconstruction of what the big funds hold is necessarily imprecise. That means a reader buying DBMF is not buying the exact performance of the managed-futures industry, they are buying a lagged, approximate copy of it.
That distinction matters for the pitch’s central claim. The “made money in 2002” result belongs to the SG CTA index, the benchmark of the largest managed-futures funds. DBMF did not exist in 2002. The direction of the claim is right, the strategy really did hold up when the S&P 500 fell roughly 23 percent, but the specific fund being sold has no 2002 track record of its own. We walked through that in our managed futures ETF explainer.
What Actually Checks Out
Judged on its own terms, DBMF is a legitimate product. Managed futures genuinely are uncorrelated to stocks and bonds, the strategy’s benchmark genuinely made money in 2002 and 2008, and DBMF genuinely is a low-cost way for ordinary investors to hold the strategy. It plays the same role in a crisis portfolio as gold or farmland, a source of returns that does not depend on the dollar or the stock market holding up, but it does it through trading rather than through owning a hard asset.
The honest caveats are the tracking error, and the fact that the pitch offers no performance accountability. Every pick in the presentation’s table is marked “N/A,” and the pitch concedes “anybody who gives you a date is lying to you.” The strategy’s history is real. The urgency is manufactured. We placed the fund in the full basket in our managed futures explainer.
What the Fund Costs
The cost structure is where the emulation model’s appeal becomes concrete. A real commodity trading adviser typically charges a management fee plus a performance fee, the famous “two and twenty” structure, on top of high minimums that lock out almost everyone. DBMF, by contrast, is an exchange-traded fund with a single, published expense ratio, no performance fee, and no minimum beyond the price of one share. That is the entire point of the product, to make an expensive institutional strategy cheap and accessible.
The honest caveat is that DBMF’s expense ratio is still higher than a plain index fund, because the emulation work, tracking and reconstructing the large funds’ positions, is not free. And the fund’s returns will lag the industry it copies, both because of that fee and because of the emulation lag. So the cost story is genuinely good compared with the alternative, a real managed-futures fund, and merely ordinary compared with a broad stock index. Which comparison matters depends on what job you are hiring the fund to do.
The Honest Bottom Line
DBMF is the most interesting single holding in the “Crack-Up Boom” basket, a clever way to access a genuinely uncorrelated strategy that has historically been locked behind institutional doors. If the pitch has a sleeve that earns its place on the merits rather than the fear, it is this one. The caveat is that you are buying an emulation with a lag, not a replay of 2002, and the fund’s own record is still being written.
The offer is The Ferris Report at $129 for the first year, renewing at $199, with a 30-day refund and a seven-stock “Capitalism in Crisis Portfolio.” The diversification idea is worth taking seriously. Just know exactly what the ticker is copying.
Ready to see the research? Click here to view the Crack-Up Boom presentation.
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