Not Your Traditional Free Cash Flow ETF: VFLO’s $10B Story

Not Your Traditional Free Cash Flow ETF: VFLO’s $10B Story

Thu, August 20, 2026 at 11:08 PM GMT+3 3 min read

Behind the Ticker's host Brad Roth, CIO of Thor Funds, sits down with Mannik Dhillon, CFA, CAIA, President of Investment Franchises and Solutions and Head of ETFs at Victory Capital, to unpack VFLO, the Victory Shares Free Cash Flow ETF, and how the strategy propelled it to over $10 billion in AUM in just under three years.

• From pre-med to ETF powerhouse. Mannik Dhillon's path to Victory Capital wasn't exactly a straight line, instead starting out pre-med at the University of Georgia before catching the investing bug during the tech boom. The years spent years evaluating asset managers on the institutional side allowed him to hone in on what actually makes a good investment firm tick. That experience convinced him that the best setup lets skilled managers focus purely on managing money, free from the distractions of running a business. So when Victory Capital came calling with its multi-boutique model, it just clicked.

• A platform built to get out of the way. Victory's whole structure is designed around independent franchise of boutique investment teams that run their own process without corporate interference bleeding into their decisions. Victory handles the tedious underpinnings including compliance, marketing, operations, distribution, so the investment teams can just invest. Dhillon says this avoids the groupthink problem that plagues bigger firms built on a single research process. It's also why Victory doesn't mind if its own products overlap, as it allows clients to choose what strategies and teams fit best.

• VFLO's not-so-secret sauce. Launched in 2023, the VictoryShares Free Cash Flow ETF (VFLO) takes free cash flow yield, an already popular value metric, and makes it smarter in two key ways. First, it looks forward, incorporating estimated future free cash flow instead of only backward-looking numbers, which helps catch turning points that a rearview-only approach would totally miss. Second, it layers in a growth filter that doesn't try to find the best growers, it just weeds out the worst ones, dodging the classic value trap of stocks that are cheap for a reason. That combination has helped VFLO grow to more than $10 billion assets in just over three years while outperforming not only value benchmarks, but growth and core benchmarks too.

• Zero Mag Seven, big results. Maybe the most eye-catching detail is that VFLO has pulled off this track record without owning a single Magnificent Seven stock. For advisors, that's a real selling point since so many portfolios are already stacked with mega-cap tech exposure through index funds or growth strategies. Dhillon says a lot of clients now pair VFLO with its growth counterpart, GFLW, to diversify away from that concentration while still keeping pace when growth stocks run. And with the framework already extended into small caps, international markets, and more variations reportedly in the pipeline, it's a strategy that's created a whole family of funds.

To learn more about Victory Capital, go here.

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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.

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