Tim Kramer
Energy Infrastructure: The Overlooked Income Play
Tim Kramer is the founder of CNIC Funds and has been in the energy industry since 1997. His career spans asset-based energy companies, proprietary trading firms, and a private equity firm where he hedged commodity exposure across crude oil, natural gas, electricity, interest rates, FX, and metals. That deep energy trading background led him to spot a gap in the commodity index world: electricity is the most consumed commodity in the United States, yet it doesn't appear in any major commodity index. AMP (the ICE US Carbon Neutral Power ETF) was built to fill that gap. On this episode of Behind the Ticker, Tim joins Brad for one of the most unique product conversations in the show's history.
The Missing Commodity
Tim's thesis starts with a simple observation. The Bloomberg Commodity Index (BCOM) and Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI) between them have $500-800 billion directly and indirectly tied to their constituents. These indices hold 24-25 different commodities: gold, crude oil, corn, natural gas, and so on. But electricity, which has liquid futures trading on ICE (the same exchange that owns the New York Stock Exchange), is completely absent. There's no structural reason for this exclusion. Electricity futures are liquid, traded, and well-established. The commodity indices simply haven't updated to include them.
AMP was designed to give investors access to U.S. power markets through an ETF. The fund tracks an index of electricity futures across major U.S. power hubs, providing exposure to a commodity that is increasingly driven by two powerful secular trends: data center buildout for AI and the electrification of transportation and heating. Tim argues that the demand trajectory for electricity is as clear as any commodity story in the market.
Energy Markets from the Inside
Tim's stories from the energy trading world give this episode a different flavor than most ETF conversations. He describes how when he worked at an asset-based energy company, they employed five in-house meteorologists because weather is the primary short-term driver of electricity prices. At one point, they hired NASA's head meteorologist on the logic that if he could land the Space Shuttle in a hurricane, he could probably forecast power demand. The meteorologist's edge wasn't just getting the weather right. He could predict what the commercially available weather forecasts would say and when they'd say it. The trading team would wait for the market to react to the commercial forecast, then trade against it using the proprietary forecast.
Even with that edge, short-term weather forecasting for power trading was "almost a coin flip." The long-range forecasts (next three months warmer or cooler than normal) were much more reliable. Today, Tim notes that firms are throwing enormous amounts of data and AI at weather prediction, making the space even more competitive and sophisticated.
Seasonality, Trends, and the AI Power Demand Story
Tim breaks the electricity market into two dynamics: long-term trends and short-term noise. The trends are powerful and persistent. Data center construction for AI workloads is driving unprecedented demand growth for electricity. Every major tech company is building massive power-hungry facilities, and the grid infrastructure hasn't kept up. Electrification of transportation (EVs) and heating adds another demand layer. Tim sees these fundamentals as "really strong for long-term appreciation of power."
The short-term noise comes from weather events and seasonal patterns. El Nino produced the warmest December-January-February on record, which crushed winter power prices because heating demand collapsed. That created a pullback in the power index. But the underlying structural demand story didn't change. Tim draws a distinction between trading the weather-driven volatility (which requires specialized expertise and significant resources) and investing in the long-term structural demand trend (which is what AMP is designed for).
The seasonality angle is real and persistent. Summer cooling demand, winter heating demand, and shoulder season dynamics create regular patterns in electricity prices. But each year's specific conditions vary based on weather, plant outages, and supply developments, making it more complex than simply following a calendar.
Key Takeaways
- AMP provides ETF access to U.S. electricity futures, a commodity with $500-800B tied to major indices but completely absent from BCOM and GSCI despite having liquid futures on ICE.
- Two powerful secular demand drivers: data center buildout for AI (every major tech company building massive power-hungry facilities) and transportation/heating electrification.
- Tim has been in energy markets since 1997 across trading firms, asset-based companies, and PE. His firm once hired NASA's head meteorologist to gain an edge in weather-driven power trading.
- Long-term electricity demand fundamentals are "really strong," but short-term weather-driven noise (like El Nino crushing winter prices) creates volatility around the structural trend.
- AMP is the only ETF providing targeted U.S. power market exposure. Learn more at cnicfunds.com, including monthly white papers and educational webcasts.
Listen to the full conversation on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.
Full Transcript
5,488 wordsMachine transcribed from Brad Roth's conversation with Tim Kramer, with speakers identified automatically. Timestamps link to that moment on YouTube. Lightly cleaned, otherwise unedited.
Welcome to Behind the Ticker. I'm Brad Roth, Chief Investment Officer of Thor Financial Technologies and Portfolio Manager of THLV, the Thor Low Volatility ETF. Behind the Ticker uncovers the inner workings of the ETF industry. We will interview portfolio managers and ETF service providers to dive deep into their work lives and their businesses. We will learn the inner workings of their strategies and what drives them as they continue to grow their company. Many of these individuals are entrepreneurs and will have unique and compelling insights to share as much goes on behind the ticker. Please note, nothing in this show is investment advice and it is meant solely for educational and entertainment purposes only.
Welcome to Behind the Ticker. Today we have on Tim Kramer. He is from CNIC Funds. We are talking about AMT, which is their ICE U.S. Carbon Neutral Power ETF. It trades off of an index they have designed. It's a very interesting conversation. I could have talked to Tim for a very long time about the power markets. I find them very intriguing. They can be extremely volatile, extremely speculative. But in this case, we talk about where you should be looking at getting exposure to this commodity and how to use it in overall portfolio, as well as some of the mechanics of how this portfolio and this ETF actually operate. So without further ado, please welcome Mr. Tim Kramer.
Hey, Tim. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I appreciate the opportunity.
So before we get started, why don't you tell everybody a little bit about who you are, your background and how you eventually started CNIC Funds?
Read the full transcript (59 more sections)Collapse transcript
Sure. So my name is Tim Kramer, and I've been in the energy industry since about 1997. Worked at a number of different energy companies, some asset-based and some just proprietary trading based. Before starting CNIC, my most recent job is I worked for a private equity company where I was responsible for hedging their commodity exposure for their PE group and their infrastructure group. So that would be crude oil, natural gas, electricity, interest rates, FX, metals, pretty much anything that you could put a price on it and you wanted to get the risk out the door. That's what I was doing for it. And so then we saw an opportunity there. And kind of the whole thought process was this. If you take a look, there's commodity indexes. So there's what's called the BCOM,
The Bloomberg Commodity Index. And then there's the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index called the GSCI. And oddly enough, owned by S&P, not Goldman Sachs now. And there's somewhere between like $500 billion to $800 billion, like directly and indirectly tied to these commodity indexes. And so they each hold about 24 or 25 different commodities. So it might be gold futures and crude oil futures and corn futures, et cetera. But electricity also has futures that trade on ICE, the Intercontinental Exchange, same guys in the New York Stock Exchange. And so electricity in the US is the most consumed commodity on a retail emotional basis. But it's not in any index, any ETF, any mutual one, it's nowhere. And so we kind of started scratching our heads and saying,
It just doesn't really make any sense that the most consumed commodity is not in any one of the commodity indexes. So what we did, and we kind of make the joke that it took a long weekend and a case of beer. And we created the first ever electricity index. And then we partnered with ICE. And we published the index in January of 2023. And then we did an ETF that was benchmarked to that. The ticker is AMPT, A-N-P-D. And we chose that because like all the other cool tickers like shock and bolt and stuff were taken. So we landed on AMPT. And so we launched that in, let's see, it was May of 23.
So that's kind of the background and where we are right now.
So kind of before we get into all the nuts and bolts, I always like to ask everybody, what do you like to do when you're not behind the desk? Any hobbies?
This ETF and starting your own company doing this, this is the screaming infant that never quiets. And so pretty much everything I do is tied to just trying to make this thing survive, make it better. And we're dealing with that. The few instances that I have that I do get some time off, I like to go back to Pennsylvania and visit my parents and go fishing.
Yeah. So let's talk about, we're going to talk about the electricity markets. But one of the things that I keep reading and comes up is carbon neutral in your name. So can you talk about what carbon neutral allowances are? And I also saw that there are futures for these as well. So can you explain how those contracts work as well?
Oh, sure. So basically, you've got in the United States, there are certain areas of the country, where if you have a power plant, they don't want you to have any emissions. But if you do have emissions, you're allowed to have these certificates, these carbon offsets, and you pay money for them. So what happens is it's basically a tax on polluting. And there's futures that trade on the exchanges also for these carbon offsets. So a simplified way of thinking about it is once a year in these areas, somebody climbs up the emission stack and reads the meter and says, here's how much carbon you put out. These are the number of offsets that you have to have. And so there's a futures market that trades. And so these things like the Paris Accord, the EPA, NERC, all of the US agencies are saying
That for transition to a carbon neutral environment, that using allowances, which is basically taxing or a right to pollute, but you pay money for it. They're saying that that is a necessary step to kind of get you where you need to be to be totally carbon neutral emissions free for what the grid is going
To be. Interesting. So as far as the future is concerned, how is that priced in terms of when you're looking at kind of the NAV of that future, how does it move and why would it move?
So like for instance, the two big ones in the US are what's called REGI's, Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. And that's for like the mid-Atlantic states. And then California has what's called the CCAs, California Carbon Allowances. And so they'll have auctions for these carbon certificates. And every time they have an auction, they've got a floor and a ceiling for what the price is going to be. So they've got the price kind of ratcheting up. And they also reduce the number in each auction that you're going to have. So in essence, this is an increasing price and a decreasing number of allowances for this. So what they're doing is they're giving you time to transition, but they're making it more and more expensive for people that actually aren't actively doing that. So what happens
Is you kind of have an idea of what the range of these prices should be. And then for the guys that actively speculatively trade these things, they'll put together models and they'll say, oh, okay, well, we think we know how much every power plant in this one region is running. And we think we know how many emissions they're going to use. And oh, hey, the weather didn't materialize. They're going to use less. So we may short it for a little bit. So, you've got that dynamic going on also, but that's pretty much what the way those things work is just like the auction process. And you've got the increasing price and you've got the decreasing volumes on that. And then you've got the future market, the futures to trade on those things, which kind of
Correspond to the physical certificate market. Interesting. Thanks for that. Because when I was reading about it on your site, I'm like, instead of me doing my own research, I figured I'd just let
You tell everybody here. So yeah, no worries. Well, what we do with our ETF and the index is we take futures, power futures from six of the different regions in the US. So you get a national footprint, and then we weight those based on what the average annual electricity consumption is. So we've got a kind of a good picture for the US and how much electricity is being used. And then we go on the EPA website and you get the carbon footprint for each one of those regions. And then the index and the ETF basically purchases the right amount of carbon offsets so that the whole thing is carbon neutral. Interesting.
We're SFDR article eight, which is the second highest over in Europe. And SEC, CFTC, New York Stock Exchange, ICE, everybody took a look at it and said, yeah, we have a bunch of people independently looking and said, yeah, this can count as carbon neutral. I would say that it's funny because we originally were calling ourselves green. And we had somebody smack us in the nose in the newspaper and say, you're not green. You don't even know what green is. Nobody knows what green is. And so it was kind of difficult to define that. So at least saying carbon neutral is quantifiable.
Got it. So let's talk about electricity. We have a lot of, I think you're the 50th episode. We've had everything from CLOs to stocks, to bonds, to ETFs, to funds of funds. So this is the first electricity product. And a lot of financial advisors who listen to this probably don't understand or know that electricity is even an investable universe. So can you talk about like at a high level, what are the main drivers that can affect the price of electricity and how it can move up and down as time goes on?
Yeah, sure. So kind of like the background of this would be, you've got, we'll just pick on gold right now. So you've got gold mining companies like Freeport, MacBurn, et cetera. So if you wanted to, you could invest in the equities of a company like that, but also you can just choose to buy physical gold or you can choose to buy gold futures. So all those different investment vehicles exist. And typically if you want exposure to commodities, you'll buy the commodity futures because it gives you direct exposure. If you bought a company that mined gold, well, you don't know if they hedged or didn't hedge and they've got operating expenses and overhead. So you're not getting a real pure play on the commodity if you buy the equity. So you're buying the equity for a different reason.
Maybe it's a dividend or something else. So that same logic exists when you talk about electricity. So there's, you can buy stocks in companies that are called IPPs, independent power producers, or you can buy utility stocks. And that can give you like from an equity perspective, that could kind of give you exposure to electricity, but we are the first, we're the only, because we have a five-year exclusive with ICE, Intercontinental Exchange on the data and the indexes. So we're the only guys that can do this for five years. And so our investment product is the actual futures that trade on the Intercontinental Exchange. So we are commodity futures and the product ant is specifically worth electricity futures. So then that's kind of the underlying order of this. So then your second part of your
Question is kind of what affects this in terms of like supply and demand. So we would say in terms of demand, every time you pick up any paper, you're looking at AI and how much that's going to impact. You're looking at, newer chips that take more power. You're looking at electric vehicles and the share of that's going to be everything you pick up in the paper is saying that demand for electricity is grossly understated. And then in terms of supply, what you've got right now is the U.S. has a goal of trying to be 100% renewable generation. it's a moving target. Sometimes people will say 2035. It's kind of been pushed back to like maybe 2040, 2050. It just
Depends. But the U.S. is trying to add renewable generation. And the problem is they're retiring fossil generation pretty much at a faster rate than they're adding the renewables. So that creates a supply imbalance. We think demand is grossly understated. We think supply is grossly overstated. And then there's a third issue, which is what we're going to call, let's just say reliability. And that is the fossil fuel generation that is getting replaced. You can control the output of that. So if all of a sudden you've got, a really hot period, you can instantly ramp up the output from those fossil generators. But you can't do that with wind and solar for the most part, because those things, you just can't vary the input. you get the wind or you get it
Or you don't get it. And the same with the solar. So there's kind of a reliability issue. You're adding more volatility to that. And there was an article in the journal today that talked about battery companies. And they're saying, yeah, we can only guarantee there's going to be more volatility. So that's kind of the supply demand overall picture. And then there's that other added element of volatility.
So talking about volatility, you walked right into my next question. I had a couple of friends who are actually PJM electricity traders. This is can be one of the most volatile asset classes out there if
You're trading the ice future. Oh, no, not can be electricity is the most volatile commodity in the world. But now what happens is that's on a shorter term basis, right? So electricity for our product, we use the future. So we use one month future out to like month 12. And then as that prompt future starts to expire, we'll roll that to month 13. So we're always like a 12 month strip. That's what the index and the ETF is. But for your buddies that trade PJM, which Pennsylvania, Jersey, Maryland, you can trade hourly power, you can trade next day power, balance of the week, balance of the month, you can trade things like that. That stuff's crazy volatile. That stuff like that'll be like, 800% on an annualized volatility. That stuff's crazy. So what we do is we do the longer tenor,
We do that 12 month rolling strip. And so for instance, the 100 day volatility, like right now on the index is 15%. And if you think about this, right, if you're taking a look, and we're sitting here today, like in mid July, and if you're trading PJM, and you're looking at these weather forecasts, which change all the time, those prices are swinging around massively. But the index right now, it holds August of 2024 futures all the way through July of 2025. Just because next day, like July 18th to July 19th power is moving around, it's really volatile. That's not really going to give you that much of an impact on what your perception is and what's going to happen to the July of 2025 contract. So the longer you are like the longer you go out in the futures curve,
The less volatile that stuff is, but your buddies are exactly right. And what they're doing is,
In essence, it's crazy. Well, it can be, kind of just staying on this topic for a minute before we get into AMP. It can be there is some predictability to it based off of seasonality, weather, but they are trading like day trading in the short, which is highly, highly speculative. But the energy market to me is, is fairly interesting because there, there is seasonality to it where you can get a little bit predictive in terms of trying to take advantage of, medium term price movements in futures.
So I would say if you look at it this way, that's a really good point. You've got, we'll say two things. There's going to be a seasonality aspect to it. Absolutely. And there's going to be trends. And so those, playing long ball, those trends, those things tend to tend to exist for a while, but then you've got the noise around that, which would be like, for instance, you had an El Nino event. So you had the warmest December, January, February in the history of like recorded weather, like all that back to like 1893, I think it is. And so what happens is they just crushed everything. And you can look at the power index or AMT, or you can look at, a lot of different things and you've seen those things kind of,
Go down, but the overall fundamentals are still in play. And we still think the fundamentals are kind of like really robust for like long-term appreciation of power, but you'll see that white noise around what the longer trends are. And so there are some guys, I'm sure your friends are in this, this bucket that do a really good job of, making money off of that short-term vol. Like back when I worked for an asset-based company and had, asset-based in proprietary trading books, we had five meteorologists that worked for us. And their, their ability to tell you kind of what long range weather is, like we think the next three months are going to be warmer than normal. They were really good at that, but asking them to kind of get like the shorter term
Weather. And it was almost like a coin flip. Yeah. As a matter of fact, a quick aside is, the weather really matters. And so, and this is back like early 2000s. So we said, okay, we want the biggest, baddest, best meteorologist we can find. Who's that guy going to be? And so we actually picked up NASA's head meteorologist because we figured if the guy can land the space shuttle in the middle of a hurricane, he's got to be pretty good. And so it, the game at that point in time was they would, there was a bunch of commercially available weather reports that would come out and the industry would follow. So our guy would say, here's our forecast. We think it, you know,
Make something up. We think it's going to be really hot. He said, but at nine o'clock, this commercial vendor is going to say normal. And at 10 o'clock commercial vendor two is going to say cold. And he would tell us what everybody was going to say and when they would say it. And then we could wait until the market reacted to the commercial. And then we could use the proprietary one. And even that was not as accurate as you would have liked it to be. And now today you've got, you've got guys that are using ridiculous amounts of data and they're throwing AI at this and they're looking at individual like hour by hour weather forecasts for adjacent cities. And they're doing some really
Specific trading on those individual points. So to your point, it's really gotten pretty sophisticated.
So let's, let's talk about Amped. Let's go back to, so it's AMPD and at a high level, we talked about a little bit, but your elevator pitch on what this product is really trying to accomplish and where it's trying to fit in the market.
The elevator pitch is the electrification of America. And then the way we kind of back that up is when you buy something for your portfolio, there's, there's two reasons you buy it. One would be speculative. I'm sorry. One would be what we would say strategic, excuse me. So the strategic reason would be why do you want to buy this and hold it forever? And then the second reason would be tactical, which is like, why do you want to buy it now? So for the strategic, like why do you want to buy and hold it forever? If you take a look and for the longest time, model portfolios were 60, 40. So 60% stock, 40% bonds, you have kind of a, let's just say that's kind of falling out of favor
A little bit. And so now you see investment advisors that are talking about 60, 35, five with five being commodities. If you take a look over like a, I think it's like an eight or 10 year period, the 60, 35, five on a risk adjusted and an absolute basis has been beating the 60, 40. If you do a 60, 35, three, two with two being us, it beats everything over a longer period of time. It goes back to like we talked about with the white noise and everything else. So number one, we think strategically model portfolio. Number two is inflation. And so when CPI comes out month after month, 2.5% of CPI is directly weighted to electricity. So that's the direct, but the indirect, you can make the case electricity literally touches everything in the U S. One good example of this
Would be, we talk about retail grocery stores. So retail grocery stores, about 17% of their OPEX is electricity and their profit margins are like 1%. So if you increase power prices, you can see what that's going to do. You have to pass that through to mom, pa, Kramer when they go grocery shopping. So we think just the direct and the indirect components. So from an inflation perspective, we think that also does a really good piece of protecting the portfolio. And then the third for strategic is we're not correlated to anything. So we give you portfolio diversification. So that's the strategic, the tactical is like, why do you buy it now? The first reason would be, like we talked about, we think that demand is grossly understated supply is grossly overstated.
And there's the whole, we'll say reliability issue. The second thing is when you buy AMT, you're basically buying futures that we package for you in ETF. If you buy a hundred dollars worth of futures, $15 goes to your broker to support the trade as margin. The other 85% of the $85 goes into basically three month treasuries. So you get paid the risk-free rate to hold this position as you wait for these fundamentals to unfold. So that's kind of the strategic and the tactical reason and how we think you should look at this. So I think you answered this question
Earlier. But are you doing kind of any analysis to potentially overweight one region over another? Or like, how are you making the weighting decision inside of the portfolio?
Right. So this particular product, AMT, AMT is a passive product. It is benchmarked to the power index. And so we are not actively trading against this because this is the first ever product. Anytime that you do, and with your ETF experience, you know this, but anytime you do an actively managed product, people say, well, I want to see a five-year track record. And so in order to get this to market, what we did is when we partnered with ICE, and like I said, five-year exclusive of the data in the index, but the index actually goes back to 2014. So there's a 10-year history that ICE publishes for this index. And so by benchmarking to the index and staying passive and matching that, what that does is that removes the ability for people to say, well, I want to watch how you
Actively try to trade this and see how it works out. So we just stayed benchmarked to that. And then the weights, just like what the Bloomberg Commodity Index or Goldman Sachs Commodity, or these other primary commodity indexes, the weights that we have, those weights are reweighted once a year based upon what the data is for what the electricity consumption is.
Perfect. That was going to be my next question. How often are you bringing this index back in line? So annual. I was looking at the index history. Go ahead.
We did annual because we're making it fungible with the Bloomberg Commodity Index and other commodity indexes. And the reason that we're making it fungible is because we think that there's lots of applications for this. So the 60, 35, 5, we think that works, but also for people that just have commodity exposure. And so if you look at the top 100 endowments in the US, I think they've got something like $500 billion. But if you look at the top 100 pensions, they've got something like, I don't know, it's like 6 trillion. It's a mind-boggling number. And the pensions tend to hold, we'll say about 2.3% in commodities and the endowments hold a little more like 2.8%. And so what we're saying is it doesn't make any sense that you don't hold
The most consumed commodity in the US. So we made it fungible with their other commodity indexes. So they could kind of switch a little bit of weight in there.
So I was looking at the index history on your website, and it seems to me that it can kind of bounce around for a little while. And then I saw in 2021, 2022, there's this massive spike in the index. And then it normalizes. Is that kind of the expectation of somebody who's holding this in a portfolio that every once in a while that can happen? And what... We talked about this a little bit, but I just want to hear it from you. What drives that price movement in the index, which will eventually affect the ETF?
Yeah, sure. We think that when you look at this thing over time and where it has been, where it is now, and where it's going, we think that this thing is going to be appreciated over time for a very long period of time because of what we talked about with the electrification of America, the AI, EDs, all that good stuff. So we think that you've got that, but there's going to be the white noise around that, that we talked about. And so the reason you had that big spike up is you were coming out of COVID and you had just massive amounts of pent up demand, industrial, as well as people were turning to the office. And so that manifested itself pretty nicely for it.
And then you had the sell-off because like we talked about, you had the warmest winter history of the US, December, January, February. And so when it's, pick a number, 50 degrees in February down the I-95 corridor, you've got enough electricity and prices are going to be low. So we just kind of view that as the noise around what we view the longer term trend.
So I see the product actually offers a yield. Where is that yield coming from? And, was that, I guess it's like a value add to having direct index exposure here to electricity. But like I saw, I think the product right now is offering like a 3.1% yield.
Yeah, that's about right. So what we talked about when you put money into commodity futures, if you buy a hundred dollars worth of futures, you don't need to put the whole hundred dollars to work on that futures contract. Your broker is going to do a calculation. He's going to say, well, I know how much it can change in price. And so I'm going to make you just post up that much in margin. So if it changes, I know that, we're covered. And so of the hundred dollars that go in the futures, about 15 of it go into the actual contracts itself. And then the rest, according to the index and the ETF, same thing, they get parked in three month treasuries. And so 85% ish of the money goes
Towards getting that yield. But you still are getting full notional hundred dollar exposure. You still need to put the full hundred dollars to work on the futures.
So I know that you guys are buying longer term future contracts in this product, which will help dampen volatility, of course. But do you see periods where this product might become day traded in periods where you're having that so-called white noise event?
Oh, absolutely. We think that like we talked about for the strategic and the tactical, that's kind of where we think it fits in portfolios. But once we get a little bit more liquidity and actually an amp itself, we think that there would be some very interesting opportunities for guys like the PJM traders that you talked to, that they can keep an eye on things and they may have a different view than the rest of the marketplace. And so we could see this being a pretty interesting arbitrage vehicle for certain people in the marketplace. Absolutely.
So funds fairly new. I always like to ask people, how are you kind of envisioning getting the name out there, marketing and distributing the fund?
So we had a great question again, we built this up, what we call crawl, walk, run. And so we didn't choke down a lot of overhead. So we used a white label ETF provider for compliance, legal things like that. We call that mid and back in the box. And we also have just kind of not taken out like a whole lot of staff. And so the marketing and the distribution of this, what we're looking to do is we are looking to partner with, and we're having some ongoing conversations with a number of platforms. Well, we're looking to partner with a platform because in addition to having that five year exclusivity, we have the ability to brand or co-brand this with anybody we want. So for instance, if you had your own ETF
Platform, we could call this the Brad electricity fund, or we could call it Brad-Ice electricity fund. And so there are a number of platforms that because of that five year exclusivity can be the only ones that would have their name on something associated with us for a pretty long period of time. And that would give them a competitive advantage, but absolutely recognize that we need to have a strong institutional retail sales force. And instead of trying to grow that ourselves, we're trying to use our competitive advantage to partner with somebody and just get the best of those strengths.
So Tim, I really appreciate your time. It's super interesting. We could have gone down so many different paths with, we were talking about shopping centers and the whole brokerage and hedging side of this. There's a lot that people don't understand about the electricity market that you and I could probably talk for hours about. But again, I really appreciate your time. And before I let you go today, where can people learn more about you, AMT, and CNIC?
Sure. So our website, CNIC funds with an S, CNIC funds.com. And that we publish white papers on there once a month. We put our podcast webcast on there that we do with third parties. And so there should be enough material there for people to get a really good understanding kind of what the product
Is. Well, again, thank you so much. And good luck on growing this thing. I think it is the most unique product in the space because I think it's the only one. So good luck and good to see you. And I just want to say thank you once again. I appreciate the opportunity because as you know,
When you're starting up your own ETF like this, it's a difficult endeavor. And so guys like you, they give us a voice and help us get the word out. Sincerely appreciate what you're doing.
All right. We'll see you soon, Tim. Thanks. Thanks. Appreciate it. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.
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