Yuri Khodjamirian, Tema ETFs

Yuri Khodjamirian spent a decade running a $2 billion global equity book in London before walking away from the industry entirely to study bioscience at Cambridge. He came back through a side door, building actively managed thematic ETFs at Tema, where he now serves as Chief Investment Officer. The most recent and most discussed of those products is the Tema Space Innovators ETF, ticker NASA, and it does something almost no other thematic fund will: it holds shares of SpaceX inside a liquid, daily-priced ETF wrapper.

How a Public ETF Holds a Private Company

The mechanics of the SpaceX exposure are what every advisor asks about first. Yuri walks through it in plain terms. The fund accesses SpaceX through a special purpose vehicle that holds the underlying shares, and that SPV sits inside the ETF as a portfolio position with a valuation, a custodian, and an audited mark. The structure is not novel in private markets, but putting it inside a 40 Act wrapper requires real legal work and real cost. Tema absorbed that cost into the unitary fee rather than passing it through as a layered expense. The result is a single-line ETF position on a brokerage statement that gives a US-listed investor exposure to a company that has otherwise been gated to institutional allocators and accredited investors.

Why Thematic Indexing Breaks Here

Yuri is direct about why a passive thematic index would not work for the space economy. Standard thematic indexes screen by classification codes and revenue tags, which were built for sectors that map cleanly to public market filings. The space economy does not. Half the relevant companies derive a small share of revenue from space today but are positioning for materially more, and the most important name in the category does not trade publicly at all. A backward-looking screen catches none of that. Active selection is not a marketing choice on this fund; it is the only way to assemble the portfolio honestly.

The Supply Chain Names Other Funds Miss

Below the obvious launch and satellite names sits the layer where Tema's process actually pays off. Yuri spends time on the suppliers, the connectivity firms, and the imaging businesses that sit one or two steps back from the headline companies. These are the names that get classified into aerospace, defense, semiconductors, or industrials by anyone running a code-based screen, and they fall out of every passive space ETF as a result. Tema's research process is built to surface them. Yuri describes how the team thinks about position sizing for a small specialist supplier versus a launch operator versus a connectivity provider, and why the portfolio is not just six obvious names plus SpaceX.

Launch Costs Collapsed Ninety Percent

Yuri keeps returning to one macro number: SpaceX collapsed the cost to put a kilogram into orbit by roughly ninety percent over the past two decades. Every projection for the space economy that uses pre-2010 cost curves understates the addressable market. The widely cited nine percent annual growth headline for commercial space is, in his read, a low bound rather than a base case. Costs falling that hard does not just expand existing demand; it creates categories that were uneconomic before. Earth imaging, in-space manufacturing, and satellite connectivity are the obvious ones. The less obvious downstream effects are still being priced.

Sizing a Thematic in a Real Portfolio

The conversation closes on a question advisors actually ask, which is how to size a position like this for a client. Yuri's framing is practical. NASA is not a core holding. It is a satellite, sized to the conviction level of a thematic and the risk tolerance of the underlying client. He pushes back on the idea that thematics should be benchmarked against broad market exposure on short horizons. The right comparison is over a full cycle of the underlying theme, which for space is closer to a decade than a quarter. The advisors getting this right are sizing modestly, holding through volatility, and treating the position as exposure to a real economic trend rather than a trade.

The episode is a useful listen for anyone trying to think clearly about thematic ETFs in general, not just the space angle. Yuri talks about active management, structural product design, and client conversation in a way that translates beyond his own fund.