← All Episodes
Behind the Ticker

Nick Frasse, Van Eck

The Space ETF Built to Let the Winners Win

·29 min
Mass-to-orbit economics: the cost of putting a kilogram into orbit has fallen from roughly $50,000 in the shuttle era toward under $200 with Starship, reframing space from a specialty sector into economic infrastructureInside WARP, VanEck's Space ETF: 20 pure-play holdings, a 50 percent revenue threshold for inclusion, and index rules written to stay flexible as the industry evolvesThe four building blocks of the portfolio: satellite communications, rocket and propulsion, earth observation and data, and space explorationWhy SpaceX is in the fund even though the S&P would not include it, and what that says about building for a theme rather than a benchmarkThe honest read on space revenue today, still largely government and defense driven, and why Nick expects the commercial share to grow toward a market projected at $1.8 trillion by 2035

Nick Frasse did not take the usual route into product management. He started at an advisory firm that fizzled out, spent a stretch fielding hundreds of mutual fund calls a day at Franklin, and then landed at VanEck, where he sat on the internal wholesaler desk for five years before crossing over into building the products themselves. That background shows up in how he talks about funds. He's been on the phone with the advisors who actually have to explain a holding to a client, and it colors the design choices he defends.

The conversation centers on WARP, VanEck's space fund, and the pitch is more concrete than most thematic stories. It runs through one number. It used to cost roughly $50,000 to put a kilogram into orbit in the shuttle era. With Starship, that figure is heading under $200. When the cost of doing something drops that far, it stops being a specialty and becomes infrastructure. Space stops being about rockets. It's shipping, communications, data, and industries that don't exist yet. Frasse frames the opportunity at roughly $600 billion today, with projections toward $1.8 trillion by 2035.

Built for the Theme, Not the Benchmark

What stood out is that Frasse is honest about the parts most issuers gloss over. He built the fund around 20 pure-play names with a 50 percent revenue threshold, which is a high bar on purpose. He wrote the index rules to stay flexible, because he expects the industry to look different in three years and doesn't want a rigid definition to lock the fund out of where the money actually goes. He also included SpaceX when the S&P wouldn't, which tells you whether the vehicle is built to follow a theme or follow a benchmark.

He's just as clear about what the fund is today versus what it's betting on. A lot of the revenue in space right now is still government money flowing through defense contractors, and he would rather own that transition honestly than dress up the current mix. VanEck has a long track record of being early to things that looked strange at the time, from gold to emerging markets to Bitcoin, and Frasse sees space as the next name on that list.

Let the Winners Win

The design philosophy is the part that actually matters. VanEck builds focused, market-cap-weighted vehicles and lets the biggest names run instead of trimming them back to feel diversified. Frasse's view is simple: his job is to hand the advisor clean, pure-play exposure and then get out of the way. Position sizing is the advisor's call, not the fund's. That's a more disciplined answer than most thematic products give, and it's why this one is worth the 29 minutes even if you never buy a share of anything in the space economy.

Full Transcript

5,541 words

Machine transcribed from Brad Roth's conversation with Nick Frasse, Van Eck, with speakers identified automatically. Timestamps link to that moment on YouTube. Lightly cleaned, otherwise unedited.

0:00
Brad Roth

Welcome to Behind the Ticker, the podcast where we go beyond the symbol and into the strategy. I'm Brad Roth, founder and chief investment officer at Thor Funds. And in each episode, I sit down with ETF managers, CIOs, and industry leaders to break down how these funds are actually built, how they behave in real markets, and how advisors use them in real portfolios. Most people just see a ticker symbol, but we know much more goes on behind the ticker.

0:40
Nick Frasse

Hey, Nick, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Brad. Good to be here.

0:44
Brad Roth

So why don't you start by giving everybody kind of a bit of your background, walk us through your career path and how you ended up as a project manager over here at VanEck.

0:51
Nick Frasse

Yeah, product manager, not project. But yeah, so I actually started my career at like a financial advising firm for like LPL that was like quickly fizzled out right out of college. Ended up at Franklin on their sales desk, which was a great training ground. Just taking hundreds of calls every day about mutual funds. Swapped over to covering sales for specific territories. That's when I made my way over to VanEck. And I spent about five years on the internal desk here at VanEck, ranging from California, covering like LA, Southern California to DC, Virginia area before popping over to be a product manager. So kind of a non-traditional career path, I would say. I was one of the only people to go from sales back to like marketing and product. So some people question raising a lot of

Read the full transcript (53 more sections)
1:44

Eyebrows, but it's been an awesome transition. It's much more fitting for my personality. It's great. From VanEck's perspective, we're still a very small family feel style company. So you get a lot of access to really be creative. And we really are meritocracy here, which is awesome. So the more you put into it. So being in marketing and product now, it just allows a lot more opportunity, especially within the thematic space. So that's what I cover, thematic ETFs, everything from our semiconductors to space to data center, supply chain, whatever it might be. Any of the thematics are mine. So it's really very interesting, right? Because it's always fun, new things, new industries, trying to find long-term trends. So yeah, it's been great. It's been a whirlwind of 10 years here at VanEck, but super happy where I'm at. And it's an awesome place to be,

2:36

Company to work for. I always have to ask everybody outside of work, what do they like to do? You and I

2:42
Brad Roth

Were talking a little hockey before we recorded, but any hobbies? You still play in beer league or

2:46
Nick Frasse

What's going on? I do still play once a week. I'm getting to the point where it's, I'm getting a little old. I think it's, it's hurting a little bit more if I, if there's any con, it's no contact league, but inadvertently, sometimes you do have contacts. So it, it, it stings a little bit longer as I get older, but it keeps me young. I feel like I can keep up with these. As long as I can keep up with these young kids, I continue, but primarily I play, play hockey once a week. I play golf when I'm allowed to. I have two little kids at home. So it's my, my days are pretty full to the brim for

3:17
Brad Roth

The most part. Don't, don't get a lot of free time. Yeah. So let's talk about VanEck for a second. The firm was founded in 1955, about 200 billion. You got real history being early in the theme, thematic sector. You had gold in 1968, emerging markets in 93. You moved into ETFs in 2006. So for listeners who only know VanEck for SMH, or the gold lineup, can you give us a high level on the firm and what drives the product philosophy? Yeah. trying to be forward

3:48
Nick Frasse

Looking, intelligently designed. I think that's the, our biggest focus is trying to stay away from fads and trends, et cetera, which is especially this day and age, right? With, with how many ETFs are coming to market. There's a lot of times new things popping up and it's undetermined what the long-term horizon for certain things look like. So we really try to be steadfast in our, in our approach to product construction and be forward looking. And I think at a lot of times we are early. We were the first ones to file for a Bitcoin ETF, although kind of a lot of them came to market together. We were, we were pounding the table early on Bitcoin, especially from a perspective of ETFs and a vehicle like that. So I think that's the biggest driver of kind of our construction philosophy is

4:32

Just really trying to be thoughtful in the entire process. And what does this look like five, 10, 15 years down the road? Not just like, Hey, is this something that's really like memory, for instance, right? Has been a big topic of conversation. We've seen a lot of ETFs pop up around it, but is, is that something that we think is going to sustain over the next 15 or 20 years as a long-term theme that's holistic? And I think that's our goal really is to try to capture that kind of thought or mindset when we're constructing indices or constructing ETFs.

5:01
Brad Roth

Yeah. You kind of led me right into my, my next question. you guys have a pretty respected thematic lineup. you have semis, you have I bought for robotics, you've got some names, PPH, BBH for healthcare. Like how do you as a team decide, okay, this theme is worth building

5:16
Nick Frasse

Around or this is just noise? It's a good question. So first and foremost, like trying to just have, go from first principles, look at, what is the, what is the industry that we're assessing, right? Is it nascent? Is it something that's entrenched? Is there anything in the space currently that's accessing it, right? That's a big part of it. So what does the universe look like? What does the competitive landscape look like? And then what are our thoughts around the specific theme or industry or whatever it might be over those next 10 or 15 years from there looking at working with say the market vector, whoever the indexing company is to say, what does the universe look like? How many companies are out there that are driving 50% or more revenue from this specific

6:00

Thing? Is that something that, there's a large enough universe that we can construct something that gives, a focused core exposure to this specific industry or theme. So I think that's kind of the basic process is just really walking through the steps of understanding what the industry or the theme looks like from a bottom up standpoint. And is it feasible to construct something that is actually giving access to what that theme is? Because I think a lot of times too, and we could probably get into this, I'm sure it leads into some of your questions, but when you're constructing an index, sometimes it's very new and there's not a lot of pure companies out there. So you end up with,

6:38

Multinational conglomerates or whatever it might be that are doing different things. And part of what you're trying to capture is just a small piece to their revenue pie. And it's not truly exposure to that. So in the near term, top down, micro perspective, maybe it is right because people are getting behind certain names that are driving it, but they're not really, true to that theme, if that makes sense from a revenue perspective.

7:01
Brad Roth

Yeah, of course. Let's get into warp. Great ticker, by the way. It's the VanEck Space ETF. It's launched May 7th of this year on the Nasdaq at a high level. What's the fun? What's it doing?

7:13
Nick Frasse

Sure. So 20 focused pure play names on space. And back to my original point is like, when you look at space, up until now, it has been like largely science fiction, right? Understanding exactly what does this industry look like because it is so new and largely it was aerospace and defense companies. That's how you kind of bucketed them in the past. And now with SpaceX over the last 15 years coming up and having reusable rockets, that is really kind of our focus is what does SpaceX in this reusable rocket and technology pull forward? And that's, that was how we approached constructing the index and working with the indexing company, right? It's like, realistically, I think it's very hard to contextualize what space, what a space industry might look like 10 years from now,

8:02

Because we haven't even read five years from now, honestly, because we haven't even ever really seen that. It's just been largely satellite companies or, communications, like said aerospace and defense, very like small nuanced businesses that were very expensive to run, expensive to get into orbit, right? Reusable rockets is an unlock for, I think, what we believe will be a lot of different industries. So when we're constructing this index, being as open minded as possible and purposefully vague in some regards, to make sure that we're not unnecessarily restricting new industries that might come to market, right? So that when we were constructing the index, that was part of the thought process is like, we don't know what this is going to look like in 10 years. So we want to be

8:51

Pure play and we want to make sure we're capturing, reusable rockets and low or low or earth orbit satellites and whatever might come from, landing on the moon, for instance, right? Like if we start with a moon base, and you're starting to mine, like you want to be able to capture these companies and you want to be able to capture things that maybe don't fit into a specific bucket right now, and trying to be as forward looking as possible and creating that index methodology. So what we ended with was, a lot of there were a lot of ETFs that kind of launched at the same time, trying to be focused, trying to avoid those traditional aerospace and defense companies,

9:24

And make sure that we were giving access to pure play space moving forward. And I wouldn't be surprised if the index, the way we've constructed, it looks completely different in five or 10 years, right, depending on what comes from from SpaceX.

9:37
Brad Roth

Yeah, I want to talk about index construction, maybe a little bit deeper here in a second. But you guys have actually been in the space industry for a little while, right? You had a usage product Jedi launch back in 20. Who's the Star Wars fan over there? We got Jedi Warp 2022. what did what did you take from that European experience? And that helps shape this particular

9:58
Nick Frasse

Product warp? Yeah, definitely. I would say Europe is there a little bit on the, I guess, on the frontier edge, as far as thematics are concerned. So a lot of times our European colleagues will have a lot of different new ideas that we hadn't really thought of yet sometimes. So Jedi happened to be one of those because thematics are very popular across Europe from a retail perspective. So they had, we looked at Jedi, we looked at the way it was constructed. There are certain parameters within the European markets that they have to abide by a lot of things that maybe we would like a little bit more flexibility on whether that's IPOs or the fact that they're in, we do in kind here in the US

10:40

Versus more cash creations in Europe. So there are certain parameters that limit us. And sometimes we have to recreate an index or go a slightly different direction, but they were definitely the trailblazer for Jedi and space. I wanted Darth as the ticker because we don't have an ESG filter on ours, which Europe typically does. So that would be the dark side. But no, we went with warp, which was great. But that's largely, they lead the way a lot of times with thematics or new ideas. And then we'll kind of fall in on their coattails depending on the specific theme itself. And is there something that we can just utilize and license the same index, which we do for some of them, we have similar ones. But then sometimes we find that we need to kind of diverge a little bit and

11:27
Brad Roth

Adjust the index to make it better for the US markets. Yeah, interesting. So as you kind of mentioned, warp tracks, the market vector space index, it's a pure play screen companies have to derive at least 50% of the revenue from space related activities. And the index is organized really around like four building blocks, if I look at it, satellite communications, rocket and propulsion, earth observation and data and space exploration. Can you kind of walk us through those segments, what they look like? And where do you think the biggest opportunities maybe are?

11:58
Nick Frasse

Yeah, I think there's probably two parts to it, right? You have like, you have near term opportunity and large long term opportunity. I think a lot of the utilizing the existing satellite infrastructure and the data being collected is probably more of the front end opportunity. Companies like Planet Labs are like looking at the entire, they're surveying the entire earth every single day with their their satellite ecosystem, right? So utilizing AI in that regard in monetizing that data, I think is probably an upfront opportunity until we see even more infrastructure built out once Starship starts launching on a regular cadence, and to get more things into orbit. So I think that's part of it.

12:38

Reusable rockets are definitely what I think that's probably an enabling technology that's going to pull forward a lot of other industries, who knows, like shipping, logistics, etc. We just saw, I forget what they what they were calling their new thing with the little puck that shoots out. So like, it's got payloads on it. And if they're shooting it back down anywhere on earth, right? So they launch from Houston or Florida with Starship once Florida gets up and running, and they can take this payload and shoot it anywhere in the world, right? So that that shipping logistics that's pulled forward. So the reusable rockets, I think, are really the biggest kind of exponential unlock over the long term. And then low earth orbit satellites, etc. comms, like you mentioned, right? I think 90% of the

13:17

Globe doesn't have access to data via satellite, or like cellular terrestrial data via cell service. So being low earth orbit cell service, I think is a huge, midterm probably opportunity as they get more satellites into space. So I think there's kind of that that's the beauty and kind of the opportunity in spaces, there's this layered time horizons for different opportunistic aspects as the technology evolves. And then you could look even further to moon bases and things that people love to talk about are data centers in space as more of a long term or long tail opportunity. And some technological hurdles probably need to be but down the road, that is definitely an opportunity. So I think from an investor standpoint, there's obviously a lot of top down risk with a

13:59

With an industry like space. But there are a lot of tangible near term opportunities across the set, midterm and then long term, right? So it really does, again, back to our kind of first principles, looking at index construction, where opportunity lies across the theme, that's space checks all of those boxes.

14:16
Brad Roth

Yeah, I want to get into some of these like, opportunities. But first, let's just talk about kind of the space economy as a whole, like right now, it's at 600 billion today, expected to reach 1.8 trillion by 2035. And that's, in nine years. Yeah, what do you think are the structural drivers like actually pulling that growth forward? Does it have everything? Does it have a lot to do with just, I guess, the infrastructure around making it more affordable to get things in space? Like, what do you think these structural drivers are?

14:45
Nick Frasse

Yeah, I think it is. I think it's mass to orbit, right? In the shuttle economy, it was over $50,000 a kilogram mass to orbit. Starship's plan is under $200 a kilogram mass to orbit. That's just a complete, economies of scale unlock that entire markets will be brought forward and find, a marketplace for it or that this scales now, it makes more sense to ship something from the US to Australia via Starship than it does on a on a on a fair or on a ship cargo ship, right? So like that could be a potential the potential for it. It's obviously there are different opportunities across it. But yes, 100%. I think that the real unlock is reusable rockets. And what that creates from an economy's scale purpose and the businesses and the industries that

15:30
Brad Roth

Are just going to pull forward. Yeah. So when you touched on this briefly, the kind of the satellite broadband piece to me is huge. There's still over 2 billion people that don't have reliable internet access. Just for me, in the last two weeks, I spent I spent an extended period of time in two places where I didn't have Wi Fi and cell phone service, which is pretty shoddy. And I'm going to probably get myself one of those little nomad. What are the internet that Elon has? Starlink? Yeah, Starlink. Sorry, it was, it's giving me a panic attack not be able to do some of the work I need to do. How does warp capture that opportunity beyond just, the obvious names? Is there stuff downstream that you can really capture some some opportunities on?

16:14
Nick Frasse

Yeah, for sure. You still have companies like Biostat in there, some like more traditional satellite comms companies. Starlink is the interesting thing about Starlink and SpaceX. It's fortunate and unfortunate, right? Because a lot of the conversation around space has to do with SpaceX and the things that they're pulling forward. But there is a lot of additional opportunity to your point, right? Starlink just happens to have, seven or 8000 Starlink satellites, which makes their interconnected network far, far more robust than some of the competitors, right? So, yes, to your point, there are other community from the satellite perspective and communications, there are definitely more down the road. I know, I'm not I don't speak to like any individual companies, but I know some of the traditional players across three,

16:57

5G, etc. Like your Verizon's AT&T is of the world. They're not going to sit they're not going anywhere, right? Even Elon has said that is like Starlink is going to be a major player and direct to sell service. But these companies aren't going anywhere. They own a lot of spectrum. They own a lot of the industry as well. So you're going to see them merge and move. Will they probably have to contract the likes of SpaceX or a Blue Origin or whatever to build out their infrastructure if that's needed? Probably. So SpaceX will be a beneficiary of it. But that's an example of, SpaceX being a catalyst, not necessarily the whole story, right? What are the industries and companies that they're pulling forward, even their competitors, etc. So, their XAI is one

17:33

Of their biggest parts and they've already contracted with Google for data centers in space, etc. So it's not like they are the end all be all. They're just an enabler to the technology.

17:44
Brad Roth

So Earth observation really doesn't get talked about that much. We're starting to hear a little bit more about AI powered space data, data centers is a piece that's starting to get talked about. Can you walk us through that side of the portfolio and why it's becoming such an important

17:58
Nick Frasse

Revenue driver? Yeah. listen, imaging the entire, in this day and age, data is everything, right? And like, how do you use that data to monetize it? And I think that's really something that's in the near term that can be an unlock. Like I mentioned, companies like Planet Labs that are imaging the entire Earth every single day. Like, I think I want to say Google Earth contracts them for some as well for their maps and all of those different services. So, the unlock of the amount of data that we're capturing now with our satellite ecosystem, and how that can be monetized in different ways that probably are way above my pay grade, because to know every single data point that's being captured by these satellites, there's a lot smarter people out there than me that are,

18:43

That can look at it and say, listen, this is something that we can monetize, we can purchase this data. So then you get, the revenue from the data that is being captured, and then turn that around in these companies that are focusing or relying on data that's being captured by the satellite, monetizing that in different ways, right? So there are different, there are more layers to the pie, and that they're being sliced different ways. So it's like, like you said, essentially, it's this data capture is going to be a near term unlock for a lot of different types of revenue streams and monetization.

19:18
Brad Roth

So the government investment piece in the space, in terms of like strategic defense, is another like structural tailwind here, how much defense exposure ends up in warp? And how do you guys think about that piece?

19:31
Nick Frasse

Yeah, I think right now, it's still if you started to like, dive into these companies revenues, and where they're being driven from. And this was space largely right prior to SpaceX. And obviously, the government is a huge, SpaceX is a huge contractor to the government. But there are a lot of these names that are prime or subprime contractors, and a lot of their revenue is driven from this, these contracts from the US government and or from other governments, for that matter, right? So in the near term, yes, you probably if you started to look at the revenue breakdown, the revenue mix, still driven largely by that. And I think I would say that where we're at today, the revenues being driven are not going to shrink by any means, because defenses and obviously,

20:15

Space defense is a huge focus for a lot of developed nations, and underdeveloped and on say emerging markets as well. But the revenue that was traditionally very focused or very reliant on government spending, that's where it stays there might grow slightly for defense, but there's more of the commercial side, that's the opportunity, right? So if you looked at it with the revenue mix right now, back to I guess, your original question, probably mostly still government, government prime contractors, as the industry evolves, it will be more commercial, the mix will go more towards the commercial side, I would imagine.

20:50
Brad Roth

Yeah, interesting. So there are a handful of space ETFs out there now UFO launched in 2019, we've got ARCX, TEMA launched NASA, who was on the show, probably six weeks ago or so. How do you position warp against these other competitors? What's the differentiation?

21:07
Nick Frasse

Sure. one of the biggest is passive versus active, right? A lot of the ecosystem, TEMA is an active one, obviously ARC is active. So that's a big thing, right? We have some active ETFs, but from a thematic perspective, we tend to be passive and try to give that focused core exposure. That's probably the second biggest differentiator is the focus nature of a lot of our thematics is they don't have, 50, 60, 70 names inside of them, we try to keep it, especially for something very specific, like space, keeping it to 20 to 30, this for warp, it's 20 individual holdings, and then allowing it to be typically market cap weighted, right? And not unnecessarily diversify.

21:47

In newer technology, or say newer industries, that may be a little bit more volatile. But at the end of the day, like, do you want to, if SpaceX is for now in the next 10 years, the leader, and we underweight them versus the peer group or versus what their true market cap is to the rest of the industry, we're handicapping ourselves, right? And we're not giving our client the agency to understand that, hey, you can allocate to this appropriately, because you're getting pure focused market cap weighted exposure to this specific industry. And it's their, it's our client's goal, or it's our client's job to work with their clients and size the position appropriately, size it based on their risk tolerances, and all of those different things from a portfolio construction. So when it comes to

22:30

Thematics, I think the biggest differentiator between us and our peer group is really focusing on the theme and allowing the winners to win, and having the specific diversification rules we need to have in place based on like, Rick, Rick rules. But at the end of the day, let the market kind of take care of the rest, just focus on capturing the right companies, you don't have to avoid the or you don't have to pick the best winner, but you need to avoid the losers. And just working with market caps typically allows you to do that. I think sometimes just all of the nature of investing, right? Whether that's echo chambers, or, confirmation bias, all of these different things, when you start to place your hand on the scale, you kind of sometimes can lose sight of the thread. And I think from a

23:13

Thematic perspective, we are in the camp of like, allowing focus core exposure in a passive way and allowing the winners to run is the best way to approach it. And not, over exert ourselves from a management perspective. Yeah, I guess I should have asked this earlier, I want to dive just

23:29
Brad Roth

Really quickly a little bit deeper into index construction, because 20 names is very concentrated. I guess my question would be a couple of things. One, what being number 21 on the list, what's the difference between included and not included? And then, is there a I'm sure there's some sort of rebalance cadence or rescreen cadence, because as you as you mentioned, and as we know, this is going to be a vastly, quick growing industry, and a lot of entrants are going to start, coming into the space, no pun intended. So can you talk a little bit about the index methodology? And what gets in what stays out? And how often are you

24:09
Nick Frasse

Looking at it? Yep, for sure. So we have specific volume and tradability parameters that are just kind of gold standard across all of the ETFs, right? So they have to, they have to qualify in that regard, just to make sure that our clients get the best ride possible from an execution standpoint. But then from there, we have free float minimums, right? So depending on the size of the company, there's the basic one is you have to have a 10% free float, that's just kind of the standard bar, we do have specific like fast, or large IPO rules within the methodology. That's how SpaceX ended up in it, because they had over a $5 billion market cap, we allow it to get down to two and a half percent

24:49

Free float. So that's how mega these mega caps get in. And I think for just a quick touch on that, that was obviously a big topic of conversation, because Russell, Nasdaq, S&P all had the conversation of like, do we include SpaceX or not? S&P decided not to, the other ones did. I think for smaller thematic ETFs, because obviously, as a maybe a collective, you have a decent amount of assets following them. But for specific thematic ETFs, when you're when you're new, when you're upcoming, it's you're not really bucking the system too much to get a company like SpaceX in there, you're not causing too much issue, because you're not a the forced buying is not that large, because the AUM is not that big. So that's just a kind of a side note, because that was a big topic of

25:29

Conversation of like whether SpaceX makes it into these indexes or not. But from there, we do quarterly rebalancing and semi annual reconstitution. So looking at the constituents on a on a semi annual basis, and then rebalancing every quarter back down to the specific weights that are based on the methodology. And then from there, you have the entirety of the universe for this, it's specified to 20 names. So you just get the 20 largest names by market cap, and then weight them adjusted as that qualify and then weight them accordingly based on our weighting methodology.

26:03
Brad Roth

Got it. Understood. And so for advisor listening to this, they've got an already diversified model portfolio. where where do you plug in to add this as again, I'm not trying to use the pun, but a satellite exposure, right? This isn't going to be like, a major part of the portfolio. But I would assume when you're having this conversation, it's going to be, bolted on with alongside their large cap or mid cap exposure.

26:31
Nick Frasse

Yeah, for sure. So and it's funny, right? There's so many puns that go with the space that I catch myself all the time doing this is space space. And yeah, so the satellite positions, all the different things you can do. I think you'd probably look at your equity sleeve of your entire portfolio, then look at what you have allocated towards technology, right? And then I think what we're starting to see is those, our clients who maybe bucket largely towards the cues and didn't disseminate between them, because their clients are coming to them and saying, hey, what are we doing about space? What are we doing about SpaceX? You start to see pieces of that larger technology pie get slivered off into specific themes that, are long term opportunistic or

27:09

That their clients are asking about because, as an advisor, they probably want to have something available when their client walks in and says, are we buying SpaceX? And maybe, they don't want to buy the individual name, but let's buy a whole basket, but still be focused, right? Because otherwise, why not just go buy the cues? Or why not buy something with 100 names in it? Like if you're going for a focus specific theme, like let's be focused about it, and let's capture the 20 largest names. And then you have another theme for semiconductors, you have another theme for data center supply to whatever it might be that you can bucket towards and know that you're allocating appropriately to what your client's asking for. Again, going back to just like,

27:43

Structuring an index so that our clients have the agency to size it appropriately for their portfolios and knowing they're getting what they're asking for. And they're not, getting Google and Amazon and whatever it might be in whatever theme because they do so many different things. So that's kind of our mantra and our thought process and how we view, having these conversations with clients.

28:04
Brad Roth

So Nick, this has been a lot of fun. Before I can let you go, where can people learn more about VanEck and where can people get all the information they need on Warp?

28:10
Nick Frasse

Yeah, definitely. VanEck.com backslash Warp. You can check that there. We have regularly cadence webinars. We've done a couple on Warp that are all available to our clients and to retail investors if they're interested in listening to it. But yeah, then we have different newsletters, et cetera, all that are subscribable through the VanEck. And you can even subscribe to just broad thematics and capture everything that we put out on a regular cadence and all the blogs that they make me right. So, or the wild ideas I have about certain industries.

28:40
Brad Roth

Well, Nick, again, man, thanks for spending some time with me today.

28:42
Nick Frasse

No problem, Brett. Thank you for the time. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Daily Market Intelligence

The Signal

Brad Roth's daily market brief — systematic signals, ETF positioning, and what the data is actually showing.

Subscribe Free →