00:18:19 · Anthony Pompliano, Jan Van Eck
[00:18:19] S2: What's kind of your analysis of that right now? [00:18:24] S1: It's... We have... And we have 13 crypto ETFs in Europe. So before the US government allowed it, we got pretty aggressive. I I think the days of sort of more crypto ETFs are basically over. What we what we are pushing is active management. We have an actively managed... I know you interviewed Matt Siegel. Most advisers can't pick Avalanche versus Ethereum, or or these kinds of things. So we did some layer one blockchains, right, the foundational ones will survive, I think. And then the exchanges, I think, will survive. Now, I don't know if Hyperliquid survives or, you know, I I know the BNB token isn't a direct play, or a play on on Binance, but, the Binance ecosystem maybe. But those are the two categories, Anthony, that stick in my mind. Otherwise, go with an index or go with an actively managed fund. [00:19:18] S2: Now a lot of the promise of crypto is they're coming for you. You know, they're coming for Wall Street. They're gonna tokenize things. Hyperliquid is gonna use perps. There's all these kinda new variations. Do you see this stuff as a headwind for the ETF industry, or do you actually think the ETF industry can just embrace the new technology and figure out how to how to kind of stand on its shoulders?
00:19:38 · Jan Van Eck, Anthony Pompliano
[00:19:38] S1: I think there are a couple of leading firms right now, like, I'll I'll say Franklin, Fidelity, and others that, are really in this move towards changing the back end of Wall Street towards a twenty four seven environment. So, Franklin just announced that they offered a money market fund that Uber, can... Uber users can use, to put savings in. Well, to do the the plumbing, to offer a fund that's accurately priced over the weekend, is... You know, that's that's pushed by blockchain. That's really enabled by the people that understand blockchain. So I think it's happening. It's just happening behind the scenes. You know, I think the dream actually of most blockchain enthusiasts is you don't know that you're using it. It's just in the background, making your life easier, making it twenty four seven. I think what's interesting... The most interesting thing for the ETF industry that you asked about is sports, these sports ETFs that are coming. I don't know how you don't do that on a twenty four seven basis because the sports games are at night and on the weekend. You wanna trade this thing at 10AM? No. Of course not. You wanna trade it when, you know, USC beats Ohio State. [00:20:52] S2: No comment. [00:20:53] S1: Don't mention the name... The team. When [00:20:56] S2: you look at the twenty four seven trading, will that just lead to record inflows, record volumes, and this is like a very good thing for ETFs, or do you look at potential issues by now moving and expanding the market hours because there's still humans
00:20:56 · Anthony Pompliano, Jan Van Eck
[00:20:56] S2: you look at the twenty four seven trading, will that just lead to record inflows, record volumes, and this is like a very good thing for ETFs, or do you look at potential issues by now moving and expanding the market hours because there's still humans [00:21:11] S1: involved? Listen. Couple different answers. First of all, our... VanEck's core business is not to do stuff like that, and that's more fun than it is investing, I would call it. Not that it's wrong, it's just that we don't typically get involved directly with that stuff. I think there... I mean, Hyperliquid has basically proven that there is a demand for individual investors to trade hot things over the weekend. And that's the debate in the in the, in the ecosystem right now. So whether it's the price of anthropic, like, it going public or what's it worth? The same thing with SpaceX. So the prices of private companies or commodities. Gold was traded very heavily in q one. So people wanted, you know, put their money and and allocate risk. The big debate is the entrenched players like the CME are suing the CFTC. They're really fighting, because they own the institutional customer, not that kind of retail and global, customer. And so that's that's that's what we're gonna watch for the next year or two.
00:22:17 · Anthony Pompliano, Jan Van Eck
[00:22:17] S2: Another aspect that I find interesting is the AI agents, people want to start letting them trade for them or make allocation decisions. The number one request we have at Sylvia is people saying, let the agent loose. I just wanna give it some money, not my whole portfolio, but maybe 10%, and let it go trade for me. How does that change flows into these funds? Because let me give you the counterexample. There's now talk of, like, an agentic bank run. If all the agents start moving from, you know, low yielding, kind of deposit accounts into high yield savings, all of a sudden, you could really have some pressure on some of these financial institutions. Is there an equivalent concern in the ETF or fund management business? [00:22:58] S1: Not in the ETF business, I would say. Yeah. I saw that. I mean, we we could have figured that risk out. I think, you know, my view is that banks actually provide services, you know, for the checking and all that kind of stuff. They provide a lot of fraud protection, right, which people still will want. So I'm not so sure that that... I'm I'm a skeptic of that bank run, kind of situation. [00:23:22] S2: I am as well. But if you look at the maybe positive impact, if agents are gonna be making decisions and especially allocation decisions, do you all have a big effort internally to go and become more agent friendly, either, you know, optimizing AEO or trying to figure out how to get the agents to pick you over some of the lovely people in this room?
00:23:22 · Anthony Pompliano, Jan Van Eck
[00:23:22] S2: I am as well. But if you look at the maybe positive impact, if agents are gonna be making decisions and especially allocation decisions, do you all have a big effort internally to go and become more agent friendly, either, you know, optimizing AEO or trying to figure out how to get the agents to pick you over some of the lovely people in this room? [00:23:43] S1: It's it's so funny. You know, q three ended, and we do these q three business reviews, and our web track... Traffic around the world is is stagnant or falling. And then people just wanna flip the page. I'm like, don't you see what's happening? Right? It's AI. Right? And so you just have to maximize the the feeding of information to agents. We just tried something with, one of our RIA clients is we gave them an MCP connection to all the data, in our webs... On our website in all our documents. So that's our first experiment, and our salespeople are a little nervous. But that's... That would be the one example. But I also believe... I wanna just put on the record. I think that people are gonna want to give their agents access to accounts with money in it. I mean, when you get... When I have the auto renew for my cable bill, that's the same thing. Right? It's effectively an agent. It's just the the... That company's software that's, you know, triggering that payment. They they basically own access to my bank account. It's not a big step, I think, to give agents that kind of
00:23:43 · Jan Van Eck, Anthony Pompliano
[00:23:43] S1: It's it's so funny. You know, q three ended, and we do these q three business reviews, and our web track... Traffic around the world is is stagnant or falling. And then people just wanna flip the page. I'm like, don't you see what's happening? Right? It's AI. Right? And so you just have to maximize the the feeding of information to agents. We just tried something with, one of our RIA clients is we gave them an MCP connection to all the data, in our webs... On our website in all our documents. So that's our first experiment, and our salespeople are a little nervous. But that's... That would be the one example. But I also believe... I wanna just put on the record. I think that people are gonna want to give their agents access to accounts with money in it. I mean, when you get... When I have the auto renew for my cable bill, that's the same thing. Right? It's effectively an agent. It's just the the... That company's software that's, you know, triggering that payment. They they basically own access to my bank account. It's not a big step, I think, to give agents that kind of [00:24:46] S2: Explain this pilot that you're running with the RIA. So you create an MCP connection. They can now get access to VanEck information data, etcetera. Right. And the idea is that they can talk internally at the RIA to their agent and the agent can more easily access VanEck information to give them better answers. [00:25:06] S1: Right. Instead of calling a salesperson.