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.
00:25:06 · Jan Van Eck, Anthony Pompliano
[00:25:06] S1: Right. Instead of calling a salesperson. [00:25:10] S2: And the salespeople using Google. Yeah. And salespeople are worried because they're saying, hey, is that the first step of automating away my job? [00:25:18] S1: Yeah. I I don't think so. I'm just saying people... It's it's a change. You asked about how we're doing it. I guess, I've I've heard BlackRock is doing that as well. So it's just changing. That's why Google's earnings were interesting, right, with their their potential decline in in, ad based search revenue. I think that that makes sense. That's gonna be a different way. For those of you who don't really know what I'm talking about, right, just very simply, AI itself doesn't have access to data. So we... You have to add connections and and related skills, but connections to the different databases at VanEck. So at VanEck, we have a connection to our custodian at State Street. So RPMs can write all kinds of crazy reports because they see everything that's held through that database at State Street. And they... That kill... It just really kills a huge part of the IT department. [00:26:11] S2: Let's have a little bit of fun. Have you vibe coded anything? [00:26:14] S1: I have not. [00:26:15] S2: No? Are you sure? [00:26:17] S1: Yeah. Okay. [00:26:21] S2: If we come and do this again five years from now, what are the biggest changes to the ETF industry?
00:26:21 · Anthony Pompliano, Jan Van Eck
[00:26:21] S2: If we come and do this again five years from now, what are the biggest changes to the ETF industry? [00:26:27] S1: To the ETF industry. So I think the biggest change is going to be, and you're playing right into it, which is more of the business will come from individual investors. So right now, we get the... You know, our biggest clients are financial advisors, And I just think that more individuals, but also individuals with a greater percentage of their wallet, will just be buying directly through low cost broker dealers. So I think that will go... I don't know. I don't know. People don't publish those numbers, but I'm gonna say from a quarter to a half of our [00:27:03] S2: business. Interesting. So 25... [00:27:06] S1: I don't even know, but... [00:27:08] S2: Yeah. Somewhat like a material increase in direct to consumer essentially Yeah. Distribution. [00:27:13] S1: Yep. [00:27:14] S2: Okay. What are you doing to accelerate that or be better positioned to be the recipient of those funds?