← Animal Spirits Podcast
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- [00:00]
A
Today's Animal Spirits Talk youk Book is brought to you by tucrium. Go to tukrium.com to learn more about all of their different ETFs, from crops to crypto and white label funds. That's tukrium.com to learn More.
- [00:14]
B
Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life and investing. Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing and watching. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholz Wealth Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Gritholz Wealth Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.
- [00:43]
A
Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Michael, admittedly the commodities market is not something that I understand. Like I don't have a good feel for it.
- [00:54]
C
Dude. Supply, demand, curves, mud.
- [00:57]
A
But that is the thing is supply and demand. But I've been watching Landman lately, okay? And Landman does not constitute reality. But they're talking about how there's this huge oil energy boom and I'm looking.
- [01:08]
C
At it and thinking, no spoilers, I'm an episode behind.
- [01:11]
A
Okay, I'm still catching up too. But oil has been $60ish dollars a barrel for a while now. It's not like oil is. Remember people said it's gonna go to $200 a barrel and you think, well, wouldn't that have to be the case? That oil would have to go really high for this to make sense for people to be making hand over fist. But we talked to Sal Gilberti from Tukram today and he said, no, no, no, that's not what you want. You don't want like crazy volatile spiking prices. You want relatively stable prices. And I think that's what we've had because obviously that gives you. It makes it easier for you to plan. It makes it easier even if you're making not as much money as you would at higher prices. It's the planning, right? You don't have these huge crashes and like we had in Covid and these huge spikes that we had in 2022. The flat in commodities or the not going anywhere is probably better for your business planning.
- [02:00]
C
That's right, Ben. And we get into Bill, that's what.
- [02:02]
A
Billy Bob would tell you.
- [02:03]
C
That's right.
- [02:04]
A
So anyway, we've talked to Sal a number of times over the years about agriculture. Today we're going to talk about crypto and how that's like a commodity as well. So here's our talk with Sal Gilberti, who is the founder and CEO of Tukrium.
- [02:17]
C
Sal, welcome back to the show.
- [02:19]
D
Thanks. Great to be here. Always with you guys.
- [02:22]
C
All right, commodities, I feel like people only want to talk about them when they're spiking and otherwise it's sort of like out of sight, out of mind. Like for example, crude oil is about to break. Well, maybe, well, maybe it won't. But it is sitting on right at multi year lows. And my God, this chart does not look pretty. This look like, looks like it's going to go a lot lower. But who knows what is the story with oil markets? Like, I feel like it's not getting a lot of attention, at least, I don't know, I'm not hearing about it. What's the story here?
- [02:54]
D
You're not. Because there's plenty of oil and people don't panic anymore. So it used to be with the whole thing that's going on now with Venezuela. Venezuela is a big oil producer, not as much as they were, but they did. And people hear about attacks and military attacks. Somebody else fills the void and notably the US Fills the void. So we are producing so much oil and exporting so much oil. People are used to the Russian war now. There's plenty of oil. There's, there's no way around it.
- [03:23]
C
So, but wait, I don't understand. There, there's more, there's just more oil now than there has been, or are we less reliant? Is there less demand? Like, is this an economic signal or is this just, do we find more oil? What the hell is going on?
- [03:34]
D
Almost all of the above, except there's not less demand, there's more demand, but the pace of increase in the demand is declining. Okay. And so as OPEC just opens the spigots, which I think the last time we spoke, OPEC was just starting to cut and now they're not cutting, they're reversing those cuts. And so you've got plenty of oil coming out of opec, plenty of oil coming out of the United States, plenty of oil coming out of Russia, even though there are all kinds of sanctions on them. So. And China isn't buying as much oil as they were and the pace of growth of oil consumption is declining. And so all of that combines to say there's no panic, there's plenty of oil in. Oil's almost like wheat now, where if you have a problem in one part of the world, unless it's one of the major suppliers, nobody cares you just get it from somewhere else.
- [04:25]
A
We'll give you credit. I think last time you were on the show, oil is probably like $75 a barrel. And you said $50 is way more of a high probability bet than 100. And we're getting there. It's in the mid-50s, so I looked. So I think oil first hit the mid-50s in like 2005. So essentially, for two decades, the price of oil has gone nowhere. Why hasn't this been a catastrophe for the energy industry? Like, are they better with more stable prices than spiking high prices? Like, why has this not been bad for the industry? Or has it been.
- [04:53]
D
I'm going to tell you, every industry is better with stable prices than spiking prices. Everybody likes spiking prices because you get a quick burst of profits you didn't count on. But in any industry, but particularly commodities, you want to know what the end point is. And your production costs kind of get managed around that. If the price of a commodity is too low, you just stop producing. Okay? Or you cut way back on producing, which is what they do with oil. You can't stop producing oil. That's why it went negative. You can't stop pumping, but you can reduce the flow of oil out of a well. And so if the price of any commodity is high enough for a producer to break even or make a little money, that's what they'll do. Do they prefer break even or make a lot of money? Of course they do. But the only thing that's predictable, understand, commodities require an investment. And so you've got a plan. You've got to build whatever it is that you build that creates that commodity. All right? Whether it's a mine that takes 10 years or a farmer that's going to plant a field and take a couple of months to get the plans and figure out what kind of seeds and fertilizer you're going to buy. Everything in between there requires some planning. And to move commodities around, particularly oil, you know, you're building ports, you're. You're drilling wells, you're building ports, you're building pipelines. All that takes time. It takes planning. A bank that gives you a loan to do all that wants to see you hedge. They want. They're making projections based upon the revenues they think you're going to get based upon the price of that commodity. It's a lot easier when it's stable. Everybody's a lot more comfortable.
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C
All right, let me ask you part a of a stupid question. Do agricultural commodities, maybe not Even limited to agricultural, but I'll stick with that. Do they have a positive expected return?
- [06:30]
D
No, we talked about that last time.
- [06:32]
C
No, I remember that.
- [06:33]
D
Yeah, it's not. So what has a positive expected return is something that has a proven left to right upward sloping price line and that's gold. Okay, that's bitcoin. A lot of volatility in there. But in terms of buying and holding something and getting a return from it, commodities and particularly grains, that's not gonna happen for you. You have to strategically buy those things. You buy them when they're at. As with any commodity, it is prudent to, to if you want to take a shot and you're so inclined to have that in your portfolio and you should for a lot of different reasons or you should be inclined to look at it. I'm not, I shouldn't. I can't say should. I can't make any definitive statement.
- [07:12]
C
You might want to consider it.
- [07:13]
D
Correct. You should consider is how we'll say that's good compliance would be really happy. So you should consider looking at whatever commodity it is putting in your portfolio. Some stabilize it better than others, but you, you're better off doing that. History says you're better off doing that. When that commodity's at its break even cost and you don't have to be an expert in that commodity to figure out where the break even is. You look at a continuation chart of the price of that commodity generally based upon some futures, it's easy to get. And when it's flatlined at the low price on that chart over long terms, five years, 10 years, whatever it is, that's the cost of production.
- [07:48]
C
I actually want to, I want to put a pin in my second part of the question just to return to the crude oil chart that I mentioned when I said that looks terrible. This isn't a stock where, yeah, at a certain price the sellers just the, the, the buyers disappear and the sellers overwhelm it like there is a floor for oil because the suppliers will do what they have to do to make sure that they're getting paid. Is that accurate?
- [08:08]
D
That's accurate, yes.
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C
Okay, so back, back to the, back to the. Do these things have a positive expected return? I'm looking at a price of sugar and this thing has gone nowhere for 10 years. And we know there's been inflation so the real change has been negative, which is great for I guess buyers of these products like and consumers. Although that doesn't really show up in prices. I still feel like the milkshakes are still $7.85 or whatever it is, but the price of sugar on a, on a nominal basis has gone sideways for a decade.
- [08:40]
D
Yeah, well, there's been some, there's been a couple of pops in there. Oh, sure, 50% pop in there. So it's like anything else. I mean, you, you, these aren't stocks where you buy them and forget them. You set it and forget it. Commodities are not a set it and forget it with the exception of gold. Okay. They're not a set and forget investment. They're just not. You do have a little bit of paying attention that you need to do. And again, when you sense they're at a break even level, which is where that chart flatlines at its low historical values, when you look back, that's where you take a shot. You allocate, if you're so inclined, and you wait. And you know, I think we've, we've said that before. We've had asset allocators come to us and say they wait w e I g h t when the price of grains seems to be flatlined and then they wait, wait. And then when there's a drought, they get out that 99 times over 100 there's a drought that causes grains to rally.
- [09:31]
A
I like how you always tell it like it is to us that that's a good thing. Why? So for some reason in the whole trade debacle, soybeans became a big thing. So you guys have the soybean etf. So Trump's team wants China to buy a bunch of soybeans from us, and then we're going to apparently have to bail out a bunch of the farmers. Why does it seem like every couple years we have to bail out farmers in this country? What is it about the dynamics of the industry that causes that to happen?
- [09:51]
D
Well, every single farmer in every single country gets some sort of subsidy from the government. Okay, you want to keep your farmers happy because you want to keep your people fed. In the case of soybeans here, the United States is the world's second largest producer and exporter of soybeans. Brazil wins the title. Okay, They've got plenty of land down there and still expanding. But, but the bottom line is China by far is the world's largest importer of soybeans. And you know, they used to, until about till pre Covid, I think they were always buying about 50% of the US crop and that, you know, when you get into a fight with the president, you have a problem and they get mad and they use soybeans as a weapon, and they buy from Brazil. Now, the thing about agriculture is we don't produce enough to. The whole world buys more soybeans than any one exporting country can sell. So China can stop buying from the United States, but then they have to buy all their beans from Brazil. It just so happens that's about the same number. China's import requirements for soybeans are about the same number as all of Brazil's soybean production. Well, that means everybody else has to buy them from the United States. Everybody buys the beans that are available. The beans that are available, if you count them as one big pile, no matter who's producing them, United States, Brazil, or Argentina, which are the big three, you still need to buy. That pile is one pile, and it's going to go to almost zero by the end of every single growing season. Okay? There's. There's generally 30 to 40% left over. And if you have a crop failure the next year, then it goes down to 10 or 20%, and people get really nervous. And so what happens with commodities is particularly soybeans. If somebody stops buying from one country, all it does is create some hardship for farmers short term. So the government steps in and subsidizes the farmer, but then the farmers are going to sell those beans. So in the end, the farmers are going to win, but they have a huge cash flow problem, so they do need a bailout. Okay, because they might have to wait till next year to sell those beans, but somebody's going to buy those beans. There just are only so many beans in the world.
- [11:52]
C
With all the financial innovations over the years, there isn't like, any sort of deep pools of capital that will offset this risk to their own benefit. Like, isn't there financial opportunities based on the somewhat predictability of these harvests?
- [12:09]
D
Michael? We like to think so, but nobody pays attention enough. So, you know, when, when China stops buying soybeans, the price of US Soybeans go down. And a lot of people bought this last round. Okay? So the soybean fund, whatever it was, it was down to about 25, 24 million at its lows. And this last round, when China picked the fight with the U.S. the U.S. picked the fight with China. However you want to look at it, that that fund went to 64 million. So it, it went from 25 million roughly to 64 million. Those inflows all came in a matter of a few weeks. All right? Because people, people understood the pattern. Last time, China stopped buying US Soybeans. Price of US Soybeans went down and then the price of US soybeans goes back up because we got to sell them somewhere. Either China will step in and buy them or somebody else will buy them. So you get these dislocations from trade fights that to smart traders can take advantage of, just like you say, and they win. And that's what's happened here. You had soybeans go down to I guess around 10 bucks a bushel, and they went back up to 11.50. Well, you know, that's a 15% move in a couple of weeks. People like that. Some people participated in that. We like to think more people would look it. It's like oil. We started with oil, okay? Oil gets to 40 or $50 a barrel. People layer it into their portfolios. They buy the ETFs with oil and they just sit on them and wait. It's only a matter of time before oil goes back up on some spike with some political upheaval or whatever. And so people understand I'm using oil, I'm turning my thermostat up and down, driving my car. They get it that they're using energy. Well, guess what? You're using corn and everything. There's no way to escape corn. If corn gets under $4 a bushel. That historically has been a price where people layer in the portfolio and all of a sudden it's $8 a bushel. Now it's not all of a sudden. You've in the last 17 years, three times it's gone to 7.5 or $8 from that $3.50 to $4 a bushel area. But you had to wait once, you had to wait only a year once, you had to wait two years once, you had to wait six and a half years. And now we've been. We've been I think four or five years since. Since that spike again. So I think people would be well advised to consider looking at the grains. Look at corn when it gets down around that $4 a bushel. Look at soybeans when they get down below that $10 a bushel. Look at whe under $5 a bushel. That's a time when it will stabilize your portfolio. And look, one of the reasons people buy grains, no expected return over the long term. But if you put layer grains in your portfolio, seven of the last seven stock market pullbacks. So seven of this last 7s and P500 pullbacks of 10% or more, the soybean fund outperformed. Soybean index outperformed eight of the last eight, the corn index that the corn fund follows outperformed.
- [14:49]
C
Well, tell us when The S&P's got a 10% correction. I'll buy as much as I can.
- [14:52]
D
I don't know. But when you get nervous, okay. That you want to diversify your portfolio and have something that's kind of an anchor, you'd be well advised, I would think, to consider grains because people don't stop eating.
- [15:05]
A
Hand up, Sal. I eat a lot of edamame when we go to a bear market.
- [15:08]
D
Okay, well, there you go. But, I mean, you know, you can.
- [15:10]
A
How close are you to backing up the truck here? Cause you've said this in the past. You're like, hey, there's certain things that I watch for in certain levels where, like, it just makes more sense. So how close are you to, like, backing up the truck on this stuff?
- [15:20]
D
You're within 10% in grains for me. You're within 10% in grains. 10% pullback in grains from here. You're now in those. Those. That $4 area for corn. I mean, corn's only been under $4 two calendar days this year. Two calendar days. It dropped down there, was under for two calendar days, and when it went back up, went almost up to 480. I mean, a 20% rally. So I think people are well advised to look at the charts and. And when they see those things, understand, there's no return on these things either. So one of the. I don't want to call it a risk, but it's. It's a characteristic of investing in grains. You're not going to get a return on your money while you're waiting. Okay? You wait. Wait. Drought out, fine. But there's no dividend that's coming to you while you wait. And that's part of the reasons people don't look at these things.
- [16:03]
C
Sal, I need. I need you to help me out here. So the price of corn does not necessarily translate into the price of the corn. Etf. Ticker. Corn. Goody.
- [16:13]
D
Correct.
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C
Ticker. So what is the dollar amount? So right now it's at $17.70. Give me my target. When should I buy? When should I consider buying? I should say.
- [16:22]
D
So you should consider buying when the price of corn itself is close to $4 a bushel.
- [16:27]
C
But. So how far. How far away is that?
- [16:29]
D
About 10%.
- [16:30]
C
Okay. All right. So I could do the math. All right, understood. All right. Ben, please remind me if that happens. I want to buy.
- [16:36]
A
All right, so, Sal, since we first started talking to you and you were the one who in 2022, when the war started with Ukraine, there's all these people saying, hey, listen, there's not gonna be enough food to right to go around and there's gonna be food shortages everywhere. And you said, no, no, farmers are gonna step up to the plate. And you're right. I think the supply chain for that happening, especially since we were still dealing with COVID it was kind of a miraculous. It seemed like that there wasn't that many, that much upheaval. So you've always kind of steered us in the right direction. Since we started talking to you a few years ago, you've added other funds. So what else is Tukrium doing these days in terms of funds besides ag funds?
- [17:10]
D
We have the ag funds. And we were doing a couple of things. One I should point out, we're putting out a model, a model portfolio that's free. You could just sign up for it. It's called Commodities one because a lot of people come to us and say, I really want commodities exposure for a lot of different reasons, but I don't know how to do it. And so we published this free model called Commodities 1. You can find it on our website. You go to Model portfolio or Resources or some tab and you. And you find it and it's once a month we give what that model does, a simple momentum model, and we invest in a variety of commodities. It has beaten the GSCI with lower returns over time. So since 2020, it's been beating the GSEI not every year, but over long periods of time it does with lower volatility. And we buy ETFs. Some of the times there are ETFs, and most of the time there are other people's ETFs because we don't, we don't offer exposure to all different commodities. And so if people are interested, they can, they can go, look at that. That's something we started by demand. It's free. We won't harass you. You sign up for it. We send you a once a month email. That's it. We went into crypto. I'm a big crypto fan. I think we've talked about. I really like bitcoin. I like the supply, demand economics of bitcoin. There are 21 million of them. Eventually 4 million they say are lost permanently. It's digital gold. As long as they're. Yeah. For bitcoin, yeah, I do. Okay.
- [18:33]
C
All right, let me ask you this. Let's talk about Ripple, which is of course the coin of crypto. Am I.
- [18:37]
D
Right, yeah. Because. So yes, let me put it this way. Ripple is the company that puts out the token xrp. We happen to have a double exposure, double long xrp. So if you want to be double xrp, our ticker is xxrp. It's double xrp. Okay. That's a levered fund. It's for day trading. It's not a buy and hold fund because it resets every single day. So people who are aggressive traders who are looking at XRP could do that. I believe in xrp. I believe in Ripple. I think that Ripple's their, their management team from day one has said we're going to change the way money moves around and when it goes on the blockchain, it's going to get moved around and it's going to get moved around on Rails and there are Ripple rails. Ripple's got us, us, you know, an rlusd. So they have the, the token, that's the stablecoin and they have xrp, which is the tool that you use to move the money around. And so I just believe in it. I think that they're, I think that if Ripple weren't under unjust attack by the SEC for all those years and they, you know, they were proven, they were vindicated, they won the lawsuits or the lawsuits have been settled on a couple instances and now they're getting, you know, they got a limited banking license last week. It's coming. So will it replace the Swift Swift system? I don't know if it'll do it completely because Swift system, where how you move money around internationally. Okay. Is also digitizing on the blockchain. They're doing it, everybody's doing it, but a lot of people are using xrp. The Ripple team has integrated the Ripple Rails and XRP into the banking system internationally. And I think when the Clarity act is passed, which is coming, they say in the next couple of quarters, I think US Banks will just unleash. They were afraid because they were under attack. They were told, you can't trade crypto. You can't have crypto, you can't participate in crypto. That's no longer the case. You've got a crypto friendly administration. And I think when the, once the Clarity act is passed, I think XRP and Ripple will be widely used. What that means for XRP's price, I don't know. But there's gonna be a lot more usage of XRP and so we'll see what happens there.
- [20:43]
C
I want to, I want to give you a data point and then I want you to respond to this. So you've been in this business for a long time. When did you start to cream?
- [20:49]
D
I started to cream in 2009, I think. Our first fund launched 2010.
- [20:54]
C
Okay, so truly an OG of the ETF industry. You've only had one product for about a minute, the Wheat fund, that had more assets under management than the Double Long Daily XRP fund, which launched. This launched in April and it immediately shot up to $500 million. Now it's about cut in half because the price has been cut in half. People are obviously less willing to engage on the long side of these, of this. But what does that say to you? Just about where we are, where the industry is, where risk appetite is. I mean, it's pretty remarkable. Now, I'm sure you've thought about this.
- [21:32]
D
I have. And I think, you know, when I started Tukrim, I'm a commodities guy, and I just couldn't believe there weren't grain ETFs and people weren't always thinking about grains. I started a Cargill a zillion years ago and I launched that. And I thought, you know, asset allocators were my target. People who, who want to asset allocated, and that's still the target for those funds. And people do trade them because they're the, they're the only single commodity funds around. In the grains, it's fine. But the market has a huge risk appetite. Stocks never go down. You buy the dips. Everybody knows that. And part of the competition with commodities is stocks don't go down, okay? Commodities go up and down. They have cycles. That's why they call them cycles and super cycles. We've talked about that before in the past too. But stocks just don't seem to go down, and so people want to return. There's a whole bunch of extra money out there for a variety of reasons, and we can have a whole nother discussion about that. But there's so much extra money out there that people love to speculate. Look at prediction markets, okay? People just like to speculate. That's what they like to do. And that's one of the main reasons we came out with a Double XRP fund versus an XRP fund. I knew 100 other people would come out with an XRP fund. We figured out how to launch the double XRP fund ahead of everyone else.
- [22:44]
C
What do you mean you figured out? Is there anything that you could share or is that like.
- [22:46]
D
Yeah, sure. I mean, everybody knows it's public knowledge. Futures were rumored to be starting on XRP So a bunch of people filed for XRP funds and double XRP funds, but everybody was waiting for the futures. And I'm thinking, if you're not first, you're nothing. You have to be first with a fund. We had a great ticker. Okay, XXRP for double xrp. Let's put a swap in this thing. And you couldn't get a US bank to do it because the banks were prevented by the last administration from, from doing crypto. So what we did was we got a third party to give us a swap on an XRP etf, or etp, they call them in Switzerland. And we stuck it inside the portfolio and were able to launch on day one, before futures started in the United States. And people went crazy. I mean, in 12 weeks it took in $500 million. It was bonkers. Yeah.
- [23:33]
A
So you said that, like, over the long run, these agricultural commodities don't have a positive expected return. Do you think that's the same case for crypto, or do you think crypto should have a positive expected return?
- [23:44]
D
I think bitcoin is like gold. So if you see a positive or expected return in gold, you can probably see that in bitcoin over long periods of time. I think all the rest of them are. They have a use case. Well, forget meme coins, okay? Meme coins and garbage coins. Using the polite word, just don't touch them. I mean, if you want to be crazy and do them, fine. But I like things with a use case. That's why we chose xrp. Okay, we could have picked Solana or Ethereum, but I knew XRP better just personally, it just happened to. So that's what we chose and that's where we went in. And I didn't want to compete with everybody else coming out with a single XRP fund. In hindsight, I wish I had. But we've got the lead double XRP fund, the leveraged XRP fund. People just need to understand it's a day trading fund. It resets every day.
- [24:29]
C
You know, it's a shame and I appreciate you saying that. It doesn't matter how much you scream it from the rooftops. Direction to their credit has been excellent about this. They were the OGs of the levered ETFs. And from the beginning they're saying, do not buy and hold. This is a day trading vehicle. There is decay, volatility, drag. Everybody knows if you make 100% and lose 100%, you're not even right. So that, that's the way that these things work. So I Appreciate you saying that. Unfortunately, it doesn't matter.
- [24:59]
D
The number of people that have come up to me and said, I'm buying and holding it. And I say, please don't do that. Please, please don't.
- [25:05]
C
What do you know?
- [25:05]
D
They don't. Yeah, they say, what do you know? I'm just the guy that started the fund. What do I know? I don't know.
- [25:10]
A
So what is an extra? Because this is the ETF thing. A lot of it is just like the right product at the right time, and a lot of it, some of his luck, depending on how much demand is there. And you talk about the swarm of speculators, and if something is doing well, how willing are you to go out on the risk curve and take some chances with ETFs with the understanding that some of these just might not work?
- [25:34]
D
Well, that's our business. So how willing are we? It's more. How solid do you feel about the idea? And so two things have happened there. One, we filed for a couple, and you can look them up, but one is flare, which is like 93rd. Is that the rustler in the cap table? No, no, it's a token. And we've made the filing. So I don't want to say more than that. It's public that we made the filing. So we believe in certain things. We'll be making a couple of more filings that'll be coming out. I don't want to mention them now because you have to be first. And so we'll be making some filings. But the other thing we did was so many people call us and say, wow, you guys know how to start ETFs. I'm thinking about this ETF. Can you help me out? And we'd talk to them at a courtesy for an hour and they'd say, thanks a lot. Then we said, heck, why don't we start a white label business and help these people? And not an original idea. There are a couple of companies that are very, very big out there that do it. But we started doing that and it's been overwhelming. I think now we have nine or 10 or, I've lost count, 11 white label funds. And the great part about white label is it's somebody else's idea and somebody else's money. So we don't have to have all the good ideas and we don't. We're just not smart enough anyway. And we don't have to lay out all the risk. I mean, to start an ETF. If you start a 40 act ETF, you're talking a minimum of about $100,000 and three to four months. Okay. If you fast track it, if they start a 33 Act ETF, which is where you hold the physical, and that's where the, the physical tokens, you know, that's where they all live and all that, that takes you nine months. Okay. Now there's some new ETF rules where you can, you can shorten that a little bit and about $300,000 and then understand, you know, inside baseball here to keep any ETF running is about $250,000 per year without marketing if it doesn't get any traction. So if you put a seed money in of a quarter million or a million and nobody buys your fund for a year, you have to write checks for a quarter million dollars to all your service providers. Providers. Yeah. And so. And you don't want to just launch something for a year. You want to give it at least two years or three years. So, you know, to come and start an etf, you have to have a budget of between probably a half a million and a million. And that doesn't count marketing. Okay? So it's, it's not an easy game to play, which is one of the reasons why it's nice to do white labels for people. Because I can't afford to go out and throw money at the wall on every, every idea.
- [27:53]
A
So you handle all the operations for these people. You help them set up, you deal with all the rules and regulations. What else are you doing?
- [27:59]
D
We'll do the trading for them as well. So we do start to finish. We'll do every single thing they want. We even do marketing for them. We have it, we have a program, and it's all. It's a menu. It's a menu. You come into agreement and you find the. It's our white label service and then our, our, our marketing service for people. And they, they can select and spend as much as they want, take as much risk as they want. It's. I mean, I have to tell you, you get 100 calls, you probably get under five people who actually pursue it, and you get one or two that launch. When people hear what's involved in starting an etf, they understand that, well, it might not the thing they want to ETF might not be the best thing, might not be the best, best path for it.
- [28:36]
C
All right, Sal, I want to close the conversation the way that we started it. We spoke about oil, and you mentioned something like people don't panic. It does seem like over the weekends when there Is a political flare up or a headline flare up. And thank God it's been a minute since we've had one of those geopolitical type of things. It seems like the oil market doesn't really react the way that it used to. Am I making that up or have you noticed that too?
- [28:56]
D
No, you're not. I've noticed it and it's a, it's a great thing. And again, because I think because production is now diversified, you're not reliant on the Middle east and opec. You're not relying. You know, the US was a net importer, now we're a net exporter. You know, they're saying that China, I just read an article recently, China has not done any of the horizontal drilling technology. And so they're saying that literally within five years, China applying the technology that the United States used 10 years ago to become an export powerhouse, China will be the number one producer of oil in the world.
- [29:27]
A
So all the shale stuff that we're doing in North Dakota and whatever, they're not even doing that in China yet.
- [29:31]
D
Apparently not. Now I, you know, I'm looking, I'll look deeper into that. But it's like there's. And we're going electric, all right? There's no way around that. So we're going electric. That is going to again reduce the rate of growth of fossil fuel use. You're still going to use it. It's still, hopefully it will continue being used just because it means global expansion still happens. Okay? So as the global economy expands and as countries develop their economies more, they're going to use more energy. And there's no way that alternatives can keep up. You've got to use fossil fuel energy and nuke, okay? Nuclear energy, that's popular as well. It's all coming. We need it all. We literally need it all. And so that's look it with any commodity, their natural break even point is where you're going to trade and the usage case always goes up and there's a supply disruption. For some reason in ags, it's weather. In other things, it's geopolitics. Whatever the reason, usage kind of goes up all the time, okay? And if you get a supply disruption, that's when price goes up too. So for portfolio enhancement, people look at commodities, all different ones. We happen to focus on grains because they're easy, okay? You can see them flatlining for a long period of time. They've got a good history. And, and when they go up, they go up because people, nobody wants to be hungry. If it doesn't rain in the end of June and beginning of July in North America, grain prices go up. That's what happens.
- [30:53]
C
Sal, when are we going to be able to trade the GPU market?
- [30:56]
D
I don't know. I don't know. My. In fact, my son keeps asking me that. He's like, there's got to be a way to ETF that. I don't know.
- [31:02]
C
All right. Well, that's your next idea.
- [31:05]
D
Thanks.
- [31:06]
C
All right, Sal, always appreciate you coming on. Great spending time with you guys.
- [31:10]
D
It's always fun. Thank you.
- [31:13]
A
Okay, remember, check out tuprium.com that's T E U C R I U M tuprium.com email us animalspirits at the compound News for more.