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- [00:00]
Jan van Eck
If you look at government spending, monetary policy and technology, we do know a lot about what's going to be happening in 2026 already. Federal fiscal deficits as a percent of GDP is on a healthy downward trajectory. So it peaked over north of six and a half percent two years ago. It was just south of six percent last year. We think it's going to be below five and a half percent going into this year. One of the things that Besson said as well though is he said interest rates today are normal. And what that suggests to me is that he was not laying the groundwork for someone to come in and drive short term interest rates from 3.5% to 1%. Token demand is exploding. It's and I don't think those numbers are released a whole lot anymore by the hyperscalers, but you know, I think it was like 38 times from the summer of 2024 to summer of 2025.
- [01:07]
Podcast Host 1
Hi Jan, welcome to Excess Returns.
- [01:10]
Jan van Eck
Thank you. It's great to be here.
- [01:12]
Podcast Host 1
As CEO of Vaneck, you oversee a innovative and a very influential ETF and asset management firm. Your home to some of the industry's well known and widely used ETFs including the VanEck Gold Miners ETF, the VanEck Wide Moat ETF and many other stock, bond and crypto ETFs and investment strategies.
- [01:34]
Jan van Eck
You've described semiconductors.
- [01:38]
Podcast Host 1
That's the biggest one. That's right. But yeah, a lot of different, I mean dozens of, I think ETFs and strategies and some of the first in some of these, I think more, I would say a little bit more focused areas of the market, but areas that advisors and investors clearly want exposure to and are important in terms of building diversified investment portfolios. So what we want to do with you today is kind of have you on. I mean you're sort of like this, you know, very influential person in the ETF landscape and sort of talk through how you're thinking about the markets, how you're thinking about developing ETFs and building new investment strategies and sort of COVID I think, a wide range of topics with you today. So thank you for taking the time and sharing your time with us and our audience.
- [02:26]
Jan van Eck
No, it's my pleasure, my honor.
- [02:28]
Podcast Host 1
So you've described the firm as having a few different, very important key pillars that inform the macro perspective and how you go about trying to take advantage and exploit these global trends in the market. And those are government spending or fiscal policy, monetary policy and technology. So I thought to start it would just be good like Kind of a little inside baseball to hear how a firm like yours sort of takes that macro view or that orientation and sort of translates that into how you think about product development and themes that you're trying to take advantage of.
- [03:04]
Jan van Eck
Yeah, sure. Thank you. Let me try to elaborate on those, on those words a little bit because everyone talks about government policy and technology. Right. I think what we bring is because we appreciate history, we think the future can actually change much more radically and much more quickly than people think about. So I don't know if I can sort of describe it well, I still don't have the greatest words, but we try to look at some of these macro forces and I think more like the rise of China as this huge magnet. It's a reality outside the financial markets, but it will pull and stretch the financial market. So anyway, that's maybe a little bit more description on how we look at the world. And I guess from an investor perspective, the phrase that people key in on is sort of asset allocation is really important to returns. Right. And so but like we like at Van Eck, like to point out, some asset classes didn't used to exist. Like when I started my career, emerging markets wasn't an asset class. People look at real assets and gold sometimes. They, some people think of it as an asset class, some people don't allocate to them at all. So what we like to do is engage and hopefully we'll get into it today with clients, investors, just how they're thinking about those very, very important things to their portfolio.
- [04:34]
Podcast Host 2
Yeah, that's great.
- [04:35]
Podcast Host 1
No, I think we will get into a lot of that today. But where I think we wanted to maybe start with you is you recently put out your 2026 outlook. And the title of that piece would is the title of that piece was Visibility should mean Risk On. So maybe what is creating that visibility and why are you optimistic as we sort of head into this new year?
- [05:00]
Jan van Eck
Yeah, maybe those words were deader on arrival faster than any other quarterly outlook I've done. Not that I've changed my view, but they require a lot more explanation given some of the headlines that have been hitting the newspapers. So primarily, if you look at government spending, monetary policy and technology, we do know a lot about what's going to be happening in 2026 already. So as far as government spending is concerned, there's not going to be a big bill out of Congress. The big beautiful bill comes into effect this year and the trajectory as we see it, of fiscal deficits, federal fiscal deficits as a percent of GDP is on a healthy downward trajectory. So it peaked over north of 6.5% two years ago. It was just south of 6% last year. We think it's going to be below 5.5% going into this year. So that brings us out of like the fiscal danger zone that we had a couple of years ago, kind of emerging markets over type of overspending towards a trajectory that's becoming much more easy for us to swallow, meaning our debt levels will become less of a stress on the markets. And so you saw the 10 year interest rates, which are a good measure of that last year, end up the year sort of at the 4.1, 4.2 level, as opposed to the 4.8 level, which was much higher. Okay, so that's government spending, monetary policy. Okay. You could say, oh my goodness, we're going to have a new Fed chair who's going to take office in May. But I think Scott Bessant at the end of last year, through an article and then numerous interviews, gave a very, very clear roadmap of a Federal Reserve that's going to be less interventionist. And he sort of, I would say made fun of the Fed during the post Covid era, saying that was a gain of function. Fed, meaning that government stimulus, balance sheet, sorry, monetary stimulus and the Fed balance sheet was way too big for too long, supporting the financial markets leading to inflation. And in any case, what I'm saying is that for the new Fed chair, they will follow the Trump Benson philosophy of a smaller, less interventionist Fed. I bet they'll probably be saving some money on their renovations on their building as well.
- [07:32]
Podcast Host 1
The, the interesting thing with the, the Fed's intervention is it sort of goes back to like the financial crisis where they came in. They kind of saved the financial system and then the markets sort of, it's almost like then you had Covid and obviously what they did there. But it's like investors have almost come to expect that the Fed is going to be there as a sort of rescue mechanism for the markets when things get tough. And obviously Besset is signaling something very, very different based on what you're hearing.
- [08:06]
Jan van Eck
Well, he said, let me be clear, he did say that if there's a liquidity crisis, the Fed needs to step in. Okay. And he quoted a European central bank, said, it's great they did that for two or three months, but we did that for two or three years. And as every American knows, that drove asset prices up, the stock market up, but it drove the prices of houses up a lot too, and a lot of other things. And so, I mean, whether where the finger pointing should go, I don't know. All I'm saying is Besant really laid a sound, coherent foundation for what's going to be the Senate needs to approve Trump's nominee for the Fed, and he gave a really good philosophical explanation there, which I think really does matter. At the end of the day, that's kind of my read. And regardless of who they end up picking, the philosophy of who they pick I think is also going to be clear. The thing that's crazy and very remarkable about one of the things that Bessen said as well though, is he said interest rates today are normal. And what that suggests to me is that he was not laying the groundwork for someone to come in and drive short term interest rates from 3 1/2% to 1%, which is how you could interpret some tweets that come out of President Trump's account. Right? So if he thought they were already normal, then maybe the market is correctly expecting a quarter point, half a point, three quarters of a point on the short end. So again, my point is pretty much the market. That's what the market expects. We have a lot of visibility. There shouldn't be some kind of adverse, extremely tight monetary shock.
- [09:50]
Podcast Host 1
Do you have any sense, if that is true, about the Fed being, you know, less interventionist, if that's the right word? Do you have any sense about how that kind of trickles down into the areas of the market that it might impact? Like I'm thinking maybe, maybe active strategies might do a little bit better if that is in fact the case. Or just how does that flow through in terms of the way investors should maybe be thinking about it at like a portfolio level?
- [10:19]
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- [10:44]
Jan van Eck
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- [10:45]
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- [10:50]
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- [11:18]
Jan van Eck
Yeah, I don't know. That's a great question. But if the tenure doesn't change a lot and the short term only drifts down a little bit, I don't think. I mean, that should help the financials on the margin, but otherwise I'm not really sure it'll have a big sector impact. So I would say probably not.
- [11:40]
Podcast Host 2
I love, by the way, that you're, you're clearly a podcast guy researching you because it talks about you listening to a lot of podcasts. And I think that part of what you're the best in Interview you talked about was the all in one or the all in podcast, which.
- [11:51]
Jan van Eck
That's the one that got my attention. I sometimes when, yeah, I really, I shy that out on social media and I listened to it like three times because I was like, I really think this is very important. Right. When the Secretary of the treasury writes an article, repeats the same message over and over again, you got to listen to it. One of the things I learned from my father is just when important people say something, listen because they're really likely going to do what they say. I mean, you know, most people are.
- [12:25]
Podcast Host 2
And it's cool too, because we're used to, you know, when I was growing up in markets, it was like these two minute sound bites on cnbc. And now we can people these, you can hear these people who are making policy decisions, like talk for an hour. It's just really cool. You learn so much from doing that.
- [12:38]
Jan van Eck
Yes, I love the long form content and also a lot of what I try to fight against in my quarterly outlooks is the headlines we see in the media all the time. Right. What does the media want to talk about? Is it Kevin? Which Kevin is it like, who exactly is being picked? And if you just take a little bit of a step back and you realize all those candidates fit within one philosophy and we kind of know what's happening and focus a little bit less on the personalities. That's why I think the long form content really helps.
- [13:14]
Podcast Host 2
You mentioned the Fed renovations. And that sort of gets to a broader issue of independence. We've been talking about a lot in the podcast, which is, you know, we've had some guests who were extremely worried about Fed independence given what's going on. And we've had some guests who said, you know, it doesn't really matter in terms of policy that much. We're all talking about it a lot. But, you know, it probably won't change the Fed's policies that much. Did you have any thoughts on that?
- [13:34]
Jan van Eck
Yeah, I'm, I'm, you know, if you look at the history of the Fed and it's only been around for 110 years or so, there's always politics around interest rates and things like that. So none of this, it's, it's a little bit bare knuckled politics but nothing like. I, I am not worried about it because listen, at the end of the day the Senate needs to approve the Fed chair and the Fed chair is only one vote on the open market committee. So what's more important is are they persuasive? Not, you know, I, I just don't see a major restacking of the Fed that's being proposed.
- [14:14]
Podcast Host 2
Before we dig into your outlook a little bit more, I want to take a high level, I want to talk about at a high level because one of the things you did that was cool in here is it's very clear you guys are thinking in very long term time frames. When you think about macro, you're thinking about long term trends, like you know, comparing and contrasting your outlook with other ones. I've read like you're thinking about 10 years, 20 years, 30 years down the, down the road and what are these big trends and how can we take advantage of them? So can you talk about like why you think that way?
- [14:40]
Jan van Eck
Yeah, because I think some of these longer trends actually give you higher conviction. So the one, one of the ones I talk about is the projections that India at their current growth rate will be the size of continental Europe in 10 years. That, that is a profound reshaping of the world. Right, the world economy, but also political power and monetary systems, you know, they keep doing free market reforms. I mean, sure it could not happen, but I think the chances of that happening are super high. Now let's compare that to something that's shorter term. Do we know what the Indian stock market is going to do in January of 2026? No idea. Q1, 2026? Really? No idea. So I think when you focus on the few number of really important trends in the world and I think for a longer time you can just have much greater conviction around that than maybe shorter term predictions. And you know, as I said at the beginning of our discussion, should it affect your asset allocation? And in that case I would say yes. Right. Because most people will allocate to international markets based on some of a current day index, not kind of where things are going. And so yeah, I like to overweight India. That's the, I guess, the bottom line of that rant. Yeah.
- [16:06]
Podcast Host 2
And you have some other great trends which we'll talk about as well in the outlook. And it's just interesting because all of us get wrapped up in this, you know, is inflation 0.5% up or 0.5% down? And all this stuff we're seeing on CNBC every day. And it is important to look at these global trends and say, all right, 10 years from now, what do I think is going to be happening? Because that in the end will probably be a lot more important than whether inflation is, you know, 0.2% one way.
- [16:27]
Jan van Eck
Or the other, 100%.
- [16:30]
Podcast Host 2
How do you think. You mentioned the deficit before and you mentioned that it's getting better. What do you think is causing that? I mean, I guess to some extent economic growth is good for the deficit. Tariffs have generated some revenue. Do you think those are longer term sustainable things that we're seeing in terms of the deficit going down?
- [16:48]
Jan van Eck
I think that it's really just what you mentioned with tariff revenue. But let me talk about something that people, I don't think talk about all that. I was thinking about this weekend, which is the Ukraine war, right. I mean, I just think that the Trump administration is trying to save money wherever it can. It hit this sort of political brick wall with Doge, and so they don't talk about it at all. But think about the Ukraine war, right? We used to be lending money to Ukraine or sending them weapons. That was, we were writing checks for the Ukraine war. We're not writing checks anymore. Europe is writing checks. So we're saving that money now. I don't know where that money savings is going, but that was like, you know, tens and tens of billions somewhere between, I think the number was somewhere between 50 and 100 billion a year. That's a lot of money still for the United States. Right. So I just think that, that, you know, and whether the fraud, some of the welfare fraud adds up to a lot of savings, I just think that it's, it's the health care thing, right? They didn't agree in the fourth quarter. They risked a government shutdown, the Trump administration, to not extend the increase in benefits in the ACA program that Biden put in place. So everywhere I look, I see them trying to save a $10 bill, $20 bill. That kind of adds up. The biggest, by far the biggest seismic change is the tariff revenue, because that's like 300 billion or more. But anyway, so that's, I think what's bending the curve and we're way out there. Like I personally and you know, in the numbers I put in my outlook are way more, you know, more positive on that number being smaller. So they're below five and a half percent, even 5.3% of GDP this fiscal year that ends in September. But who knows? But we'll see. But we're the more bullish people on Wall Street.
- [18:48]
Podcast Host 2
So when you think about the economy, I mean, are you bullish as well? I mean, it seems like we have pretty reasonable growth right now. It seems like inflation is above target, but it's not that high. Do you feel good that we're kind of in this Goldilocks environment going down the middle right now?
- [19:00]
Jan van Eck
Yeah. So again, going back to fiscal and monetary, I used to say after Covid, we had two feet on the gas pedal, we were spending a lot of money and the fiscal policy was both, they were both stimulative. Right. And so remember when the Fed raised rates in 2022, everyone said we're going to have a recession, we're going to have a. You don't have a recession when you have both feet on the gas. Right. Government was stimulating in both dimensions. And so, you know, through, through QE and government spending. What we're having now is we're having this slight trade off. I thought it would be faster, but it's a slight trade off. Right. Fiscal stimulus is coming down as a percent of the economy and the monetary stimulus is slightly going up. Right. This interest rates are slightly going up. So it's just a slow moving kind of shift that I don't think net net will be negative for the economy. No. And it's, it's much healthier in the long term. Right. To not be spending so much money.
- [20:01]
Podcast Host 2
So I was excited to talk to you about AI because I know you've looked into it a lot and it's something that excites me just because I'm using it so much on a day to day basis. And I think all of us have this tendency to maybe try to rank these things in history. Railroads, the Internet, AI. But I know you rank AI towards the top. I believe you said it was the second biggest technology in American history after railroads. So can you just talk about how you're thinking about AI and what it's going to mean for the economy and for all of us?
- [20:25]
Jan van Eck
Yeah, I think the one thing I would say is, remember like the Vaneck philosophy is look away from the financial markets. What's actually happening on the technology front and on the Technology front to over simplify it. Token demand is exploding and I don't think those numbers are released a whole lot anymore by the hyperscalers. But I think it was like 38 times from the summer of 2024 to summer of 2025. So even CEOs will just say we can't predict it. It's insane. So basically the demand for this compute is huge. So that's really what that, that's what drives our thinking is the amount of, you know, the, the, the compute demand. And if you look at the quarterly numbers, like last week we saw tsmc, right? The, the company in Taiwan that makes all these chips again a positive earnings surprise. And their stock is at all time highs I don't think. You know, based on what I've heard on your pod, I don't think that really surprises the people that are, you know, playing close attention. There is a compute, an acute compute shortage and if, if TSMC is printing record earnings guess Nvidia, who's locked, right? They, they're locked together. They're going to have a good quarter too. So if you just look at the biggest players in the space, that, that, that's I think where you're seeing, you know, as I said, consistent with what you all have talked about on your podcast. Let me just quickly also talk about Q4 because I don't know if you're going to ask, but a lot of people say oh, what about OpenAI? And I'm like that's great. The marginal players in this compute phenomenon, they got their teeth kicked in in Q4. Oracle stock, core Weave stock, the Bitcoin miners, all the people at maybe the riskier, more leveraged end of the compute build out the stock market, I like Josh Brown's expression, took out its own trash, right. You thought, you know, it repriced the risk associated with the OpenAI kind of ecosystem. Open AI, part of the AI ecosystem. So I'm happily a buyer and I'm happily a buyer of Nvidia because as its earnings goes up and its stock price stays flat, it's getting cheaper on an, on an earnings basis. Yeah.
- [22:50]
Podcast Host 2
And I think you definitely could argue what happened in Q4 was healthy. Right? I mean in a bubble, that's not the type of stuff you see. You don't see differentiation between companies. You just see everything going up. You know, you see pets.com and stuff like that. So it's probably healthy long term for AI that that's happening. Differentiation between the players.
- [23:05]
Jan van Eck
Yeah. The way I put it, everyone is Talking about the AI bubble in Q4 while the bubble burst.
- [23:12]
Podcast Host 2
Right.
- [23:12]
Jan van Eck
I mean, that could very well be true. If you look at Those stocks down 50%, that feels like a bursting bubble. If you're, if you're long those names.
- [23:20]
Podcast Host 2
This, this question is no answer. But how do you think about this from an economic perspective? Because I was listening to a tech podcast the other day, the Dwarkesh podcast. I don't know if you've ever listened to that. It's kind of a hardcore tech podcast. But it was like two hardcore tech guys and one of them was arguing, you know, this is going to like double GDP growth over time. AI. And the other one's arguing, well, we've had a million innovations in history and GDP growth has kind of ended up in about the same place. So it's probably not going to have that much of an impact. I mean, do you just think like at an overall economic level, there's so many things that we're thinking about. Productivity, unemployment, like, do you have any thoughts on like an overall economic level? What do you expect us to do?
- [23:55]
Jan van Eck
I guess I have reasonably high conviction that we won't get a dramatic employment shock. So you can never invite me back if I'm wrong in 2026. But the reason I say that is if you look and include this in the quarterly output. Output. I, I borrowed, I stole some or I borrowed some charts from Morgan Stanley that look at different jobs like administrative assistance. And it really takes decades for the complete trend to work. You don't really see a big jump. Even though that's being automated, that job's being automated away or retail. Remember, you have to used to have cash registers. Now everyone's checking themselves out. You just don't have dramatic jumps in employment. A futurist I listened to talked about, can you imagine if 40 million jobs were dumped onto the US economy, what unemployment would look like? Well, it happened. Women joined the workforce after World War II and you could. There's not one chart you can find where you see that actually impacting things. So I think the point is we have such a dynamic economy and jobs are being redefined so consistently that it would be surprising to me. And this again going to the great visibility into this year. If we had an unemployment shock now, that's obviously. I'm not saying no, I'm just saying I think the odds are against it.
- [25:17]
Podcast Host 2
I'm just curious. I always like to ask guests how they're using it personally, like, are you. Is this a big part of your life now? Do you use it a lot personally during your day to day?
- [25:24]
Jan van Eck
Oh yeah. I mean I use it like a sort of knowledge worker replacement for search. You know, my colleagues, we kind of gave licenses to all my colleagues and we're using it at work basically the way the industry is. What I would say is sort of like a year ago a lot of it was glorified search, but now people are deploying agents and as you know, you can, the prompts are four times as long as they used to be. They take like three to four times as long to process. And what's shocking to me, kind of caught up with some of my colleagues a month ago, is how bad old software is. Meaning to create a blog on our website requires so many hours of work, it's crazy. And you know, so I think really, what software? We just have this great new version of software that's going to eat old software.
- [26:23]
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- [26:48]
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- [27:20]
Podcast Host 2
Yeah, and every time I think I've learned everything, it's just like there's just so much to learn. Like I'm just starting to get into Claude code. Uh, you may not have used that yet, but it's, it's crazy even for somebody who's not like I'm, I'm somewhat of a coder but not a hardcore coder and it's just amazing what this can do when you, when you put your, you know, when you put the time in to learn it.
- [27:36]
Jan van Eck
Well, we're, we're certainly using it here at Vaneck.
- [27:38]
Podcast Host 1
Is there like, do you tend to lean into one a little bit more than the other? Are using kind of all of them equally? How, what would you say? Like I'm, I'm, I'M definitely more tied into Chat GPT as my main one. So what about you?
- [27:50]
Jan van Eck
Corporately, we went with chat because we have to protect our data, but now we're getting an enterprise version of Claude as well. And I don't know, we're also looking. People love Gemini and the integration with all their productivity tools like spreadsheets and Word and email and things like that. So I think it's. A lot of flowers are blooming at this point and they're leapfrogging each other as well.
- [28:21]
Podcast Host 2
This gets back to what you were talking about in Q4, but you talked in the outlook about this transition from phase one of AI to phase two and I think we're kind of seeing that now. So can you talk about that and sort of what it means?
- [28:31]
Jan van Eck
Sure. I mean, well, we talk about AI 2.0. We started using that phrase last year. It's more industries that will benefit from AI. The most obvious ones are in the electricity generation area. Sometimes people call it energy, which is like a pet peeve because it's electricity that we're short of, not necessarily NAT gas. We'll have enough NAT gas to last our lifetimes. So yeah, so that's that the nuclear etf we thought, because I call another catchphrase, the solution to electricity is QR code. So it's quantity but also reliability. People leave out the reliability part. And that's where alternative electricity was not good enough for the AI cycle.
- [29:29]
Podcast Host 1
Right.
- [29:30]
Jan van Eck
So nuclear has been a big beneficiary of that trade. We think the complex of companies that are leaning into this electrification and compute demand like bitcoin miners and some of those kind of things that the Vista, some of the IPP is like they're leveraged into that electricity shortage. Space are going to do well, Chevron even and you can do both old school energy and new school electricity is has a whole bunch of gas turbines that they're looking to repurpose to become electricity providers.
- [30:09]
Podcast Host 2
Yeah, it's just so cool to see all the innovation in energy now. I feel like for a while we didn't really have the pressure that would create like the need to have this innovation and AI seems to be creating it. So like batteries. You mentioned nuclear. I mean there's so much going on that's really cool that probably like in a decade is going to, you know, create things we can't even think of right now in terms of energy.
- [30:27]
Jan van Eck
Yep. It's, it's. There's a political risk element as well. Right. Because people don't want to pay Higher utility bills just because they want to use Claude. Right. So there's, there's attention. And who pays for this increase in electricity?
- [30:47]
Podcast Host 2
Do you have any thoughts on this overall AI CapEx build that's going out? Like, we've talked about this a lot in the podcast and you have some people who think, you know, there's never going to be any revenue or enough revenue to justify this much of a spend and a lot of other people are thinking they're not spending enough, like this is such a great innovation, is going to generate so much for the economy that we need to spend more. Do you have any thoughts on this? And I know you've studied, you talked about railroads before. You've studied historical things where we've spent a lot of money on capex. Like do you have any thoughts on this thinking relative to those types of things and whether you think the benefit will come?
- [31:16]
Jan van Eck
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, a couple, I'll use a couple historical analogies, but basically the question is, was the US equity market last year when 10 companies were 40% of the market cap, was that some kind of fundamental distortion or did that actually make sense? So that distortion, we talked about the technology before, so I'm not going to go into the kind of demand side, but the distortion has happened before. It happened in the railroad era where the railroads were a huge, and I would argue more transformative technology than AI but they were a huge part, the largest sector in the economy. I think they grew to like 60% of the economy. So that has oppressed it. But what's amazing, and I think really underappreciated, is that these mega cap companies are profit, unbelievable profit machines, right? Their revenues keep growing and they, they, their headcount has basically been flat for a couple of years. And if you, through the efficiencies of AI, right, CLAUDE is writing its own Claude competitor. They can drive their costs down. And so that's just a crazy sort of chart that we have in our outlook, just what their profitability is. Now listen, they're so lucky because the hyperscalers, these big companies are solving a very high level. We're a consumer economy and they own the American consumer. Right? And now here's yet another technology AI where they have a competitive advantage. Why? Because they have the traffic, right? The models that get the most traffic are going to be the most effective again. So they're just incredibly lucky. Maybe this is too much of a sidetrack, but you know, someone else who was really lucky in history was Rockefeller. Right? Because Here he was this entrepreneur making kerosene. And you know, then what happened? The car was invented. Right. So they needed more refined oil product. So he was just sitting there. Was, was he running around saying, oh, I think I'm building too many refineries? I don't think so. You know, the first 10 or 20 years into, into the auto revolution. So sometimes these companies get lucky. I think they're kind of lucky to be able to use their scale and pivot into this AI technology. And so far, no, to answer your question of 10 minutes ago, look, I mean their balance sheets are still pretty strong. I don't love the SPV vehicles that some of them are using to fund the data centers. But I don't see anything that's sort of crisis alarming.
- [34:04]
Podcast Host 2
Yeah, it's interesting because I think one of the things people miss when they compare this to the fiber build out is that those were not strong cash flow generating companies. You were using a lot of debt back then. It's just a different situation. You've got a lot of spending now and maybe we will start to see the debt phase of this now. But so far, I mean a lot of this has been done by very profitable companies that have a lot of cash flow to spend on this type of thing.
- [34:24]
Jan van Eck
Right. Which is not to say that people won't always try to cut costs in producing this sort of compute. Right. So models have gotten much more efficient. Nvidia chips have gotten much more efficient from an energy electric, from an electricity usage perspective. Right. He's Jensen Huang talks about dropping energy demand cost per per compute unit, 90% a year. I don't know if he can do that. People were shifting some of the compute more towards inference and doing being more efficient in inference use or memory use. That will definitely happen. So there, there will be slight bumps on the road. I mean this is a very dynamic technology. But think big picture right now the finances don't seem to be risky at all.
- [35:18]
Podcast Host 2
One of the things I've been thinking about a lot with these huge companies is if you look through history and you look back by decade, you'll see the top 10 companies in the S&P 500. And you go forward the next decade, they're usually pretty different. A lot of times you think these companies have a boat that can't be broken and then it does. But I wonder if these companies are different. I'm thinking about it a lot. I'm thinking 10 years from now, are we going to see these same big companies as the, the biggest companies in the S P 500 and that law will sort of be broken. Or are we just gonna. Or am I just living in the moment and not realizing that there's going to be something that's going to come from behind and overtake them? Do you have any thoughts around that?
- [35:52]
Jan van Eck
Yes, of course. I mean, of course it's very hard. That's why I kind of. I have two comments. Right. That's why I said that thing about Rockefeller. He was so damn lucky. He was in the right spot, already had a great business and then the car was invented and people needed gas lead for their cars. Right. I think the other thing about the AI industry so far is OpenAI, here's a company startup basically out of nowhere that because of its chat product in 2023, went way to the top of market share for AI prompts. Right? And not only did it grab the consumer market in the United States, it also partnered with Microsoft to get after corporate America. So OpenAI, in a way has the ability to compete head to head with an Amazon in the following sense, right? You can shop through both portals and both. If OpenAI partners with Shopify like they've talked about, or Walmart, they're getting the delivery, the logistics and the payment infrastructure. Right. So who would have thought like 10 years ago or five years ago that someone could actually try to compete against Amazon? Yet here's a company, hundreds of millions of users monthly users with potentially the ability to compete against Amazon. So it's such an interesting case. We don't know how that's gonna end up. Right. But I think that's a really interesting question and obviously hotly debated on podcasts and in the industry.
- [37:30]
Podcast Host 2
That's what we do here. We do hotly debated podcast topics. Another thing, I guess another hotly debated podcast topic is this idea that, you know, if you going back to my example of the fiber, the companies that built out the fiber network were not the biggest beneficiaries of the Internet. Obviously. The companies that sat downstream were. I mean, do you think that's the way it's going to play out here? Or do you think maybe these builders, you know, the Mag 7 type companies that are doing the building will be the primary beneficiaries of this whole thing?
- [37:58]
Jan van Eck
Yeah, that's a great question. My telescope doesn't go that far into the future, I would say. It's just hard to know. I don't have a high conviction on where the Mag 7 go. I will just say though, because we do spend a lot of time thinking about semiconductors. Because of smh. I listen to Jensen Huang and here's a guy who made it by competing in a very tough cutthroat commodity part of the business, right? And then, and now he kind of owns the main, I call it, owns the mainframe. He owns the whole AI compute infrastructure. And I can tell you as someone who has done both themselves at a much smaller level that once you tasted, you know, know some kind of business traction and gotten away from having to compete just on price or the next product, want to have the stickiness around that ecosystem and so whether he has to do a deal with Grok or whomever like I, I really think Nvidia is in a very, very good situation right now. It'll take a long time for, for them to, to lose significant market share. And so I think they're cheap at the price. Right. Their earnings, therefore price to earnings ratio is kind of near where it's been at multi year lows.
- [39:21]
Podcast Host 2
Do you think about that like in terms of semiconductor demand in general? I think one of the things we've seen throughout this whole thing is everybody keeps saying, oh, Nvidia can't possibly keep growing at this rate. Or semiconductors can general can't be possibly be growing at this rate. But then people inside the space, inside of technology are like, we can't get enough of these things. These need to grow at a faster rate. We need more of them. Do you think this is as we think forward into the future years, in the future? Do you think this demand is just kind of insatiable right now?
- [39:46]
Jan van Eck
Listen, I think we have visibility just like one of your Recent guests of 2, 2 years of compute shortage. Right. It just is very unlikely for that. So I kind of like, well, will the demand for tokens intersect with the building of capacity and cross at some point in the future? Sure. But I'm not sure we need to worry about that right now. You know, we've got, I think two years of this, this phenomenon still happening. At least that's the view of my expert colleagues.
- [40:18]
Podcast Host 2
You talked about one of the risks we've talked about on the podcast in your Outlook, this idea of private credit. And you know, we had Thericolor, we had first brands. There's some people who think those are just, you know, one off type situations due to specific events. And it really has nothing to do with private credit in general. And then there's other people who call them cockroaches, which is I think what you refer to them in the Outlook as well, like where they could be a sign of a system systemic problem with private credit. Do you have any thoughts on that?
- [40:39]
Jan van Eck
Yeah, I mean I was looking at one area called business development companies or BDCs. And these are effectively pools of loans to mid sized companies that trade every day on the stock market and are run by the same firms that run private credit. You know, private, private credit funds that you can't redeem. I, yeah, I think that, that those, those vehicles are a great thing to look at in terms of sometimes they're going to be cheap and sometimes they're going to be expensive. So BDC is like a closed end fund, could trade at a premium to the value of its underlying loans or at a discount. If the market's very concerned about the quality of those loans, it'll trade at a big discount. Like during COVID about 20, 25%. In the fourth quarter of last year they went from like a 10% premium to a 10% discount. So I said listen, if you think this is going to be a big disaster, then you should sell and you can because they're liquid. But if not, then they're probably a good buy. Now when I look at corporate balance sheets, they're shrinking as a percent of gdp. Household debt is shrinking as a percent of gdp. So you know, the really the big borrowers in our country is the federal government down in D.C. so am I really worried about private credit? No. You know, people freaked out a little bit. Jamie Dimon said, well, there's one cockroach, there's going to be more. So far we haven't seen more. And so I slightly favor BDCs because they have daily liquidity and if we see something you can get out, but they also give you good buying opportunities.
- [42:22]
Podcast Host 2
You're probably the perfect person to ask this next question to because one of the things we're going to see with these private assets is we're going to see a lot of people and we have to some extent already see a lot of people try to bring these into ETFs. And you've got one argument saying we're democratizing access to these types of things. And you've got another argument that you can't put illiquid things inside of an etf. It just doesn't work. So how do you think about that?
- [42:43]
Jan van Eck
I think you're right. It's really important to match the liquidity of the underlying with the liquidity of the structure. And so, you know, something that does work is, you know, like an interval fund or a tender offer fund where not all the money can go out the door on one particular day. Right. That's really what we're talking about, a closed end fund structure as well. No one has the right to take the money out of that fund on any particular day. Again, can trade at a premium or discount. There is a big demand for access to the private markets and we don't talk about it a lot, but Vaneck has an early stage venture fund and also invests in private, you know, private equity. So we do have experience in those asset classes. And to your point, there's a lot of demand for the SpaceXs of the world.
- [43:41]
Podcast Host 2
Do you think it will ever like on large scale, do you think this will ever come? I mean it's in ETFs a little bit right now and obviously we've got these liquidity problems. Do you think this will ever be like something that's offered in a lot of ETFs?
- [43:52]
Jan van Eck
Let me put it this way. Not, not at Vaneck. I completely agree with you. Illiquid assets should not be in daily liquidity vehicles because not only, you know, there's a hidden cost as well. Right. So certainly you can say, oh, I've got some illiquid position in an ETF. Let's say it's 10% of that ETF, which is allowable under the rules pretty much of mutual funds and ETFs. But what you don't also know is that the bid, ask, spread or the kind of, I'll call it the cost of transacting in that ETF can also be high. And sometimes that's not very visible to investors. So it's just what we seek is the highest possible degree of liquidity in our ETFs and the lowest transaction costs. And that would be a conflict.
- [44:42]
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- [45:12]
Jan van Eck
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- [45:26]
Podcast Host 2
Another question you ask in your outlook is did I miss gold and for me the answer is yes. Unfortunately yes, I did miss gold. But I'm wondering, it just seems like whatever's driving gold and it's a bunch of different factors, it seems to just keep going despite everybody saying this run has to end. What do you think about the factors driving gold and how are you thinking about it going forward?
- [45:47]
Jan van Eck
Yeah, again with India being a major economy, I just think gold is re emerging as the world's leading currency. It's just like the world was 100 years ago where every currency was only valuable in quote unquote because it was pegged to gold. And in a world where no one can agree like who the boss is, is it the US or China or is it India? Gold I think is going to be the default. You know, it started under the Biden administration when we seized the Russian assets after their invasion of Ukraine. But like no one wants to be vulnerable to the, you know, having the US decide one day we don't like them and somehow having their assets or their money trapped in gold is, you know, it's, you, you have it physically, it's, it's yours. So I kind of really think it's a 10 year, just shift or shift back to the way the whole world is going to be. If you look at China and India, big parts of the global economy, they're not dollarized economies, they don't want to be. I mean the renminbi is a little bit linked to the dollar but India doesn't want to have a dollar linked currency. And so I do think there's this big shift towards wealth in the developed markets and they're on the margin, as they get wealthier, they buy gold. So I think we often make a mistake by trying to take our US perspective and say oh, US inflation means I should buy gold and stuff like that. I mean last year should have blown up those perceptions. Right. Gold hit all time highs and inflation actually went down over the course of the year. So we don't live in a US world, we live in a global world and I think it's a super long term trend. Now having said that, could it make big corrections? 20, 25% corrections? Absolutely. But we're trying to encourage our clients to, you know, to allocate and if they, we run some allocation models ourselves or they can't bear to buy gold, but put them in our allocation models and we'll take that pain for them.
- [47:56]
Podcast Host 1
What do you think's driving the overall like price of gold?
- [48:00]
Jan van Eck
The thesis of it, what is the.
- [48:01]
Podcast Host 1
Core Sort of thrust of it. Is it like investors are waking up to this asset class that has long been maybe ignored to some extent? Is it central banks? Is it a host of variety reasons? What's your overall thought?
- [48:13]
Jan van Eck
Yeah, I mean, look, it's a variety of reasons. I think if you look back maybe over the last 30 years, 30 years ago, US was on top of the world economy and everyone was linked to the dollar. And basically the old world, sorry, the old world meeting Europe, the developed world used to be linked to gold and now they were like, oh, we live in the dollar world. You know what they did? They sold their gold. So for like a whole decade the UK sold its gold at like $250 an ounce. Like they nailed the bottom. Right. And so the developed market said, we live in a paper world, we live in a dollar world, I don't need gold anymore. And then about 10 years ago, the world's wealth has dramatically shifted on the margin towards emerging markets, China, all over India, globally, Eastern Europe. And so what's happened is they all, as they got wealthier, started buying gold. So this isn't like an overnight thing, it's just that they've been doing it and now with the US being so politically unpredictable I'll call it, they just want more gold. Like every political headline, gold goes up another percent. And so, you know, will that change it with a new administration? I don't think so. And I just think your trend, that's. Why did I scold? I don't think you did. Now it's very hard to persuade people to buy into a bull market. But you know, that's the dilemma we face. And I feel pretty strongly that this is a very long term trend.
- [49:57]
Podcast Host 1
And explain the difference between if you're an investor, you can invest obviously in the physical or ETFs that hold the physical commodity as in gold, or you could get exposure to gold through some of the mining equities. And I think as we mentioned at the outset, I mean one of your larger, maybe not the largest ETF in your ETF family, but a very large one is, I believe this Gold Miners etf.
- [50:22]
Jan van Eck
Yeah. So the mining industry has gone through what a lot of natural resources did, which is investors said, hey, you know, I've got this AI company over here. And then Jan, you're offering this mining company and this mining company isn't finding a lot of new gold. And even worse, you have to dig more dirt every year to find the same amount of gold. So it's, it's like the opposite of a tech company. This is like the least desirable company I could even create in my mind. Right. And so they basically went down a lot over the last decade. And people said I'd rather own bullion for a variety of reasons. Last year there was a big turnaround, I think finally investors started saying, I like the fact that I do believe gold's going up and I like the fact that gold mining companies, if their costs are basically stable, I should be making a lot more money and their stocks should be going up as a multiple of the gold price. So that's the basic thesis that I'm sure you're familiar with. One of the reasons I'm bullish on gold is we actually got about three or four billion dollars out of our gold mining ETFs in the first quarter of last year. And it wasn't because people said, oh, gold went up. I think I'm going to make, you know, sell and make sell and realize my profits. Instead I think sophisticated investors were short those gold mining shares for many years and they're like, I don't know about this. Maybe gold will be going up here. Maybe I've made all the money, I'm going to do it. Which is exactly what I think happened. So demand to the demand for shorting gold mining companies went down substantially last year. But that just, that doesn't mean there's a ton of demand for them. It just means there's less hatred for them. Which is part of my thesis is that gold is still kind of undiscovered or, or not super popular from, from the perspective of US investors. So like gold, like gold mining shares is the bottom. You know, there are other parts of the precious mills ecosystem, like silver is going absolutely bananas right now. So you know, just, I would just like it's, it's hard to know I wouldn't be buying silver right now because it's gone up so much. But anyway, so that's a couple of our thoughts on that.
- [52:56]
Podcast Host 1
Yeah, two questions somewhat related to family and I think you'll get where I'm going with this. So when you look across your entire ETF lineup today, is there any theme or strategy and maybe we've talked about already, but that gets you like most excited. And the reason I say that's like a family is because it's like, it's hard to pick like your favorite kid.
- [53:18]
Podcast Host 2
Right?
- [53:19]
Podcast Host 1
It's, you know, you don't want to pick favorites but if you were to key in on and you know, maybe we've discussed some of these from your outlook or whatever. But I'm just wondering because there is a. The Vaneck lineup is a very diverse lineup. You have your commodity related stuff, you have your crypto related stuff, you have your equity in terms of. We already mentioned the moat. So is there anything that gets you really jazzed up for the next, you know, 12 to 18 months? What would you say?
- [53:46]
Jan van Eck
Yeah, I don't, I mean as I said, a lot of stuff corrected in Q4 that we do find is relatively attractive. Right. Some of the companies most leveraged to the AI compute space, like the Bitcoin miners, we have an actively managed ETF called Node that has about half of its assets basically in this kind of compute shortage play, there's nothing that's so screamingly hated. I will say that, you know, people don't really like India. India went up again last year for the 10th year in a row. But it underperformed emerging markets. So I guess there's some investments sometimes that have been really disliked. I can't, nothing really occurs to me, you know, kind of right now but India would probably be one of the least liked and, and it's underperformed relative as I said to em. So if you like my overall 10 year thesis, I, I'd say India.
- [54:44]
Podcast Host 1
Yeah, some, some kind, not a little bit more contrarian in nature stuff that hasn't really kept up necessarily with maybe the broader, you know, em universe.
- [54:53]
Jan van Eck
Yeah.
- [54:54]
Podcast Host 1
And the, the, the, the, the one other family question I wanted to ask you is Vaneck is a family owned and operated what Adv. You know, talk about the advantages that you think a firm that is family owned given the size of Vaneck is able to have maybe over others.
- [55:18]
Jan van Eck
Sure. Well, just to go a little bit into history. So my, my dad started the firm 70 years ago and he started investing overseas. But he really made his name by starting the first gold fund in the United States. And when gold was pegged at $35 an ounce and then it went to $800 an ounce. So it was the best performing mutual fund in the industry in the 1970s. But gold can go down, gold shares can go down. Just to give you a number from after the financial crisis, people liked gold but didn't do anything. And it corrected From 2011 to 2016, gold mining shares went down 90%. Now when I joined the company, that's all we did is manage gold mining funds. So think of the Vaneck corporate revenue going down 90%. It's a lot easier to have a little money in the bank. We had not much money in the bank back then, but to have some money in the bank and allow for these market fluctuations and not have to lay people off in your client relations team or in your portfolio management team. So I say that's the profound advantage, which is not having to work worry at all about quarterly earnings and just do the best you can with the funds that you're offering your clients, making sure they're well managed despite the spoiled quarterly kind of profits. So I would say that's the biggest thing by far. We have a profit share kind of compensation structure. So it's definitely not just Vanex, you know, making money at Vaneck. So those would be the kind of two things I would say. And you know, a lot of the giants in the mutual fund industry are family owned. I mean, Fidelity Investments, Franklin Templeton, you know, you're talking about third or fourth generation there. So we're just early in the game. I'm the second generation.
- [57:15]
Podcast Host 1
Are there any developments that you see happening in the market that either excite you in terms of like new technologies? And I'm talking like kind of trading.
- [57:28]
Podcast Host 2
Like market structure a little bit.
- [57:29]
Podcast Host 1
And the reason I'm thinking of this is because I just saw, I think today that the New York Stock Exchange is going to, I don't know if it's like an experiment or, or what they're doing with, with tokenization and trying to put forth, you know, using blockchain to, you know, try to possibly develop a, you know, 20, 24 7, you know, trading week where through the tokenization the stocks would be able to trade or certain equities, you know, vehicles would be able to trade, you know, 24 hours a day. So I'm just curious, I'd be curious your comments on that or. And is there anything else that you're seeing coming down the pipe with new technology that either you're like, whoa, wait a minute, that doesn't seem. Or that that excites you?
- [58:17]
Jan van Eck
Sure. Well. So Vinneck was the first ETF sponsor to get behind a Bitcoin ETF in 2017. Of course, we all came to market at the same time, but been looking at kind of blockchain related technologies for a long time now. So very excited about them. I think last year the stablecoin bill was really dramatic in the context of US history. I like to say that there's three big things that happen in the US financial system. Hamilton helped create it, FDR saved the banks during the Depression. And I think the stablecoin bill enables tech companies like a Coinbase to Compete directly against banks when it comes to your wallet. Right. That your. Our financial lives would always be open a checking account and then everything goes through your checking account. Well, you know, technology can now, companies like a Facebook or whatever can now compete directly against the banks. And I think that's a dramatic change. So I'm very excited about that. Tokenization, which is what you were talking about relative to your stock exchange is something that we're definitely looking at. I kind of like to say, honestly, last year we started suggesting that people invest in our actively managed, I'll call them crypto or stablecoin or blockchain funds because so much is happening so quickly. I find in, in when I was talking to finance, when I talked to financial advisors or whatever, maybe people understand Bitcoin, maybe Ethereum, but when it Solana or Avalanche or all these other kind of things, they. They really have no idea. And so anyway, so that's kind of. I would say we're excited, but it's a lot of the plumbing of Wall street where I think the funnest stuff, I guess I would say is happening at Robinhood. Right. Where Robinhood is enabling access to prediction markets, which I think are very interesting and obviously very into tokenization and crypto. And I think they're really setting the pace for a lot of retail or individual oriented financial applications.
- [60:40]
Podcast Host 1
And their customers will eventually be the ones that hold the wealth in this country. So to some extent, you know, it'll be interesting to see how that sort of shakes out over time.
- [60:50]
Jan van Eck
Have you done a prediction market podcast?
- [60:53]
Podcast Host 1
We haven't yet. And that's something. Jack, we got to kind of go on our, you know, we gotta get on that.
- [60:58]
Podcast Host 2
Actually. It'll be. It's interesting that I know very little about those. Yeah.
- [61:01]
Podcast Host 1
And John, I'm like one of those guys that I like to like try to like use what. It'd be great if I could like get in there because I haven't done any of the prediction market stuff for my own, you know, my, myself. So I think if I got in there and started, you know, doing all dabbling in it, I would be. Be more well versed in it obviously, you know, but yeah, that's the one we got to put on the, on the future.
- [61:24]
Jan van Eck
I think we have to just because there are. It's not. I don't know if it's of institutional scale yet, but there are risks that people try to hedge that I think are expressed better through prediction markets than traditional financial instruments.
- [61:38]
Podcast Host 1
But yeah. So Jan, thank you very much for your time today. We really appreciate it. We always like to end with two standard closing questions for all of our guests. And the first one is, what is the one thing you believe about investing that most of your peers would disagree with you with?
- [61:55]
Jan van Eck
Yeah, I don't know if they fight me on this, but so much of the mistakes that are made in finance are based on psychology. It's recency bias. Right. And all we see are charts, and charts generally are shorter term. And it's literally feeding into one of our bigger behavioral mistakes. Right. So when, when I finally realized that, I would say the Vaneck perspective is take the longest chart possible because usually people are focused on data that's just too small. And, and if you go back, I, I always say I love multi decade charts because, you know, that gives you a better perspective whether you really add an extreme or not, whether it's something that you should be paying attention to or, or, or not. So I wouldn't say that peers would fight me on it per se, but just in terms of all the information that we consume, it's of this potentially misleading nature. Right. And, and then just that the world can change so quickly, you know, is kind of the flip side of that. That's, that's really what that is.
- [63:08]
Podcast Host 1
I love that because it reminds me of, I was at an investment conference, this is years ago, and Corey Hofstein was on stage, who's been the friend of the friend of ours. Been on the podcast multiple times and shout out to Corey here, but he was talking about back tests, when back tests were used a lot more in the industry, you know, especially early days ETFs, because a lot of people didn't have real live track records. And Corey, you know, was on stage and he said, you know, if somebody shows you a back test and it, you know, never underperforms, tell them that they needed to, you know, they need to run it over longer periods of time because all investment strategies go through periods of underperformance. But yet, you know, we're never seeing a bad back test. So anyways, I think that's a great, great point there.
- [63:50]
Jan van Eck
And a lot of our tools, you know, weren't built until the 90s. And so if you want to look at how like the 1970s, which was a big inflationary period, like your charts don't go back that far.
- [64:02]
Podcast Host 1
Right.
- [64:02]
Jan van Eck
Like, you know, now actually now with, with AI, you can get a lot more historical charts than, but not, they're not really available on, you know, that what's available in the industry and the.
- [64:15]
Podcast Host 1
Last question is, based on your experience in the markets, what's the one lesson you would teach your average investor?
- [64:21]
Jan van Eck
Well, I guess trial and error with a lot of history and a lot of context to how things are changing. If you can. It's hard. It takes quite a while to kind of get that history. But I would say the philosophy of some money managers used to be put your money in the fund and don't trade individual stocks. I think trade individual stocks, I mean, and don't become a day trader. That's not my point. But there's nothing like losing money to accelerate your learning, right? And I think, you know, that. That kind of stuff. I would. That's what I would tell my younger self.
- [65:07]
Podcast Host 1
This has been great. Thank you very much.
- [65:08]
Jan van Eck
We really appreciate it.
- [65:09]
Podcast Host 1
Yann.
- [65:09]
Jan van Eck
Oh, it's great. Thank you, guys.
- [65:11]
Podcast Host 1
Thank you for tuning in to this episode. If you found this discussion interesting and valuable, please subscribe on your favorite audio platform or on YouTube. You can also follow all the podcasts in the Excess returns network@xsreturnspod.com if you have any feedback or questions, you can contact us@xsreturnspodmail.com no information on this podcast.
- [65:31]
Podcast Host 2
Should be construed as an individual investment advice.
- [65:34]
Indeed Advertiser
Securities discussed in the podcast may be.
- [65:36]
Jan van Eck
Holdings of the firms of the hosts or their clients.