What do you make of it, though, the volatility we've been seeing?

Well, I mean, obviously we had some big news last week, and that kind of affected the entire AI complex, as you know.

We have two sort of areas or sector focuses that target this area.

So one is our AI and technology fund, which is GPTY.

And then our other ones are Soxie and Chippy, which focus on the semiconductors.

Now, of course, there's a lot of crossover between these two and the Broadcoms, the AMDs, the NVIDIAs.

Those are going to end up in both categories.

Which ones are the biggest holders?

Talk to us about SPCX Options Income Strategy ETF.

Yeah, so this is an ETF that, like many of our other single stock option overlay income ETFs, basically takes a proxy position in SpaceX and then sells upside call spreads to harvest a little bit of income or premium by selling that upside.

But it only sells the upside a little bit.

So you still get that participation in the event that the stock moves very sharply higher.

Essentially, if you did something like a covered call, you're strictly capping the upside.

We're trying to prevent that because this is a really news-driven stock, and it is definitely one of the stocks that we've seen that options traders are highly interested in.

In fact, one of the points I would make about it is that options listed very shortly after the IPO, and on the first day of options trading in SpaceX, we saw that it traded three, it was basically the third busiest single stock option traded after Tesla and Nvidia.

Which other sort of single names have you got ETFs attached to with single stock levered ETFs?

But yeah, you just jump in and tell us your memories.

I suppose I've got three or four things that really stand out for me.

One, when I was on the fringe of making the first team at Blundells and Grant was already a star in that side, but of course it was being led and commanded by Hugh.

And I turned up as a 15-year-old to watch, hoping that someone would get injured and I might get asked to play.

And this was at the end of term festival.

And I watched Hugh Batt against, I forget who it was against, Uppingham, I think, but I may be incorrect.

And he played the most amazing innings I have ever seen.

And I just thought that was so sound and so... delightful that the fame and the success hadn't changed him and he was still a lovely, lovely person.

Is it the companies and their fundamental stories driving the volatility or is it the volatility that's driving some of these companies and their stories?

I think it's the volatility in some cases.

I mean, if we take a look at a name like Kohl's Stores, for example, I mean, this is a stock that had a lot of short interest in it.

The street was not enamored of the name coming into it.

It was up a bit.

And then you get any bit of good news out of some of these stocks, and you can sometimes get these real upward snaps, and I think we have seen that.

And then of course you have situations like you were just talking about with Abercrombie where I think a lot of people were a little bit surprised by how good those results were.

How do you think the options market is handicapping just how the results will go this season?

With regard to fees, how much more advantageous is it for an individual or trader or investor to understand or learn about the use of futures and options and implement strategies on their own versus paying the above index level type fees for actively managed funds to have an ETF strategy try to mimic some of those options-based strategies?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's worth first just talking about what the scale and scope of those fee differences are.

It's not uncommon for a lot of these options-based ETFs, and we run several ourselves, to have fees of 99 basis points or basically 1%.

Compare that to an S&P 500 strategy, which might have fees of 15 basis points, or in some cases, substantially even less than that.

But these are very active strategies.

So is there an advantage for investors to learn about futures and options and potentially do it themselves? Well, there's a couple of potential advantages in that.

But there's also something really critical, which is that if you're buying these products, you probably ought to understand the underpinning securities and futures that they trade.

Is there anything that we can glean about just what traders and investors at that retail level are expecting given the kinds of activity we're seeing in the options market, futures market, and these levered and inverse type ETFs?

Mike, let's talk about the options derivative side of the general markets vis-a-vis what these ETFs are doing with inverse and leverage type products.

Yeah, I mean, so, I mean, I guess the first thing I would say is that there's, you know, a lot of different flavors of these types of ETFs.

And as a portion of the overall ETF market, these things still remain quite small.

So if you can imagine there's maybe 150 billion in products like this, that's perhaps 1% just of what the AUM for ETFs in the United States is alone.

In the United States, ETF market is substantially larger than it is in the rest of the world.

Now, I think that the spirit of some of these things is quite good.

I mean, what you're trying to do is give strategy access to people, basically democratize strategies for people who don't either have the ability or the time to implement some of these strategies themselves.

And really quickly, before we let you go, for this part of the discussion, Mike, if you take a look at the true transaction costs of implementing some of these types of leveraged or inverse strategies versus using the ETFs themselves and paying the fees, where do the fees stack up?

So, Mike, let's talk about silver and why you think that it's a better trade relative to what we're already seeing for the record highs in gold.

Yeah, I mean, one of the things, obviously, we have record highs in gold.

We are not seeing record highs yet in silver, but it certainly has been doing exceptionally well this week.

And we had some recent local highs up a couple of bucks from where we are right now.

And of course, the all-time highs are substantially higher.

And my thinking is that silver could do a little bit of a catch-up here and break above the highs of the last 12 months.

And so my thinking is to try to take advantage of something that we call call skew.

Why do you think why not just be that much more bullish and just buy the call outright? Or do you think it is because of this pricing dynamic right now?

How do you play it?

Yeah, so this is an interesting case.

As you pointed out, the AI trade, the data center trade, incorporated a lot of electricity generation based on anticipated increases in power demand to service that space.

What we saw, of course, is that Vistra, along with the rest of that trade, has sold off quite a lot in recent days.

And there is another wrinkle that has been added, and that is the must offer that is going to be related to the auctions that they're going to be holding for PJM later this year.

And that basically is an effort by PJM and FERC, which is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, has agreed to go along with this to make sure that there are sufficient Supply available and of course if you increase supply all else equal the idea is that that would lower prices which would put some question.

On the margins that a lot of people were anticipating for Vistra in the next year which was anticipated to earn about.

Any reason to expect a change in tone tomorrow when they report anything about the consumer? I mean, a lot of people argue weakness might even benefit them there.