00:00And when it comes to DRAM, the ETF, this all goes back to that idea that memory chip makers are
00:05the next wave of the AI excitement.
00:08This was not the case two years ago. I mean, memory chip makers really took off in late 2025.
00:14What does that say about where the DRAM cycle is?
00:18Yeah, the DRAM cycle is definitely in its sort of boom phase right now.
00:22We're in an extended up cycle.
00:24If you look at past historical cycles, typically they last somewhere between seven to ten quarters.
00:30We're already well beyond that.
00:32And based on guidance for some of these companies and the trajectories of these companies' earnings, it's estimated to keep
00:37going for quite a while.
00:38And a lot of that is just driven strictly by AI demand, but also a supply-demand imbalance that's driving
00:44upward pricing moves.
00:47Yeah, let's talk about this ETF again.
00:49I looked at the top four thematic ETFs of all time.
00:52It took them over 1,000 days each to get to a billion.
00:57So when I see DRAM come out and get to a billion in 10 days, I'm like, what is going
01:01on here?
01:02What's interesting to me is the three stocks, SK, Hynix, Samsung, and Micron, are really not easily gotten.
01:10They're not either in ADR format or in other ETFs.
01:13Roundhill saw an opportunity here.
01:15Talk about those three names.
01:16How dominant are they in this particular market?
01:18Yeah, those three names take account for the vast majority of memory demand, both for DRAM, which is the name
01:25of the ETF as well, but also NAND.
01:27And so a couple of key aspects to think about is high-bandwidth memory is what's driving a lot of
01:33the AI demand.
01:34And SK Hynix is by far the leader.
01:37Micron has been a share gainer.
01:40Samsung is looking to take back some of that share with HBM4 and the upcoming NVIDIA GPUs.
01:45So it's really been these three that are very dominant in the space and will continue to be so based
01:52on their capacity for the foreseeable future.
01:56So is it safe to say, I mean, when you take a look at the portfolio, the collection of names
02:00that this ETF holds, that this is representative of the industry at this moment?
02:07Yeah, it's very representative of it because there's really only a handful of companies that really dominate the space.
02:14And a lot of that is from a result of a lot of consolidation and bankruptcies over the last several
02:19decades.
02:20So it's stabilized a bit over the last couple of decades.
02:23But now it's really three main suppliers.
02:25But then you can include other companies in there like SanDisk and Kyokusa.
02:29They have a JV to do research development and manufacturing as well.
02:32So if you really include those two additional companies, you end up with five real main players.
02:38It's pretty remarkable.
02:39You look at SK Hynix, Micron and Samsung making up 75 percent of the ETF on their own.
02:44For SK Hynix, we're talking about the Korean shares.
02:47But this is a company that may launch ADRs as well in the U.S.
02:52So do we assume that the ETF would then invest in the ADRs as opposed to the Korean stocks?
02:57I'm not sure how some of the mechanics might work.
02:59But at the end of the day, I wouldn't expect the weighting to necessarily change all that much if we
03:05were to just kind of look at it from like a share aspect in terms of the overall memory market.
03:10Yeah.
03:11Yeah, I think DRAM, if the ADR comes out, it takes a little shine off of DRAM.
03:16But at that point, once it's liquid and going, people know it as the memory ETF.
03:20I mean, it's pretty much good from here on out.
03:22I think one of the things that I thought was interesting about what you've been writing, because I didn't know
03:26anything about this.
03:26I decided to go to him and get all the information.
03:28And you see 75% growth.
03:31So this industry of memory is $75 billion currently.
03:34But you see it going to $135 billion in only two years.
03:38Yeah, that's specifically high bandwidth memory.
03:40So one of the things about high bandwidth memory is not only that it's specifically driven by AI demand,
03:46but because it has higher wafer requirements compared to a standard DRAM wafer, it's reducing some of the supply of
03:53the standard DRAM.
03:54And so it's causing an incrementally tighter market pretty much every single day as you keep pumping out these HBM
04:01wafers,
04:01because the amount of capacity added is not keeping up with the actual amount of demand.
04:07And that's driving this price increase that we're seeing pretty much daily.
04:11Although now if you look at spot pricing, because the trading is so thin,
04:14it's not necessarily indicative of what we're seeing in real time.
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