Trillions

Every day, several new exchange-traded funds come to market. Some rocket to instant glory. Others take their time, building assets month after month, year after year. And more than a few quietly disappear into oblivion. Starting this month on Trillions, Eric Balchunas and Joel Weber will sift through the flood of launches to pick out three ETFs worth watching. Whether the funds are potential hits, future mainstays or squarely in the “good luck with that” camp, the goal is to figure out what distinguishes them—and how they might help (or hurt) investors. On this inaugural monthly episode of Three ETFs to Watch, Isabelle Lee, a cross-asset reporter for Bloomberg News, joins to discuss a late Bitcoin arrival, a rare launch and an expensive swing at value investing.

For a while, the AI trade was almost comically simple: just buy Nvidia. But as the buildout of massive data centers accelerates, and the AI models running on them get more complex, some long-overlooked parts of the semiconductor world are suddenly back in focus. One of the most important: memory. Dominated by a small group of global giants — SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron among them — it’s a corner of the market that’s been hard for investors to access in a targeted way. Until now. On this episode of Trillions, Eric Balchunas and Joel Weber speak with with Bloomberg Intelligence semiconductor analyst Jake Silverman to unpack the explosive debut of the Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM), which pulled in $1 billion in just 10 days. They break down why this fund could become one of the most successful thematic ETFs ever, what actually makes memory different from other chips, and why — despite its critical role in AI — it still trades a lot like a commodity.

Just when it feels like ETFs have done it all, along comes some filings that push the frontier. A trio of issuers wants to launch funds tied to prediction markets -- letting investors wager, from their brokerage accounts, on outcomes like which political party will control the White House or Congress. But how would these ETFs actually work? What else might get packaged this way? And will regulators ever sign off? On this episode of Trillions, Eric Balchunas and Joel Weber interview Matt Hougan, CIO of Bitwise and one of the filers, about why prediction market ETFs might make sense, how they’d work, and whether this is the start of a much bigger wave of event-based ETF investing.

With each passing year, ETFs pull in trillions of dollars while mutual funds steadily bleed assets. And yet, mutual funds still hold more money overall. Now, a long-standing wall between the two may finally be coming down. Dimensional Fund Advisors has launched the first-ever ETF share class of an existing mutual fund, a structure made possible by the expiration of Vanguard’s once-protective patent. On this episode of Trillions, Eric Balchunas and Joel Weber speak with Joel Schneider, Dimensional’s deputy head of portfolio management for North America, and Katie Greifeld of Bloomberg News. They discuss why Dimensional volunteered to be the guinea pig, why it chose its 45-year-old US Micro Cap Portfolio (ticker: DFMC), and whether this hybrid structure could reshape how trillions of dollars are invested.

As the US-Israel war with Iran has reminded the world, oil remains as integral as ever to the global economy. But the exchange-traded funds for investing in crude come with some caveats—and are a big reason why Bloomberg Intelligence introduced its traffic-light system, which is designed to warn of risky trades. On this episode of Trillions, Eric Balchunas and Joel Weber speak with BI’s James Seyffart, an ETF analyst, and Vincent Piazza, a senior energy analyst. They discuss Piazza’s “delay, disruption and destruction” outlook; how the US Oil Fund (USO) came back from the dead; and what to know about other noteworthy energy ETFs such as XLE, CRAK and even BWET.