ETF Edge - Hedging through allocation 10/13/25

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

The recent dramatic whipsaw in the markets is a reminder to review your portfolio’s safety mechanisms. This time, it may not be about what you’re adding but how much of it. Find out why.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The ETF Edge podcast is sponsored by InvescoQQQ. Let's rethink possibility. Investco Distributors, Inc. Welcome to ETF Edge, the podcast. If you're looking to learn the latest insights on all things, exchange-traded funds, you're in the right place. Every week, we're bringing you compelling interviews, thoughtful market analysis, and breaking down what it all means for investors. I am your host, Dominic Chu. Now, a whipsaw in the markets is a reminder just how fragile the long rally has been.

So should investors reassess their protective measures now? Here's my conversation with John Borrello, senior portfolio manager of the Global Asset Allocation Team at Investco, alongside Stephen Schofstahl, the director of ETF product management over at Sprott's asset management. John, maybe I'm going to start with you for the state of play, if you will. I kind of mentioned a little bit in the opening intro about kind of where we're at right now. We're still at or near record highs.

the pullback happened on Friday. This isn't at least a rally that has been hated by so many folks out there, but it just keeps going higher and higher. So how exactly is a portfolio manager like yourself deal with some of the valuation concerns we're seeing? Yeah, to your point, the market's been climbing a wall of worry now for quite some time. I think, you know, the pundits have been calling for a sell-off for, you know, feels like years. And, you know, it seems like we don't get that. April was a bit of an exception, but by the dip worked then too. And so when you think about how to manage risk and how to time the market, that's really difficult.

We really can't predict when the next sell-off is going to be, but we can prepare for it. So there are various ways that you can bolster your portfolio, make it more resilient against an equity market sell-off. And I mentioned this earlier. The reason that's so important is that so much of household wealth is now tied to stocks. And when we have a situation like that combined with the market concentration that you see in U.S. equities, just a few companies, the MAG7, of course, driving markets higher, a lot of us are really dependent on just those few names, you know, continuing to grind higher. And so you can diversify with assets like bonds or commodities. And we're going to talk about that a little bit today.

But also you can turn to option-based strategies that have more structural protection embedded in them. So, you know, options are not reliant on the correlations of stocks with another other asset class. They can have a more reliable form of downside protection and also can offer income that's not interest rate sensitive, which as we're getting into a rate cutting cycle, adding income without reliance on the Fed is becoming more and more important. I think that's driving some growth in the space. John, as we talk about the current state of play with regard to these markets, the fact that we have some near and very near-term volatility has driven up volatility aspects of the market, especially in the options and derivative side of things, to certain higher levels than we've seen. But when you're talking about options-based strategies that kind of sell these types of instruments to help generate income, you're doing so in this environment at relatively depressed levels compared to what you're doing so. the historical average has been for volatility in the marketplace over the last, say, three, five years. As a portfolio manager who employs options, how do you find the relative value of

options that you are trying to sell to generate income, and how do you reconcile that with the types of returns that we're seeing on a capital appreciation basis with the underlying assets in your portfolios? I'd start by saying that option markets are highly efficient, just like stock markets. And so So looking at just the level of volatility on the surface isn't really enough to be able to determine whether or not it's an attractive environment. In other words, when volatility is low, it's not so easy to just say I'm going to buy it, let low prices and expect to earn positive returns. Same thing with when volatility is really high.

It's not as simple as to just say I'm going to sell options because volatility looks high. Again, the markets are too efficient to make that easy to make money just based on that observation. So our view is that you need to start with some really important design principles to be able to weather all different kinds of volatility environments. Number one, and this is probably the most important, we don't use leverage. When you combine options selling with leverage, that's when you get into trouble. In our case, we build everything up front to be fully covered, fully collateralized so they can weather any type of market drawdown and still have a great chance of outperforming the underlying equity market.

A second thing I'd point to is diversifying the option overlay. So we think laddering is really important. And what I mean by that is we'll use one-month options, but we're trading a small slice each day with a new one-month option. So today we'll maybe be targeting November 13th, tomorrow to be November 14th, et cetera. Slice it up so that you get maybe 20 bytes at the apple every month. that allows you to adapt.

Now you're not beholden to just one price of options to overlay on the portfolio. You're moving strike prices, your diversifying expiration dates, removing path dependency as much as you can. I think those are key elements to building something that's robust and can live through a lot of different environments. All right, Steve, let's turn to you because it's not just the equity markets right now that are seeing some of these elevated levels. A lot of folks in our audience right now, listeners and viewers, and readers alike, understand that gold prices have been kind of, I wouldn't say surging, but they slowly and steadily have moved moving to the upside. We've crossed the $4,000 per Troy ounce mark now. It seems like there's just no end in sight for the move that we've seen

higher in gold prices. I wonder if you might take us through just how you are viewing some of those elevated levels in the yellow metal compared to the kind of price action that we're seeing in certain parts of the broader equity markets. Are they alike? Are they not alike? And if so, what are the similarities and differences between that gold trade and what we're saying, seeing with the S&P 500? Yeah, absolutely. So gold's always traditionally been viewed as a safe haven for economic turmoil, geopolitical instability, things that we're seeing right now, because it doesn't have a yield. Generally, following interest rates are beneficial toward gold. That's when we see a lot of investors start to move into gold. So far this year, we've seen on physical.

gold exchange traded products, about $38 billion of investor flows going in. What's really happening now is a shift into the acceptance of gold. Typically, it's been viewed as kind of a fringe or outside metal and allocation tool. What we're really starting to see is now more prominent economists are starting to shift or suggest shifting from a 60-40 model to something closer to a 60-20-20, where it's 60 percent equities, 20 percent fixed income, 20 percent gold. Most people we feel are probably well positioned if they have about a 5 to 15% allocation of physical gold depending on their risk tolerance. What you get out of gold is that hedging to the broader investor universe. So when you start thinking about things of correlations, well, how well does gold move versus other aspects of

the economy? We tend to see low to moderate correlations across most major asset classes and an inverse correlation to the U.S. dollar, all aspects of the economy that investors are starting to feel uneasy about at the moment. Does that make you feel as though, Steve? Does that make feel as though there is going to be a continued bid for gold, given the fact that at least for the medium to longer term trend that we've seen so far, there is a decline in the value of the U.S. dollar relative to other developed market currencies. We are continuing to see some geopolitical risk, the Middle East peace progress aside that we've seen. There are aspects of, say, a government shutdown that we are currently still in. Political risks in the U.S.

U.S., geopolitical outside, the dollar and everything else. Does that mean gold does have a clear path forward to the upside or not? We do think there's still significant room for gold to run. I think today's a great view on that. We see the deal in the Middle East that hopefully can relay tensions down a little bit. Gold's higher this morning over $4,100 an ounce as we're sitting here. We're seeing discussions about potential reciprocal tariffs and, you know, as it relates to rare earth export restrictions coming out of China and what that might do to elevate an already tenuous, geopolitical realm that we have with China, that's pushing gold prices higher. I don't think those overlaying macro factors are going away anytime soon, and I think that's something that investors

are really latching onto. Another aspect I think that's really important to gold is that a lot of central bank buying is happening in the metal. So that's really pushing prices higher. Over the last three years, it's been about 1,000 tons per year. We're still seeing continued buying from central banks. What that does is allow central banks to de-dollarize their assets. They can move out of treasuries, move into gold, and at the same time, they can actually repatriate that gold back to their home countries for their own self-storage. It gets it out of the way of sanctions that could potentially come from the United States or other countries. All right. So Steve, John, we've laid out a case on the stock side, on the gold side with regard to kind of talking about

and justifying and maybe trading around some of the higher elevated levels that we were seeing in some of those asset classes. You had both kind of mentioned a little bit about the allocation side of things, maybe how under or overexposed people are to relative parts of the market. I'd like to go back to you, John, with regard to the options overlays that go into some of your strategies and some of the types of funds that you manage with regard to income orientations or defined outcomes, so-called buffer-type funds. How much do you think of relative under-exposure to some of those asset classes and

strategies are to perhaps what we could see in terms of flows into some of those types of strategies going forward. In other words, is there perhaps a secular, maybe even demographic tailwind towards things like option strategies and defined outcome strategies? I think there's a very large tailwind that could last many years ahead. And the reason is because the demand themes of income and defense against equity drawdowns should never go out of style. Those are things that every portfolio likely needs at some point throughout someone's life. They might want to reduce risk to equities. They also might want to add income that's a diversifying source and again not relying on interest rates.

And so when we built our income advantage suite, QQA, RSPA, RSPA, EFAA, tied to big, broad markets like the NASDAQ100, S&P-500, Equalweight, and MSCII, EFA, the reason that these are gaining so much traction and we're We're talking to a lot of clients who say it's really one of two things. They've already been exposed to this massive rally that we've seen over the last few years, and they're starting to get concerned about maybe valuations being near all-time highs, market concentration. They want to take some chips off the table. They want to downshift that risk. And then there's another camp, and these are investors that have excess cash.

There's been a lot of press about the $7.5 trillion in money market fund assets. I'm not sure all of that goes into equities, but there are a lot of people on the sidelines. And so when you look across the equity markets today, it doesn't feel great to a lot of people to just jump in with both feet. So our option income strategies, the income advantage suite and others, offer you a way to have kind of an intermediate step in. You get a foothold, you can participate in the equity markets, but you're doing so with less risk and with, again, that addition of monthly income.

And so I think that's really going to be the driver of the demand. And we do expect to see a lot of growth in these types of strategies. Steve, same question to you with regard to just how you view what's happening with the relative exposure in certain people's portfolios. You had said maybe a 5 to 15 percent kind of allocation that some people maybe already have. You talked about the evolution of a 60-40 to a 60-2020 in terms of bonds and alt on that 2020 side of things. if that's the case, what exactly does that mean for the total addressable market, if you will, for investors out there in terms of how much more they could put into, say, a gold or a silver trade, because they don't have as much exposure as they may want,

and how exactly would investment advisors start to get their arms around that kind of paradigm shift towards being more exposed than they have been in the past to things like gold and silver? Yeah, there's several ways to get access to gold. and silver for that matter. Typically what we see is that investors tend to be under-allocated to gold, below that 5% allocation that we typically see from investors that have a significant portion in their portfolio. As it relates to gold and silver,

there are other options where you can kind of get some outsized returns by investing directly in the mining equity. So gold miners, silver miners, they have operational leverage to the underlying price of gold or silver, which typically allows them to outperform over longer periods of time in bull markets. We're coming on to a period now where if you look at the top performing ETFs in the U.S., 12 out of 13 best performers are gold and silver miners. So they're far exceeding what we're seeing from the physical metals themselves. That does go back to that

operational leverage. But at the same time, as it relates to gold miners, we're not seeing significant investor movement into gold miners, even though they're returning 120, 130 percent so far this year, which is about double of what we're seeing from physical gold. So we do think that there's opportunity through gold investment, either through physical or through the miners, that really comes down to investor preference. Once you start moving down the route of miners, you start to introduce equity investment risk. Some might not be comfortable with that. Usually what we say is that physical gold is a good stepping stone into the gold market. Investors can understand kind of how the metal works, how it fits within their well-diversified portfolio,

and from there we tend to see them branch out into other aspects. Steve, that's an interesting point now. So if you take a look at it from, say, a retail investor's standpoint, or maybe even an investor advisors, investment advisor standpoint, do you treat the gold mining, silver mining type stocks and gold in the same way in terms of allocation? In other words, if you hypothetically had that 20% allocation to alts and metals specifically, say gold, do you then mix that between the gold miners and the gold miners and the gold miners and in the gold medal itself? And is that part of the allocation?

Or do you have to kind of segment out gold miners and have them be more of an equity type component as opposed to an alternatives component in that allocation? Yeah, that's a great question. So typically we look at gold is that ballast within the portfolio. So it's there over market cycles. You may adjust it up and down somewhat,

but we advocate for a long-term position to gold. Where we tend to see the miners come into play is through investors that they're looking to take on that equity risk, and they could dial up or dial down that standard gold exposure that they have in their portfolio. It does open up a lot of operational complexities that we see in mining, so there are additional risks that you might not see in other sectors. And so because of that, it's more of a way to move the lever around their strategic allocation to gold. Gotcha. Okay, John, let's now turn our conversation towards a little bit more about what we

are seeing in the overall markets and just how much we can see perhaps at least a transparent path forward and for how long. We know that the global trade issue is still kind of now back on the middle to front burner given what happened this past weekend. We do know that valuations are a concern, but the AI trade has gained a lot more traction. From a risk manager's standpoint, do you feel comfortable with the visibility that you have in the markets going forward, or are you more active than you have been in, say, the last six to 12 months with regard to trading around hedging or risk managing those positions, or do you feel as though this is one where you can kind of let things right a little bit longer before you have to start getting really

active? I go back to how difficult timing is, and so our philosophy and our team is really not to predict but try to prepare, and that just means that we don't know when the market sell-off might happen. We do know that the market does give you different opportunities to manage risk. And today with the level of volatility actually fairly subdued relative to history, and I would say implied correlation is another thing to keep an eye on. In other words, the way that stocks are moving within the index, they're zigging and zagging, which is suppressing the level of volatility. That's giving us an opportunity to be, you know, leaning into hedges, to be reducing risk

to broad markets. And when they do get choppy like they did on Friday, we're there. We're prepared. We are reducing risk, at least in a portion of our client portfolios. And I think, again, that protection is getting more valuable because so many people are exposed to just this small segment of the broader U.S. equity markets. And there's a lot of complacency out there. There's still, you know, risk taking is alive and well. So that really gives us and our clients an opportunity to say, wait a minute, I don't want to be only invested and only exposed to a broad market selloff.

how do I de-risk, how do I take ships off the table? That can happen with hedging with options, also with adding income with options. And then, of course, there are other diversifying tools out there like Steve just mentioned with gold and precious metals and, you know, fixed income and other things. But these are all tools that we're using and that we think our clients, you know, it would be probably a good idea to reduce some of that U.S.-centric equity risk because it's certainly out there and with valuations and other uncertainty,

you know, you mentioned tariffs, et cetera, the time is very ripe to try to take some of those chips off the table. All right, so that's the equity side of things. Steve, as we talk about what's happening with the commodities-based allocations or components, there's a case to be made that the elevated levels that we are seeing here

should be a note of caution for those people who are looking to, say, get more exposure to those metals. within that metals complex, we mentioned gold prominently. I had mentioned and alluded to silver before, from a kind of ETF strategy standpoint and an allocation standpoint, just how would you carve up that kind of metals allocation? Is there one where it's equal parts gold, silver?

Do you tilt more towards gold then silver? Are there other maybe platinum group metals that you think are going to be part of that exposure? How do you treat the allocation within commodities and those alternative sides of assets? Yeah, I would say gold tends to be. the most common, right, because it is a purely precious metal, and we do see that being used not only by investors, advisors, and institutions, central banks. Silver's a little bit different

because it is a dual metal. It's part precious metals, part industrial metal, and actually the industrial metal component is about 60% of overall demand now for silver. The intriguing thing about silver is while you can get some of those same diversification benefits, the low to moderate correlation to major asset classes that we see with gold, you also get the growth component that you can see coming through industrialization, the energy transition, automation, and electrification, artificial intelligence. Silver is very vast in its uses, over 10,000 uses and as the most conductable metal on earth, as we're trying to electrify, it's becoming more and more important. What we're seeing out of investing in silver miners, it's drastically different than what

we're seeing out of gold miners at the moment. Flows have been coming into silver miners for most of the year, whereas gold miners, the flows have been outflows, surprisingly. So what we're seeing is investors are able to take that gold as their precious metals allocation. Some do like the additional torque that you tend to get out of silver relative to gold. It does tend to outperform in rising markets, which is where we find ourselves today. But then if you're looking at the miners, the silver miners can fall right into a gross sleeve and do a commodity sleeve. So it can really help enhance some returns around while still providing that precious metals exposure. All right. And we're going to end with a final question to each of you guys with regards.

to the kind of macro environment that we're seeing right now, John, to you first, do you feel as though there's something that could really come home to roost in terms of risk over the, say, the next six to 12 months that we are not really seeing or paying attention to as much right now? We've mentioned the lofty valuations. We've mentioned some of the risks. But is there anything that you think would be keeping you up at night with regard to what could happen in the coming quarters. I think if the labor market slows enough and consumer confidence starts to fall, what could become an issue is the interplay between people being invested in stocks and the economy itself. You know, normally the stock market doesn't drive the economy. It's the other way around.

But given that sentiment is so tied to the direction of equity markets, that could become a fulfilling cycle that we are definitely keeping our eye on, that sentiment from the retail investment community could actually impact the real economy. And Steve, the same point to you, what exactly could happen for us to see market downside for gold, silver, and other kind of precious metals in that trade? Yeah, so for gold, what it would take is to see some of that risk coming off the table, geopolitical economic risk. I would think that in the near term, that seems quite unlikely. If you're looking at silver a little bit different with that industrial component, if you start to see slowdowns in AI investments or slow down in global economy, you could

see some pullback into silver prices. But in our view, silver has actually been underinvested in for so long that we think there's still considerable room to run for silver. The main difference that we see between the two metals, gold has central bank buying associated with it. Silver doesn't have that underlying demand. So expect a little more volatility with silver, even to the upside. But that's one of the things I think that could potentially, you know, cause a pause, I think, in upward movements. Now it's time to round out the conversation with some thoughtful analysis and perspective to help you better understand ETFs with our Markets 102 portion of the podcast. Stephen Schaftall, Director of ETF Product Management at Sprott Asset Management,

continues with us now. Steve, thanks for sticking around. The conversation that we had, let's dive a little bit further into a part that we didn't get to talk as much about. And That is the metals trade outside of, say, gold and silver. We talked a little bit about gold's traditional and historical paradigm of being used as a ballast, as an allocation for safe haven status to help protect against inflation, things like that. Silver you made the case for as being more of an industrial tilt towards how it's used. But outside of that, you know, there was a time we used to call copper Dr. Copper, right? It was kind of like the PhD in global economics.

other base metals, nickel, zinc, everything else like that, is there a way that you can look at the current state of the market, given everything that we know about the AI trade, growth around the world, geopolitical risks that makes a case for whether or not people should be more, I guess, exposed or paying attention to things like copper and other base metals? Yeah, absolutely. And I think a lot of the attention has gone to gold and probably rightfully so because it has performed so well, right? And that's what most people are comfortable with.

Most people know how you can use gold in a portfolio. When you start looking at things like copper's a great example, you know, it used to be a barometer for global economic health. That's where the Dr. Copper moniker comes from. Things have changed over the last four or five years, particularly as we see China has continued to expand and its energy footprint. So as we go through the energy transition, we see about $2.1 trillion invested just last year. There's this underlying demand for copper that wasn't there, you know, 10, 15 years ago. So that's causing a bit of a floor in copper prices. When you look at copper demand in general, it doubles roughly every 25 years. And that's just as the economic engine keeps moving forward. So that level of demand coupled with

supply and demand imbalances that we're seeing, whether it's coming through production disruptions that we see as Grassberg, for example, the Freeport mine's impacted by mudslides, not expecting to have their production up and running fully prior to the mudslides until about 2027. It's the second largest copper mine in the world. You look at treatment charges of copper within China where smelters are actually paying to treat material because there's just an overcapacity of smelting capacity, but not enough material coming in to be treated. So there's this foundational, and we see it across critical materials by and large,

where there's a looming supply and demand and balance, and we see the investment happening that's providing tailwinds in market environments where we might not see that. Now, copper is also an interesting component, trade, whatever you want to call it, because we've often talked about the industrial uses. We talk about things like, say, construction, home building, the copper use is there for things like piping and whatnot. Copper is also being talked about more, at least on a relative basis to what it has in the past, about the kind of electrification needs that we will have for.

for that booming AI trade. We, every, seemingly every day, every week, certainly we hear a new headline about who's committing X billion, tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars towards building out the capacity for AI and what kind of needs it'll take from not just a data center standpoint, but from a power standpoint to make all that happen. Do you feel as though some of those industrial metals that will be part of that kind of build out in the AI trade have maybe accurate? reflected just what the future use cases and needs of those metals are? Or do you feel as though

that there has been an underappreciation, again, on a relative basis compared to other parts of the market? We've already talked about electrical providers, nuclear providers, that sort of thing. Is a base metal like copper, maybe some others, a derivative play on AI that has not yet cotton up to what's happening elsewhere in the market? Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. I would say, you know, copper is referred to it as like the Swiss Army knife of metals because it has so many uses, not only generation and storage of electricity, but also transmission of electricity. So anytime you start talking AI and those massive data centers, you really have to have copper really to tie everything together within the data centers. It tends to run much cooler than you might see with other metals that could be used to transmit electricity.

It's the second most conductive metal behind silver, which is used in semiconductors, but too expensive to use, you know, where copper can otherwise. fit in. What you get from that derivative trade is, I think the hardest thing for people to understand is there's a lot of resources that need to go in behind just building a data center. You need significant amounts of copper, increasingly turn to nuclear energy. So you need to mine uranium and enrich uranium and build nuclear power facilities, silver, you know, through semiconductors. I think that aspect gets a little underappreciated when you see, you know, companies like in the Magnificent Seven that have done so well you've seen, you've seen, by and large miners haven't really caught up there and i think what we're starting to see is a

shift in the way that miners are viewed in their importance not only to technology but uh as a strategic and national security resource just this morning jp morgan announced that by 2030 or excuse me over the next 10 years that they have uh anticipate you know whether it's through facilitating loans or investing directly or financing up to 1.5 trillion dollars and included in that are things like mining and processing of things like lithium and copper in the United States, as well as building out nuclear capacity. We see that. We see from a government standpoint where not only is the U.S. government providing incentives

and grants to get mines up and running, make them profitable, but we've seen the U.S. government in recent weeks and months come out and take ownership stakes in MP materials, saying that they'll buy the rare earth set of price that's higher than the market, if that's what's needed. Lithium America's recently, a similar thing where the government's taking up to a 10% stake there. We see other miners are in discussions with the U.S. government. I think that's really the next shoot of all, as it were, as it relates to metals and mining investment. The critical resources that you spoke about is something that you deal with on a daily basis over at Sprott.

How much more can we expect this paradigm to shift, given what we now know, about global supply chains for critical minerals and materials, the influence of China on those supply chains, specifically for things like rare earths and whatnot, there's a reason why the U.S. government is more actively looking at taking stakes in companies that are based domestically here in America or just in North America, more generally speaking. How much is that going to be a true shift

in the way that certain types of countries' geographies have to view supply chains? Do they not want to rely as heavily in the future? on places like China because of things like economic risks, geopolitical risks, or even fundamental kind of ideology mixes that are in play. Yeah, I don't think that could be underestimated, because when you start to look at the last three or four years, just within the United States, we've moved past the rhetoric phase,

and now we're in the action phase, right? So it's one thing for politicians to get out and say, oh, we need to resure these aspects of our economy. It's another thing now to start providing bills that are providing funding and grants for the government to make direct investments or to ease the permitting process, which we see in the U.S. and also in Canada. And that's actually one of the big hindrances to investing in mining in U.S., Canada and some other tier one mining jurisdictions.

So I don't think that can be de-emphasized with how important that is. As it relates to things like rare earth, you know, there's one aspect that you have to look at and China spent the last two to three decades really building out the supply chains, It's not just a rare earth, but lithium, the smelting capacity for copper. If you look at Russia, they have about 40% of enrichment resources or production as it relates to uranium. All of these things are things that we need to bring back to the United States or allied nations. So we're expecting to see continued investment, not just on the U.S. standpoint, but also from Australia and Canada and other mining jurisdictions. It's really that overarching geopolitical battle that we're seeing.

We see just how much the news changed this weekend. We're going into the weekend. It looked like we were going to have renewed tensions in the trade war with China. China comes out and starts saying, well, we're going to look at export restrictions on rare earths. And now we're at a point where we're being told, you know, things could settle down here. But I think what we're seeing is that dynamic, China understands that they have the pole position, a lot of these metals. But at the same time, the United States realizes we have to bring that kind of more under our control. and I think that's where we're heading at this point.

How big of a deal is it for a place like America, for us to be able to have some of that more domestically oriented or North American-oriented supply chain for critical materials, say nuclear, say lithium, say rare other kind of rare earth-type materials and whatnot? Is it feasible to think that as a nation we can meet our needs using materials that we can find sourced from North America and other ideologically friendly or compatible type countries? Yeah, I think this is where it really depends on the metal, right?

So when you start looking at, just looking at the production capacity outside of the mining, but actually processing the material, a lot of that knowledge exists in China. We have to develop that in the United States. That's part of the export controls. Many are viewing that as kind of a nudge back at how we've limited what Nvidia can send as far as computer chips to China. Now they're saying, well, we're not going to export our processing technology. So that's something we have to develop. When you start looking at mining uranium, lots of resources that we see for uranium in Canada.

So that feels like a pretty good source, though not in U.S. borders. Lithium is very abundant within the United States. That's something that is a little more difficult and why those, you know, the government's, stepping in with grants and equity stakes is so important because what you see is China is able to keep production high, that crowds out investment, but by, you know, government incentives coming in and taking direct ownership, it gives some clarity to the U.S. picture. And you start looking at some of the other metals copper. Again, that's a lot of that comes from South America, comes from Africa. We see, you know, Africa's been caught in the middle between, you know,

Western and China influence over the years. We're seeing investments by the United States infrastructure. China's been doing that for decades. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us here on ETF Edge. We really appreciate it. It's great to be here. Thank you. All right. That does it for the ETF Edge podcast. Thanks for listening. Join us again next week or just head over to etfedge.cbc.com. How does InvescoQQQQ rethink possibility? By rethinking access to innovation and the NASDAQ 100. Let's rethink possibility. Investco Distributors, Inc.