ETF Edge - Inside the record-breaking “NASA” ETF 5/27/26

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

The anticipated SpaceX IPO has investors clamoring for all-things space related. But, what happens after launch?         Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The EETF 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'm your host, Dominic Chu. The coming SpaceX IPO is driving out of this world, almost literally demand for space-themed ETFs. So here's my conversation with the man behind the NASA N-A-TICR the biggest of those ETFs, Moritz Pot, founder and CEO of Tema ETS, alongside Mike Aiken's founding partner of E-T-F action. The newspeg is simple, and I'll start perhaps with you, Moritz, because this is right up your alley.

SpaceX's IPO is probably going to be one of, if not the most highly anticipated IPO that we've seen in years at this point. And it is driving a massive amount of interest for space-related stocks. Just how much has that headline frenzy, that headline fervor, really contributed to your ETF's launch so far. So again, thanks so much for having me on. Great year today. The space economy is still very early. And Ratsy's that we're only starting to see the commercialization of innovation happening and in its infancy. SpaceX, in its essence, is three businesses. But those three businesses, only one of those is actually really revenue generating and funding the other two.

So the retail frenzy is happening, but still the market size of the TAM range between two trillion or 28 trillion, if you look at the S1 from SpaceX. This is a massive, massive opportunity. All right, first of all, you could drive a truck through that spread. I mean, that's not even, I mean, two to 28 trillion in total addressable market is something that is massive. just how much are the expectations in your mind so far knowing what you know aligned with what you think this stage in the game is for SpaceX? SpaceX is continually shown that it exceeds expectations and it innovates in areas people do not expect they would be able to innovate. So I think investors today are taking, looking back at what SpaceX is done and excited and, you know,

frankly optimistic about the outlook for that time opportunity. But the time opportunity of $28 trillion, that's massive. That exceeded most investors' expectations before the S-1. So I think the reality is that the space economy is literally and figuratively taking off, but we're still very early. And yes, there's one bell with our company. But what's more interesting is the company's beyond SpaceX. SpaceX is the iconic company, but there's a number of growing specialists around SpaceX,

which we've really focused on in the TEMA. Now, it's interesting because Firefly is one of those. because we just had news. They're going to be one of the partners of NASA, the actual NASA, the National Aeronautic Space Administration and the government, for this project about putting people on the moon, a colony on the moon.

That's the newspeg today, and that's what's driving a lot of them action for some of these space stocks outside of SpaceX itself. But it speaks more broadly, Mike, to this notion that the news business, the business that I am in is what's generating so much of the buzz around many of these companies these days.

The news is amplifying some of the product and themes that are driving so much more investor attention. I wonder if you could juxtapose for us what the news has done for investor interest and sentiment for these types of products now versus what it was, say, 10, 20 years ago. Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. I think the news has always been there. You guys have done a great job covering what's going

on in the world today, what's changed is the delivery for the investor, right? So 10, 20 years ago, you talked about a theme like this. An investor would have to go out and look up all these companies. You guys would put them up on your screen, but now there's a ticker. NASA, it captures the theme, right? And I think, you know, that's the idea of the ETF and what's great about it, the reason I've been doing it for 20 years and I love it, but it also brings with it complications, right? So now you have created this easy access vehicle. Well, you know, with, I'm just thinking kind of the idea of with the ability, I'm trying to think of the word, but you have all these options, right?

Comes more responsibility, right? So it used to be, okay, I give my money to my advisor who gives it to an asset manager. Now you have more and more folks just managing it themselves, and you create sometimes a disconnect, right? So whether it's Dram or NASA, and I'm not saying there is. I think, you know, Maritz knows way more about the space than I do, but you can have a whole lot of, you know, it's kind of trying to like parallel park a freight train, right? I mean, how much money goes into these how quickly, and I think you can look at it beyond just

the flows into the ETF, look at the options market. I mean, I don't know. You know it better than I do, but how many open interest options are there on NASA now, on Dram? So there becomes a little bit more responsibility on the investor side to decide on that entry point, but I think what's changed is democratization of access. ETFs have been a big part of that, and it goes way beyond just investing in the ETF. Now you can use the ETF as a discovery vehicle of the companies you want to own, right?

Like, I was spending time looking under the hood of your guys as NASA, which is actively managed. So different than just an index. And I was learning a lot today, you know, just on those companies, but that's instantly available to me just by looking under the hood of the ETF. The ETF, I just want to follow up on that point, because to the point that you made, The ETF wrapper is one that has enabled much of this, right, over the course of the last couple of decades, in earnest. I mean, it's been around for longer than that, but in just the last five years, we've seen a massive ramp up in terms of funds being brought to market. I had made the point earlier on our air with you that there, I think the stat still holds, there are still now more ETF tickers than there actually are single stocks that are publicly traded in the United States right now.

that just tells you how quickly these products can be brought to market. Just what exactly has enabled that speed at which a manager or an issuer can take a basket of stocks and bring it to market and get assets in there in an ETF format? Technically, the regulatory constraints haven't changed. So to launch an ETF, you've got to file with the SEC. There's a 75-day quiet period, but you can launch kind of shell wrappers that the bigger issuers use. I think what's changed is the demand. And, you know, there is now, well, when I started ETF action in 2018, there was 85

ETF issuers. Today there's 505. When I joined, got into the ETF business in the early 2000s, there was 10. So, you know, the number of folks kind of thinking up ideas because the demands there, demands there, they will build the product. You know, the issuers will come to work with the product. Just means that it's not, you know, the top five firms coming up with a ideas, it's folks like Maritz here that are coming up with ideas as well, so it just kind of

snowballs into more opportunity sets for the investor. But again, that brings a whole other can of worms. You're not the only expert that's brought up the concept of the field of dreams approach, right? The if you build it, they will come. Because if you tap into a hot market for something, there is a built-in amount of investor attention. The space ETF theme is obviously getting a lot of attention because of the SpaceX IPO. I wonder from your perspective. I wonder from your perspective, just how much have you seen or can you glean about the investor demand or appetite for these types of companies, given the news flow that we are seeing, and how exactly has it impacted you and your job as the CEO, CIO of a fund issuer, of which there were only a

dozen 30 or so years ago, and now there are over 500? So I think it's great question. I think two points I make. It's never been easier to launch an ETF. it's never been harder to scale an ETF. And there's more buyers of ETFs than ever before, no matter how you classify them. But that means you have to be a lot more thoughtful

if and when you decide to launch an ETF. And the majority of ETFs, unfortunately, don't go anywhere. Now, when we think about NASA, what's unique about NASA is we were seven years late to the space party. Seven years ago is when the first space ETF launched. And historically, there's been a principal first mover advantage in ETFs.

The first mover wins the market. I think what we've shown NASA is if you come up with a better product, even if you're seven years late, you can actually still capture and dominate the market. And there's very few examples in ETFs where a seven-year-late entrant that isn't from a big brand

where the better product still wins the dominant share. How, okay, let's follow up with that, because one of the reasons why your product is maybe somewhat differentiated from some of the other products in the market right now. And to your point, this is now about product differentiation in order to scale a product. your product actually holds privately held shares of SpaceX or exposure to it as part of the portfolio.

That's part of the reason why many investors are looking towards this ticker NASA as a way to kind of gain that exposure without having to clamor for this IPO allocation that is going to be probably the hottest ticket this year, maybe arguably outside OpenAI and Anthropic. What exactly has the product philosophy been in developing your portfolio and just how important has getting incremental exposure to SpaceX been for the product itself? Great question. So as an investment firm, we focus on three things. Product, process, performance.

When we think about the space economy, if we were not to offer SpaceX directly into an ETF, you're missing arguably the biggest, not just value creator, but also innovator in the overall space economy. Now, people have tried to use Ecosters or proxy to get to SpaceX. The reality that deal hasn't closed, and that deal isn't expected to close until after the SpaceX IPO.

So for now, it's still tentative whether that actually is the way to get in SpaceX exposure. So our view is, if we're going to invest in space, we're going to offer a better way to invest in space. We have to offer exposure to SpaceX. We have to do that in a fiduciary way, which means that is transparent.

There is no management fee, no performance fee. We focus on lowest cost and best investor terms. So our thinking was space is an interesting opportunity. Space means investing in innovation. Innovation carries risk. Risk can be an opportunity, but also a liability. That liability needs to be managed. And we want to come up with a better product

so that people can access SpaceX in a way they cannot today. How much, Mike, has the notion of being able to get into certain types of investments that aren't as easy to get into in other formats, a driver for the growth of thematic ETF investing specifically. This is not the only ETF that has some exposure to that.

We've talked to other people. We even had Ron Barron on here, who's taken some of his strategies, which includes SpaceX, to convert them into ETF formats. But how much is that kind of access to stuff that you can't really easily get access to, a driver for some of these thematic type products?

And is that one of the main reasons why, thematics have exploded the way that they have. I think part of it. I mean, also, I mean, take it back a step. I mean, one of the biggest pitches that I used to do when I was at Alps and running their product book was international, right? I mean, no investor out there, including financial advisors, are going to pick international stocks and pay the commission at cost to do that.

They're going to get it through a mutual fund or through an ETF. So that in and of itself is a huge benefit of being able to get that allocation. I think going to the private side, Look, registered investment companies have always allowed up to 15% ill-liquid vehicles in their products. And I think, you know, done properly, it can be a very good differentiator for your product. There is a trick with the ETF market in that, you know, there is a market price in an NAV. And I think people need to watch where is the price action, the premium and discount with respect to that. But no, I'm in favor of it as long as it's clear and transparent.

I think, you know, the evolution is there. I kind of go back to the whole thing. If you're going to use the product, you're accepting a little bit more accountability than you normally would have as you go further down the spectrum. And I'd also not like you. TTEQ, I think you guys had the portfolio manager on there. They've got Anthropic and Open AI in their portfolio.

So I think we're going to see a lot more of this because we've kind of been in this rut of IPOs, but there's some big ones coming up. So I think you're going to start having this conversation a lot more. How much does a manager? an issuer of funds, to Mike's point here, how much does someone like you that runs an issuer pay attention to the volatility associated with the fund itself, the ETF, versus the underlying assets? To Mike's point, the discount or premium to net asset value.

It's some of those things that have been in the past large at times with technology and information flow. Those buffers have gotten kind of a little bit closer. They have not been as volatile, still exist. How closely do you pay attention to the value of your underlying holdings versus what the market price is? And then how much has that changed if a large part of your portfolio is in something that is private that has, yes, a mark to market, but is not nearly a second to second perhaps sometimes as a publicly traded equity? Two great questions. So on the first question, quality of exposure is not just what's in the portfolio, but also what are you paying for it in terms of the spread? So managing the premium discount is key to what we do. And what we've

seen is that despite having a 10 to 12 percent exposure to SpaceX, depending on the day, we've consistently kept a very minimal premium, in some case even a discount on the ETF. So not only have people who have been able to access SpaceX, they've been able to access it in a fiduciary way without actually paying a massive premium. I think when you're a second question when we think about just your general private exposure, I think there's some companies that frankly don't fit in an ETF. They're too early. And there's definitely some interesting companies in the space economy

that we love to invest in, but they're not suitable for an ETF, suitable in terms of their liquidity, their size, just their risk profile. So for us, when we thought about just investing in SpaceX, it was about could we do it in a scalable way, in a fiduciary way, but also in a way that we can ensure that investors are able to get in and out in the right way.

Okay. Mike brought up the point before. This is an actively managed exchange traded fund, which means that there is a fundamental or process-driven approach to the stocks that you pick and the weighting that's assigned to them and then how often you churn the portfolio or rebalance things around. What exactly is the portfolio going to look like in the coming, I mean, nobody has a crystal ball. But as you anticipate the future trajectory of the portfolio, given what actually, assets you think you might have, the capital appreciation that might go along with it and everything else, how exactly does SpaceX fit with the broader scheme of a space-driven thematic portfolio? In other words, what other investments do they need to do in order to maintain a spot in your portfolio?

So when we think about the space economy, we think about there's different stages of innovation, there's different stage of commercialization, and we want to invest across the value chain in the space economy, which means we invest in smaller companies, but also a later stage company. You could argue that SpaceX is on the more developed side, at least the satellite communication part of that business on a more developed side. Now, core to investing in innovation is how do you manage risk? Because the risk could today be an opportunity, could tomorrow be a liability. And we've learned before that if you don't manage the liability, then frankly it becomes

a risk to the overall investor portfolio. So for us, we intentionally don't want to look at an index, which is why it's conviction-based, roughly 30 companies. it's risk managed across both early, mid and late stage exposures, and that really gives unique exposure across the value chain. As Mike mentioned, you find companies in NASA, you don't find another space ETFs. Why? Because we have investment expertise and we have industry expertise. We spend time looking under the hood at these companies, speaking with companies,

something that index doesn't do. Mike, this is a broader story around thematic investing as well. There are a lot of folks out there who believe that this ETF market, is ripe for the deployment and issuance of thematic-based ETFs because if they are transparent, they become an easier way and a perhaps more muscle memory way of getting into some types of stocks and getting exposure that doesn't need you to necessarily have to make one concentrated bet

on picking one particular single stock or issue. Is that thematic approach, something that you see continuing in earnest on its current trajectory going forward? I bring this up in light of Round Hills DRAM ETF, the memory chip ETF, which has, yes, multiple stocks in the portfolio, but is very heavily weighted towards a handful that are getting a lot of attention. How much is this thematic story going to play out the way that it has in the future, or is this maybe a top-ish, given what we've seen in market action? I think it's a great question. And I think what's great about the space, the ETF space, is that I think there's certain

areas that are very topish. That's my personal belief. I've been in the market a long time. You have a lot of money all overnight. You have entire thesis playing out in weeks instead of, you know, the original analyst saying this is going to play out in three to five years. And that creates risk and it creates topish behavior. And I kind of won't call out any names, but I think it obviously exists in the marketplace.

But there's 463 thematic ETFs that we class. across 12 broad categories and over 100 sub-themes. And to the extent that the market continues to support it and the issuers continue to support the products, it allows the investor to be like, well, this one's topish, but this one's gone out of favor. There's an opportunity there. And they can think about actively managing across those themes as they would with single stocks, but in a more efficient vehicle of the ETF. So I think, you know, big picture, it's there, but you can't, you can't look at something,

some stocks that are, you know, seeing 10, 20, 30 Xs inside of weeks after an ETF launches is a concerning thing. And you have to look at capacity of the ETF underlying market capitalization and how much money is going in there. And, you know, kind of cliche at this point, but we can go back to COVID days, you know, work from home days and watch what happened with the ARC funds. And a lot of those were really, really good investments. But there's only so much you can do when that much money tries to pile into companies that have that small of a market capitalization, and that is incumbent upon the issuers and everybody else to recognize it, talk about it, but adjust and reflect their portfolios as such.

It's a challenge as well. Let me follow up on that point really quickly. In your expertise, in the amount of time you spent tracking these funds, is there a number you would mention earlier in the conversation, that many of these issues that come out are not necessarily billion, two billion in size. Many of them are much smaller. It's not to say that the ETF is not a solid product. It's just to say that they haven't gained as much traction.

They haven't scaled as much. How much does a fund in your mind have to reach in terms of assets before it becomes a product that investors can feel will be there for them to actually transact in and be there in case that there is some kind of, kind of market volatility or instability? That's a really tough question to answer. Really, there's two factors that go into it. Just kind of the issuers track record.

How long do they stay behind a product? But also, you know, the math of it. And I mean, you know, just kind of rule of thumb. Generally speaking, you're looking at $50 million in an ETF to be break-even, right? And so you kind of look at that number. You can judge by it. But that being said, you know, an ETF, if you like an ETF, and it's liquid and you believe in the theme,

you know, an ATF closing is not a disaster event for you. It's very simple, it's clean. And reality is sometimes you get it wrong. I mean, part of the issuer's job is to bring products to market, make it for the investors. Sometimes they misjudged demand, and so be it. You close the product and move on. So it's kind of an ever-flowing process.

And then the second side of that, the capacity thing of these ETFs is very dependent on the product itself, right? Some spaces of the thematic market are, you know, $10 trillion aggregate market cap. Others, I believe your guys' portfolio outside of SpaceX is around $280 billion in aggregate market cap of your underlying names. And so that obviously plays into the equation. All right. So that leads us to my final question for you, Moraids. As you take a look at the underlying portfolio that you have, how much are you focused intently on SpaceX and the IPO that's coming?

in relation to the other companies in your portfolio. I mean, how much, from a fundamental analyst and portfolio manager's standpoint, there's obviously a massive gravitational force in SpaceX that's draining attention, research, you know, and resources, and is it at the expense of all the other companies, or how much does that impact kind of the overall portfolio construction? It's a great question. Frankly, my CIO and the portfolio manager make those decisions.

I do not get involved in the investing side. I'm a firm believer, investing is a full-time job. But the way we think about that is two things. Our SpaceX position has held a cost. We do not mark to market, only once the IPOs. And then that's from the perspective being fiduciary and being careful. So the IPO for us is simply a remarking of the position to market price. We have no commitment to sell.

We have no obligation to sell. The reality that we believe the space economy is so early. SpaceX will continue to be a dominant player in the space economy. for us, we continue to focus on companies beyond SpaceX. SpaceX we own until the IPO, we can't buy more SpaceX or constrain what we can buy, and therefore we have to focus on idea generation, but also risk management beyond SpaceX. So thinking about not just the companies that you may find in other ETS, but also smaller companies, and it's not about just is the company investable, but how do you size the company?

And again, thinking about this from a risk management perspective, the opportunity on the upside is vast, but what we are concerned about is when there will be volatility, how to ensure that people don't see the opportunity as a liability. So in some, we spend a lot of our time looking beyond SpaceX. The IPO for us is just merely a remarking of the position from cost of the market. The market will determine what the price is at the day of the IPO, but we have no commitment or no obligation or no real view that we want to sell because of the IPO. The IPO is just a marker on the long-term journey of the space economy going global.

Wall Street is getting the popcorn ready to go. Final point to you. I was going to say, Marriott's made a great, point about they're carrying SpaceX at cost. That's the beauty of the ETF wrapper is you have really big firms like Jane Street, if you've heard of them, that are making markets in these products. And you know, you think back to the bond days of like H. YG where people were looking to the ETF market to discover the price of these securities. So the ETF wrapper is superior in that manner. And the market makers are helping you with price discovery.

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. Moritz-Poc founder and CEO of TEMA ETFs continues with us now. Moritz, it was a fascinating discussion and one that's gone a little bit longer than some of our other conversations in the past because it is a timely one and one that a lot of investors, I guess maybe are having a debate on because of just the fever pitch that has gone along with the SpaceX IPO news cycle alongside the... anticipation of who gets what allocations and where this kind of IPO is going to go.

So this is a perfect opportunity to have this podcast with you right now. As the CEO of an ETF issuer that has one of the biggest, if not the biggest space ETF out there, that actually owns SpaceX exposure going into this. What exactly are your expectations for the SpaceX IPO? and ultimately what does it do for not just your funds, but for the space industry overall in terms of investor sentiment? Yeah, it's a great question. And again, thanks for having me on the podcast today.

So I think the SpaceX IPO is unprecedented in a few ways. One, the sheer size. Two, the retail participation. Three, the way the lockups or the unlocks are structured. And fourth, the indexation question. How quickly will SpaceX be included in the indices? And the combination of those four big unknowns or four big unprecedented events makes it actually quite hard to predict what's going to happen post-IPO.

But I think it's fair to say that there's a lot of pent-up demand for SpaceX today. But when we think about the space economy, we think about the IPO SpaceX as an early milestone in the space economy. It's not the destination. It's a milestone on the journey to the destination. And the destination is years, if not decades ahead. And when we think about the space economy more broadly, It's not just space.

It's not just communication. It's not just infrastructure. It's a confidence of those three. And the reality, right now, the space economy is more developed on the connectivity, the satellite side. Next, we expect the infrastructure side to develop. And then tertiary, we expect the launch and space economy developed last. So we think that there's a, you're building the blocks in which you basically can compound the growth, but also the proliferation of the space economy.

You had mentioned before during the ship. that SpaceX represents a roughly, I think you've said, 10, 12%, you know, waiting in your current portfolio as things stand right now. It's a sizable portion of a portfolio that is now publicly traded in terms of an ETF format. If you look at SpaceX right now, you are a shareholder. You own it on behalf of your clients. There are many concerns about some of the valuations that are coming from Space.

in the private markets themselves, where there are, it is a mark. It's not as robust as in the public markets, but there are marks out there based upon transactions in that secondary private market. There are also concerns about some of the governance factors going into it as well. I wonder from your perspective, as a holder of a large stake, relatively speaking, in SpaceX, how much do you have to be concerned about some of these pre-IPO issues before it becomes public? Yeah, so Rati, risk needs to be managed, and these are really important risks you raise. And core to what we do, I'm telling us, it's not just focusing on the upside, but also thinking about how to we manage the downside risk, because we are an investment firm, we're not a marketing

firm. I think when we think about these issues, the Rattis, we diligence them. We obviously do our homework on them, but the Rati, we can't change them. And if we're uncomfortable with them, then we sit out. So let me give an example. If a block has high fees, we will not buy it. If a block is marked at a price you don't like, we will not buy it. If a block has liquidity provisions we don't like, we won't buy it.

If a block has governance oversight over and above what it's at SpaceX, we won't buy it. So we are very selective in the exposure we will buy the SpaceX. And more importantly, we'll be fiduciary in how we do that, which means that there's no incremental management performance fees. we actually have taken the initial almost half a million dollars of brokerage fees on any SpaceX transactions. The position is held a cost, not a market, and we've continued to be very conservative at what blocks and what prices we buy. For us, the IPO is simply a remarking from cost to market of the stake. We don't have any grand expectations that this will change our thesis on SpaceX. Yes, the valuation may get ahead of itself, but the reality we're still very

early on in what SpaceX estimates is a $28 trillion space economy? We have spoken over the course of the last few weeks with some folks out there, market participants, and some folks that represent large institutions on the pension and the kind of investment side of things, who have expressed concerns. We're talking about public retirement systems and pension funds who have expressed some of the concerns around the governance structure,

provisions in this particular company, that is being presented to investors via the S-1 IPO filing. The case has been made that if you are an investor and you are that uncomfortable, there is that amount of discomfort with some of the governance provisions or some of the issues that you have with perhaps the structure of the company, the voting power and everything else, that you don't have to participate in this IPO, that you maybe fiduciary investor-wise don't want to put your client's money or your participants money into it. Is it fair to say that given your holdings,

those are not as much of a concern for you because you are not ready to exit the position given some of the overhangs that other people have said are overhangs for them? So I think to your point, these are really valid concerns and these are real concerns. For us, the question is, one, can we diligence to concern? And two, how do we size the risk associated with that concern?

These are ultimately risks. That's a reality that SpaceX is a small percent of the portfolio below the 15 percent threshold for a number of reasons, not least because of the risk from the risk you mentioned. I think the question for us is not do we like these risks, we don't, but can we get comfortable in the respective size with the risk that we're taking? And more importantly, do we think that we may, over time, be paid for taking these risks? Being paid for taking risks is core to what we do every day. We are in the business of managing risk, and we believe that some of these risks you will get paid for.

Now, you won't get paid day one. The Rati, SpaceX, again, is three businesses. It's a communications business. It's a AI infrastructure business, and then it's a space business. They're not at the same stages of growth today. They will never be. And the Ratties that you'll be paid at SpaceX for the maturation or proliferation of those three different businesses at different points in time.

As an ETF provider, you're also a vehicle or conduit, if you will, for investor flows. oftentimes your decision to buy or sell an asset sometimes depends on whether or not money is coming in from investors into your fund, which you have to then quote unquote put to work, or redemption requests that come in, that then you have to sell certain assets in order to raise the money to fund those redemption requests. So in some ways, you're a pipeline, if you will, for that investor movement of money. As an actively managed fund, you don't have to be as much because you're, You can, at your own discretion, reweight things, raise cash buffers and everything else. But I wonder all of those things aside, in a vacuum setting, is it your intention, given what

you've said about the possible total addressable market and everything else, that you are a longer term holder of SpaceX and some of these other names? And if so, why? And if not, why not? So it's a very good question. We see SpaceX not as a trade, but as an investment opportunity. and therefore we think about this from a long duration perspective. These are going to be long duration investment cycles,

but also therefore your maturation cycles. We therefore do not see this as a pop, a trade that we sell out of. We believe the space economy is early. We believe that over time investors do get compensated for taking risk, but managing that risk. When we think about the space economy and SpaceX specifically, SpaceX is still, again, we have one business that is starting to get de-risk. If you didn't look at last year,

the core business, Starlink has 9 million users, estimates would suggest they can get into the 2, 3, 4, 400 million user base, that would be a highly profitable business. So I think our view is that at different stages that will be different profitability generations. It's been like Google. If you think about Google has a very profitable core business and you use that profitable core business to fund different innovations

around that core. So while it's a different business model, the approach to how you basically use core, profitable, innovation, the fund exploratory or frontier innovation, is actually not that different in what we see in SpaceX. Of course, there's some very eccentric features of SpaceX, not least the way the IPI's been structured, the way the companies be structured, the entrepreneur behind the company. So we recognize these are unusual, and because they're unusual, they require extra homework, and we therefore have to be extra careful in not just our excitement on the upside, but also our tempering

are expectations on the downside. I know that you are not the portfolio manager of record for NASA in this ETF. However, I am interested as a person who obviously sits on a committee that kind of deliberates and looks at many of these types of investments. I'll take the last few moments in this podcast to ask you about something that's not SpaceX, which is everything else in the portfolio that is not SpaceX. What exactly as a committee at Tema, do you find which companies within the portfolio in NASA, in your space ETF,

are the ones that you have the highest conviction on outside of SpaceX, and what are the common factors that give you that kind of feeling of optimism about those higher weighted stocks? So I'll paraphrase what I think the CIA would say, but he may correct me. You know, Duranzi, beyond SpaceX, we own some of the more obvious names, like EcoStar, like AST, like Rocket Lab. But take a company like Philtronic, which is a smaller company, satellite communications company,

that's an example of a company which you don't find in many other ETFs, and we do own that company, that company's done very well. So we, as specialists, an investment focus specialist, we don't just focus on owning two free companies in the ETF. We focus on owning companies that people recognize, but also people that people don't recognize. Because what does active do? Active gives you the flexibility to manage risk, but also to identify opportunities before indices or other market participants can.

So a lot of our time is spent speaking with companies, researching companies, and it's not about being smarter. It's literally about the flexibility to understand where the puck is moving to, hopefully getting that before the puck arrives, and then really undetifying the risks with that travel of that puck. I have way more questions, but we've run out of time. So please come back and see us again soon, Moritz. Donnie, thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed this conversation today.

All right. Moritz Potts at Tema ETFs, which, by the way, has one of the biggest, if not the biggest space ETF out there. That does it for the ETF Edge podcast. Thanks for listening. Join us again next week or just head over to etfedge.cnbc.com. Over the last few decades, technology has transformed our world in amazing ways. Through it all, Invesco QQQEF has connected investors to the forefront of innovation.

Access the future today with InvescoQQQ. Let's rethink possibility. There are risks when investing in ETFs, including possible loss of money. ETF risks are similar to those of stocks. investments in the tech sector are subject to greater risk and more volatility than more diversified investments. The NASDAQ 100 index includes the 100 largest non-financial companies listed on the NASDAQ. An investment cannot be made directly to an index. Before investing, consider the funds investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses.

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