The Canadian Investor - Jan van Eck on Gold’s Surge, AI’s Rise, Emerging Markets & the Future of ETFs

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

Braden and Simon sit down with Jan van Eck, CEO of VanEck, for a wide-ranging conversation on where capital should be going over the next decade. Jan explains why he sees gold re-emerging as a global reserve asset, how central bank and emerging-market demand could fuel a long bull market, and why a 20% drawdown wouldn’t change his thesis. They dig into the AI build-out and the semiconductor cycle through SMH and Nvidia’s eye-popping margins, the risks and opportunities around OpenAI and infrastructure constraints, and how private credit stress may show up first in publicly traded BDCs. Jan also makes the long-term case for India as a distinct structural growth story within emerging markets, and the trio wrap up by talking about how AI and structured data will change investment research. Tickers of Stocks and ETF Discussed: SMH, GPZ, NVDA, AMZN, V, MA, BTC, SHOP, WMT, INFY, HD, MCD, GS Check out our portfolio by going to Jointci.com Our Website Our New Youtube Channel! Canadian Investor Podcast Network Twitter: @cdn_investing Simon’s twitter: @Fiat_Iceberg Braden’s twitter: @BradoCapital Dan’s Twitter: @stocktrades_ca Want to learn more about Real Estate Investing? Check out the Canadian Real Estate Investor Podcast! Apple Podcast - The Canadian Real Estate Investor  Spotify - The Canadian Real Estate Investor  Web player - The Canadian Real Estate Investor Asset Allocation ETFs | BMO Global Asset Management Sign up for Fiscal.ai for free to get easy access to global stock coverage and powerful AI investing tools. Register for EQ Bank, the seamless digital banking experience with better rates and no nonsense.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Just my reminder to people who own cyclicals. Don't be surprised when there's a cycle. If there's uncertainty in the markets, there's going to be some great opportunities for investors. This has to be one of the biggest quarters I've seen from this company in quite some time. The Canadian Investor Pod. Welcome to the show. My name is Brayden Dennis. As always joined by Simone Bailon J. I haven't been on the pod in a while, but when I get someone like Jan Vanek on the show, I'm here. Yon, welcome in and thanks for taking the time. Yeah, no, it's exciting to catch up with two of Canada's biggest thinkers.

Oh, do are for both. Yon, you and I have gotten to know each other a little while over the last couple years, first. So just being in the same space. and then now as an investor and so forth. And, you know, I've always really thought of what you've done as been always skating to where the puck is going, as we're going to use our Canadian hockey. I know you're a hockey fan, so we'll use that reference. I want to start today with go back. I think it was 06 when you were starting to really lean into the ETF business.

the traditional way was always mutual funds. Correct me on the year here and the history. But walk me through that decision because this feels like an innovator dilemma in the asset management business back then. Yeah, I think it is. I guess I would say a couple things. First of all, my inspiration from business really came from my time in Silicon Valley. So I have a kind of a startup. I'm always interested in the, there's an experimental side to startups, right? You try something, you think you have an idea that has customer demand, then you find out, well, maybe you need to pivot or whatever. So there's just a trial and error approach to that innovation that I think is important to have in mind. The other is just that organizations have

entrenched interests, right? And I think that's what took so long for active money managers to get into the ETF business is they were kind of run by portfolio managers. It's sort of like the car company being, you know, run by either the CFO and the CFO has a certain approach or the engineers and they have a certain approach or bias. And so kind of as a generic business person, I was never a portfolio manager, although I'm on several investment committees. I think I kind of just gave me the freedom to do this kind of trial and error. And, you know, just one last comment on that. It was 2006 when we finally got going. But we had back then, you needed to get at an SEC permission for every ETF that was launched. And it took us like three years to kind of

uncrack the legal code, if you will, to find the right lawyer at the right law firm who had the right in at the SEC. So yeah, it wasn't an overnight process. It wasn't just like submit a filing and suddenly you're approved. And we're going to talk a lot about the investment themes of the firm and, you know, some of the specific tickers. but you seem to always be ahead or always thinking about some of these things first, whether it was gold, whether it was SMH, some of these big winners. How did you, because at the time, those are not obvious plays, and now they're so obvious, of course, right, in hindsight.

So how did you kind of always seem to be, you know, a few steps ahead of some of the other asset managers? Yeah, I mean, listen, a couple of things. Our firm's investment philosophy, I call it macro. I'm not sure that's the best word, but it's basically to say the financial markets, there's no wisdom or truth within the financial markets. They actually reflect what's happening in the world. And what are the important things that are happening in the world? It's government spending. It's money supply. And then it's technology. Technology has a huge impact, right, on. on how our world works. Basically, since capitalism was invented, it's been a series of technological innovations and then companies being formed to take advantage of those technologies and then to kind of disseminate them to the consumer.

So those trends tend to take a longer period of time. That's kind of, and we're asking in portfolio speak, the question of what asset classes should you own? Because once you get that right, like the subsidiary things kind of are a lot easier. So, you know, when my dad started looking at gold in the 1960s saying, listen, there's going to be inflation, very likely to be inflation in the U.S. Yeah, we haven't had it, but we're likely to have it now. What do you want to own in your portfolio and started this gold fund in 1968 to take advantage of that? And I think the other thing I

would say in all tech people really get this, but I like to say from a historical perspective, that change can be unbelievably quick. Like everything in history kind of looks like, yeah, obviously it was going to happen. But it's, you know, the more you study history, you more realize, wow, there's a lot of different outcomes that are possible. So that informs our thinking about the markets. Now, the counter to that is the markets are efficient. They should price everything in.

And I just don't think they do at a high level. And like, I'll take one of my favorite examples and we can come back to it later is just the rise of India, right? India has done all these pro-market reforms, very likely that they reach the size of Europe in 10 years. You know, you could go through all of 2025, not ever talking about India at all, right? But it's slowly marching forward and sometimes the market falls, goes race his head, sometimes it falls back. But sometimes you can have just higher conviction over something that's going to happen in 10 years than worrying about does the Fed cut rates in December. So that those are the things and we tried to just focus on our high conviction

long-term trends and and that will lead us to launch different funds or stress different investment pieces. So you talked about gold a little bit of course with a history of your father launching the gold fund and kudos great timing on that obviously with what came in 1970s. But we've been getting a lot of questions from retail investors with gold being above 4,000. US. Is it too late for retail investors? And how should they view goal? Because one of the common themes is it's a non-productive asset. Buffett has never been a fan. I shouldn't really own it. It just stays there. It does nothing. And that's its beauty. It stays there and does nothing, unlike some asset where a ton more can be created. In this case, the asset is the paper dollar,

paper loony, right? And so, and then in a world, it's fragmenting. We talked about the rise of India, but there's also China, right? These economies don't want to be dollar-centric. And so this longer-term trend that we see is just the kind of re-emergence of gold as the world's global currency. And a lot of the, it's just sitting there lack of big supply increases, but it's also bear in nature, right? You can transfer it. You don't need someone's permission to go through their firewall or whatever, you know, tech risks their might be. And so it's just gained, it's gaining, and I think it will continue to. So let's unpeel some of these things. I talked about how the world is getting more fragmented. I think this actually

really interesting factor. It is China's share of the world economy has shrunk over the last two years, right? It's not because China is shrinking, but it just shows you like it's just the world has a lot of pockets of wealth out there. So, so you find that the emerging market countries are wealthy, right? 30 years ago, they were basket cases financially. They all defaulted on their debt, Brady bonds, blah, blah, blah. Now you're in a world where they're actually accumulating wealth on their own. And so as they accumulate wealth, one of the things that they've decided to do, maybe it's cultural, maybe it's rational economics, is to buy gold. As you get wealthier, you buy gold, and the wealthier get the more gold you buy. So it's not just jewelry

demand in India, but this, we're talking about central bank demand. So emerging market demand is also, we just think, a super long-term trend. Then you have, on the other hand, the risk around developed countries that have borrowed too much money. And it's not just the U.S., which had fiscal deficits a couple years ago, or last year, I should say, that we're the highest ever in U.S. history. We're about to be 250 years old. So kind of crazy high in a in a full employment economy, but Japan's got the same issue, Europe's got the same issue. So in that kind of a world, now, nothing has exploded yet, but people are very well aware of the risks. You have investors in the developed markets as well by. So I kind of see this as a super

long-term trend. I don't see any of those components changing. Emerging markets are not going to stop growing. Develop markets are not going to fix their financial problems overnight. And so with that backdrop. I do see this as a long-term cycle. Now, it's a bull market. If you look at technicals, gold is well above. It's a 100-day, 200-day moving average. You can easily have a 20% correction from highs in the bull market. So that's sort of $3,500 an ounce. And any time you've had a rise like you've had this year, typically you're going to have a correction or some kind of sideways movement. But I'm pretty long-term bullish. Yeah, it's been actually surprising. I don't know about you just a quick mention how gold has been pretty resilient as the market has been very volatile

in the past week or so it's especially as bitcoin gets face ripped yeah yeah yeah no i mean that to me is confirmation that it's going to be a longer cycle because it's been so well behaved you know it's just it it started to feel kind of at the end of the summer kind of hyperbolic lift off and like whoops but i'm i'm really happy that it's corrected and totally i'm with you the way it's corrected has been really confirmatory to me that there could be early days. And one thing I didn't mention, I don't think like this is the biggest driver in the world either. But if you talk to investors in the United States, which I do a lot of, they are not buying gold. Like flows into gold funds have not been high. In fact, we're net out several

billions of our gold mining ETFs, which these things are up 120 percent on the year. my interpretation of that was a lot of it came in Q1, and it was actually people covering their shorts because people use ETFs to short. And so if I'm right there on that point, then in 2025, all this happened is people stopped getting short gold in the U.S., right? They haven't really gone long. And the last thing I would just mention, gold mining shares are obviously well understood in Canada and well known to be volatile. But from 2011 to 2016, gold shares went down 90%. So that no one's piling, I don't know, maybe in Vancouver, but no one generally United States is piling into gold chairs yet. There's been some nibbling in allocations, but again, signs that we've got

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Just Zed it and forget it. Considering ETFs like ZED-EQT, BMO's all- Equity ETC, or Z-GRO, BMO's growth ETF. Earlier this year, I headed to Calgary for our Stampede podcast meetup. It was a blast. I got to connect with listeners, hear a few of their stock pitches, catch them rodeo events for the first time, enjoy the fair, and just soak up the energy of the city during the Stampede, all while rocking my new cowboy hat.

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Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host. We'll circle back to some macro stuff in India in particular and some discussions about emerging markets. But first let's talk about the AI investment cycle, the Vanek Semic semiconductor ETF SMH is one of those category-defining ETFs that you guys have. And of course, some monster winners over the last five years in the post-Chad-GBT post-LLM era. I think the questions that's on everybody's mind is, you know,

Nvidia reports another monster banger of a quarter yesterday. the buildout has backlog that still we can't see ending. But how do you think about the concerns that investors have? And you can see it with the hyperscalers and VD actually people calling it a bubble. I think they trade a pretty reasonable multiples. How do you think about the durability of this AI buildout? That seems to be the trillion dollar question on everyone's mind. Yeah, I think what you mean there is what I

called the hardware. And so there are a couple of observations just I have around AI in general, just to level set before we get to hardware. So number one is, yet again, it's size wins, generally speaking, right? That the AI prompts with the most traffic get, the models get smarter, their databases get built out better, and just like social media had the giants winning and lots of aspects of the internet, ultimately, Amazon was the winner in shopping and all that kind of stuff. AI is the same way. So number one, that's a big thing to note. And number two, the more you use a particular chat prompt, the smarter it gets about you and the better experience. So it's going to probably be a stickier experience over time. Now, I know some of us

you know, use multiple models and what have you. But as a general matter, especially when you start getting more and more, which is happening every month, into consumers' daily consumption life, like where I live, like what apps I use, what stores, what banks, etc. It's just going to get stickier and stickier. So there is this race to market share because with everything, market share early in a trend is cheaper than later on. So that's kind of, you know, an important back. Now, to get to the kind of hardware, compute math, it's, I call it crazy math, because you've got demand for tokens going up almost to the sky, right, 38 times over the last 12 months. And there's no, even the experts will just say, we have no idea where this is going.

And then to your point, you got Jen Sir Wong saying, but I'm going to cut your compute costs 90% every year. by redefining my, I call it a mainframe. So, you know, that's just crazy math. It's really hard to figure out. Net net, I'm exactly sorry, where you started, which is you've got, you've got this compute demand that we've got years in front of us, right? And I think the market is, you know, you wonder why things aren't rallying more. And I think the market is just sort of looking, trying to look through that compute cycle

saying, what's the terminal value of this company? I think that's what's starting to happen in the dialogue. But to your point, we looked at these companies last summer, and even though it's our ETF, we said, I think this is overdone. When NVIDIA was at 50 times sales, like I like to say, those are words that should be said on a family podcast.

That's just ridiculous valuation. I think it's much more reasonable now. and I'm very comfortable. We do a quarterly investment outlook just to get our views on the record. And it's been a lot of time looking at this compute dynamic because our market, a U.S. equity market is so dependent on, you know, these 10 companies. And, you know, my walk away is, sure, 10 companies are like 40% of the S&P, but they could be more.

I mean, it's such a beautiful thing because the last thing, these companies that employ that have the scale advantages can use AI to cut their costs, right? So they're rubbing you going up and costs going down or flat, like Amazon laying people off. I mean, in the history of capitalism, there haven't been many businesses that have had that, like almost never before technology for sure. Yeah, yeah, it is it, it is a operating leverage play that were, you know, going to see out. And I think that you're right, the big get bigger here, like the ones that had all the capital and the data centers and Google with already building out TPUs for things that

they wanted to accomplish internally, you're seeing that those Web 2.0 winners just ascend into the AI era winners. And it definitely, you know, I have some concerns about that a little bit as well, too, just thinking broadly, but it sounds like we all agree that size and scale and unit shared economies really, really matter in this next investment cycle. Yeah, I mean, we live in their world and we can't really fight and we just have to cohabitate. I would say there's one exception, Braden, to the kind of Mag 7 narrative, which I focus a lot of attention on my fourth quarter outlook, which is open AI because it is just what

what we said is unbelievable. A company has kind of come out of nowhere and is a category leader, at least right now, in terms of monthly active users at 800 million or what have you. And they are doing partnership after partnership. So here, Amazon, like, who could compete against Amazon in terms of interfacing with the U.S. consumer? Yet, Open AI combined with Shopify or Open AI now combined with Walmart, where they Walmarts and Shopify give you the payments and the inventory and the logistics of delivery, suddenly Amazon's got a competitor.

It'll be really interesting to see kind of how that plays out over the next couple of quarters. But Open AI is, until I kind of really spent a lot of time studying, frankly, just speaking for myself, I underappreciated how important they are. Now, of course, they are also probably the single financing risk to the ecosystem, right? Because everyone is spending money that they're earning and they're spending money that is coming in somehow. So that's a little bit, that's the,

it's the amazing thing. And it's a risk a little bit to the Mag 7, but it's also, it's also risk to themselves if they can't get that money together. And everyone's seen that circular AI economy visual that has, you know, all this kind of circular deals between open AI and video and hey, I'm a venture investor in use. You can pay for a compute and Nvidia is an venture investor in use so that you can buy more GPUs and the song and dance goes on and on and on. So yeah, it feels like it's it's on a bit of shaky ground there, but you make a good point. But they have the eyeballs. They have the eyeballs. And everyone wants those eyeballs, right? And distribution is king no matter what industry we're talking.

talking about. Do you think the markets are getting a little worried that the amount of investments is not enough in the infrastructure? Because we saw Open AI, I think it was a few weeks ago kind of floating the idea of potential bailout down the line, David Sachs kind of saying, no, that would never be a thing. And now you're also saying some of the Mag 7 issuing some dead offerings, which of course they've done in the past. But I've seen some people mention. mentioning that we could be underestimating the amount of investment that's required for AI. Well, I mean, the shortage is probably what Sotian Adela said, not in the chips so much in the U.S. as electricity supply. But I think what's true in the U.S. and very important, and we have an ETF like a nuclear ETF that's done very well based on on that shortage of electricity, I think if you look globally, that's a solvable problem.

certainly China's building out a ton of electricity themselves, not that they're buying our chips. But if you look at Saudi Arabia, cheap electricity, building out data centers, I just think the industry, if it's considered on a global basis, I'm a little bit less concerned about the electricity shortage. So then it's, there's enough demand. Well, it's unknowable, but it's going to the skies, right? There's enough demand, you know, probably for several generations of invidia chips, then it's just to what I said before the terminal value. So one of the things that we focus on is the gross margins of invidia, which are like in the 70s. I think the market is just sort of saying, wow, is that going to be true? Like usually companies don't have that

wide a moat and whether it's Gemini with their own chips or what have you, Google, excuse me, you know, I think that's what the market's starting to look to. And I think that's definitely happening in crypto as well. Yesterday, they reported a 70-30% gross profit margin and a 63% operating margin, which is higher than Visa and MasterCard for reference. That's pretty good. For a hardware business. Yeah, good point.

Those types of margins just beg for competition. Absolutely. Yeah. So I guess we can shift. We wanted to hear your thoughts on stress and private credit because we saw, I think it was early October, some defaults in the private credit market for his brands, tricolor. They've raised some question about underwriting discipline in private credit, collateral quality and liquidity. And given that it is a pretty opaque market, and I think even the Fed had this new acronym, I think a non-traditional. financial institution, or I think, you know what I'm talking about, right? I don't know the exact

acronym. I don't either. I make fun of it, though, like non-financial financial. I'm like, okay. Yeah, something like that may be to reassure the markets, but do you think those are isolated cases or could be early signs of broader strain in that private market that has gotten so big over the years? Yeah, I mean, listen, I have no insight into the credit books of any of these, but I'll give you, I think a tool for investors to use if they have a view. And that's business development companies. So BDCs are effectively just pools of private loans. And they trade on the stock market every day. So we have the biggest BDC ETF. And those BDCs report their net asset value every quarter. And I can tell you, there's a lot of math around how that's done and a lot of fiduciary responsibility. So I'm going to take

those navs at face value. And then you can just chart the BDCs against their net asset value over time. Obviously, during COVID, they were at a 20 or 30% discount to NAV. Earlier this year, they were trading at something like a 10% premium. And then during these credit concerns over the last month or so, they fell to about a 10% discount. And so I would never probably pay a premium for a BDC exposure, like why, I'm not sure why you would do that unless you're really desiring to get exposure. But I think if they're at a 10% discount and it's just a couple of fears in the market, then they're a buy. I do think if it becomes a wholesale fear or fleeing, like let's say we start heading into a recession and we're really going to get

defaults or something like that. I could see people using BDCs as their escape valves because they can't get out of their other private credit vehicles and getting to even 20 or 30 percent discounts, even though arguably they shouldn't be there because those nabs are good nabs. So that to me is a tool. If it got there, I'd be buying almost in any market if it ever were to get to that discount. So that's kind of how I look at it. I don't know. I don't really have a ton of other insights other than there's a very, very good regulatory reason

for these huge alternative credit shops. to exist, which is that the U.S. government, after we blew up our banking system, I know you guys didn't in Canada wisely, your banks are rock solid, but we blew up our system again, and people besides creating Bitcoin decided that banks shouldn't be doing this business anymore, which is why it's all an alternative credit. And so that's why we would expect that, you know, that part of the market to grow. Yeah, and I see you and team, you know, a lot of places in conferences around advisors, even retail. And the big thing that we've seen with asset managers here in Canada is just how much ETF flows to retail matter for their business all of a sudden. And I've

heard it's like half and then, you know, chronic crossing the chasm, to be one of the most, if not the most important channels for for ETFs. How do you think about ETF flows in retail? of course, amazing tools and products that's been given to everyone. It's really the most democratizing things that the industry has produced. So how do you and the business think about retail investors, individual investors, and investing in some of these funds? I mean, I think individual investors are our second biggest channel. So the way we define our customer basis is we have financial advisors.

through traditional brokers like Merrill Lynch. Then we have independent fee-based advisors. But number two is individual investors. And to your point, I think they're growing in share at Van Eck this last year. And I think that is an area where AI could unleash a further leg of growth, right? If individual investors are comfortable researching investments and having that information synthesized for them, in the form of AI prompts, I think that could be, and I know you're, I'm talking your book, but go to fiscal.a.ai, right? But I, I, I, I don't think the industry talks about it

nearly enough, nearly enough. And do you think because, I mean, I've seen it a lot even with generic LLM tools, it's like, you know, how do I get exposure to AI? And it'll like, it goes right to like SMH and like it is a lot of search engine optimization, but the LLM version of ETFs being kind of brought right center stage there instead of listing individual stocks. Is that is that what you mean? Yeah. I mean, look, there's a seismic change in digital marketing. So it's gone from Google dominated world where everything was what's the Google search and

then you wanted to be clicked through on top of that page to your point. It's AI optimization. And I'll give you an example. We came out with an ETF to invest in private credit and private equity managers called GPZ. And I wanted to research. I had to talk about it. And I was like, oh, give me all the holdings of GPZ and tell me what they're forward looking revenues are and valuations and blah, blah, blah. And I said, but I want to see all of the portfolio. or all of the holdings in the ETF or the index. And time after time, I just kept getting the top 10. And so I went to our IT department.

I'm like, what is going on here? And it turned out that on our website, you had to scroll down to see the additional holdings. So the AI crawlers weren't grabbing the whole portfolio. So you probably know what they had to do. But I can't articulate it. But they made our AI website friendlier to the AI. excuse me, friendlier to the AI crawlers and prompts, which I thought was right.

You know, we're just, we're just making our websites for the machines. We're not making it for humans anymore. But anyway, so I just think we're early days. And, you know, it's really, it's exciting and it's natural, though. Like if you get a result from a doctor, which I had some kind of normal annual blood test, I was like, I don't understand what the hell this says. just copy, put it in AI, and suddenly you're good, right? And then I didn't need to talk to my doctor. I was like, I'm good. So if that can happen for investments, I'm looking forward to that

day, right? I wonder what my doctor thought. I haven't been to doctor in so long. I went and I went to him with like, hey, chat GPT says this. He's probably like so tired of this. Like, I'm the doctor. Let me tell you what's wrong. Not the AI, but like, you know, it was a exactly what he said as well, too. So, yeah, it's an interesting place we're in. It's not, like professionals like that, and I'm not trying to be preachy yet, but it's not when the Braden asks her a question, you know, like, oh, yeah, did the AI, AI prompt, right? It's when they don't even go to the doctor, right? They get the answer and they don't call the lawyer because the answer from AI was just as good and about a billion times faster than

you'd get an answer from a lawyer. So, I don't know, they'll be really interesting to see how individuals research their investments in five years. What do you think? I mean, I've used it. I've used, I, we've even made some episodes on like how to speed up, you know, save time to invest because you can get some full transcripts. I know you can get it on fiscal.

I know you can also copy and paste and just chat GPTO summarize it for you. You can easily, like you mentioned, get some ETS. get some breakdowns of just an overview of the business lines for a new company you're researching. I mean, to me, it's always making sure you double check the information because I find it it still hallucinates. I've noticed it time and time and again. But I mean, it's almost like having a research assistant with you. You just have to double check the work, make sure sometimes it's correct. So the ultimate question, Simon, is will a larger percent of your portfolio be self-directed as opposed to driven by a financial advisor, right? That was Braden's question. Do you think

that's true or are we just going to kind of keep the dollars the same, but just resource it different? It's probably going to be different in Canada and the U.S., surprisingly enough. And Braden can probably add a little bit, but we love our mutual funds here. There's been countless of examples of undercover stories of a reporter. Well, the banks just push them. Exactly. The big banks with high fees. And I think it's probably going to take longer for that reason for people to be more self-directed in Canada than I think the culture is a bit different in the U.S. That's just my... We do have really high penetration that comes to individual investing. Funny enough, I saw a report that the Nordics have the highest penetration of individual

investors kind of managing their own portfolios. But I think, you know, broadly there's two things here, you want to answer your question, if AI will help the research process a lot. There's one, there's numerical data content, which if you ask it to go pull data from, like got to go find the right content, locate it, extract it, give it out. First of all, it takes a lot of compute. Two, it flips lines, flips digits, grabs the wrong thing all the time. So that's the whole point of our company, right? Yeah, there are people solving that problem, Braden. Yeah, yeah. We actually are now partnering with two of the four largest AI labs on Earth now to give them that content, you know, as, you know, they're customers of ours now, to solve that

problem for them. And then personally, you know, when it comes to you unstructured, like written content, I still am just the biggest use case of summarize this earnings call for me. You know, Like, if it's a company I'm really, really digging into, I want to listen to it. I want to make my own notes. I think a lot of the industries like that, but if it's just something that, like, is adjacent to what you're looking at, like, I'm not going to listen to the whole call. I'm not going to read the whole thing. That is helpful for both professionals and individuals at scale.

So it's a lot of the simple applications as well. Yeah, especially if you think people who have a full-time job, right, and they just do this part-time. They don't have eight hours a day to do investment research. So, can I just push into this a little bit, brain? Like, are we going to get, so it sounds, you know, like what you said is we're getting, we're not approaching the era of unstructured data is okay. Meaning you still have to organize the data for AI. Is that true?

If we're talking about like, yeah, so. We've done lots of case studies with our clients, like before, after using our data with some of these AI labs, where it'd be like, give me 10 years of revenue, operating margin and some other number to build a comps table. And it was getting a fair bit of numbers wrong, like one in 10, two in 10 type of thing. That's way, way too high. And so then with our content, you know, you're getting one in a hundred thousand wrong. Right, because you structured your data. That's one point.

So we're not getting away from the era of, we're not getting away from the era of structured data. No. And in fact, it is going to be in higher demand than ever because these types of platforms would prefer to have it structured first because it's also a lot faster and cheaper to call structured data than go rip through, you know,

4010Ks. Sorry. I don't know who listens. to your pod, but for normal people, the difference between structured and unstructured data. So unstructured data is just think of data strewn all over the place, maybe all within one document, you know, with word surrounding it, right? Or, you know, in multiple documents, as opposed to, like, say, a table that a computer can, like, look and you know it's like literally the same data, the same defined bit of data, you know, within something that's organized.

And think of like a PDF versus a spreadsheet. Right. PDF is very unstructured. A spreadsheet's very structured. Well, yeah, yes. From a computer's perspective, from a human's perspective, the PDF could look organized, right? I just wanted to be super clear. But from the computer, see you're thinking like a computer.

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considering ETFs like ZEQT, BMO's All Equity ETF, or ZGRO, BMO's growth ETF. Earlier this year, I headed to Calgary for our Stampede podcast meetup. It was a blast. I got to connect with listeners, hear a few of their stock pitches, catch them rodeo events for the first time, enjoy the fair, and just soak up the energy of the city during the Stampede, all while rocking my new cowboy hat.

While I was there, I stayed in a home on Airbnb just a short walk from the Stampede grounds. After a full day making new connections with people just as passionate about investing as I am and a late night at the rodeo, it was the perfect place to come back to and make a quick dinner and unwind in a quiet, comfortable space that felt like home. That trip got me thinking about my own place back in Ottawa. While I'm away, my home usually just sits. empty, but instead, I thought I could be hosting it on Airbnb.

Hosting is flexible so I can set the timing, and it could help me cover the cost of my next adventure while someone else enjoys our beautiful neighborhood. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host. Simone, you have a question on India. This is one that I've actually been wanting to hear about a little bit to the growth of emerging markets and particularly India is very interesting and compelling right now. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I've listened to you on a few different podcasts, Jan, and you're

always, you've been recently very bullish on India. So you express strong conviction, long term, big opportunity in India in the past. Can you go over what structural advantages you see in driving growth there? And should investor view India a bit as a unique case in emerging markets, or is it emerging markets as a whole? Is it one or the other? And are people better off looking at ETFs or looking for kind of more sector specific to India as well? So what I like about India is, let me reject the sort of demographics story and all the kind of things that we looked at China. It's big. It's growing. GDP's growing. And that's why you should invest there. We know that's not true.

You can have a shrinking demographics and a good stock market, and you can, you know, so you don't just look at that. What I like about India is just that the government has enacted pro-business reforms. And it was an economy that out of the British colonial system was heavily, heavily regulated. I don't know where it is on the spectrum of Canada, but just a lot of, like, regional taxes from, oh, you guys have that too, actually, from province to province, right? But what they did is they kind of normalized everything and they digitized everything. And what I mean normalized, there's like one set of taxes across all the regions in India.

And that makes a big difference for infrastructure. So you don't, anyway, just it created one national economy from a taxation perspective. And then the digitization added a lot of ease of doing business. because there was a ton of paperwork. Like when we started India funds in the old day, literally you had to take paperwork to the regulator to get your funds started. Now they have a national identity system

and a documentation, actually, standardization system that is run by the government for free. So what they give you an example that I think is interesting from a financial services perspective. It used to be that for anti-money laundering and other reasons you'd have to bring your you know, government ID to a brokerage firm to open an account. Well, during COVID, they basically

relax that. We say, why do we have that? We have national ID, digital ID anyway. And suddenly, you know, brokerage firms were opening a million accounts a month, right? Because of the ease of doing business. Now, it's like 20 bucks, 50 bucks. It's not a ton of money. But it starts, it just shows you in our sector, what those reforms were doing. And then another major, I would call it subtle, but I think important component is it's a pro-equity culture, meaning for whatever reason, the democracy in India is okay with billionaires, right? There's some of the world's richest people are there. They're not trying to attack them, burn them, or drive them out of the country. They just kind of cohabitate because the idea is everyone can get richer. And so that kind of pro, there's a

hundreds of IPOs a year. So that pro-equity culture, and one that really changed was they had computer services companies like InfoSys, like this is like 25 years ago. And they gave out all these stock options. And suddenly there were all these overnight millionaires. This is Yon's oversimplification of history, by the way, but, but like all these millionaires were created from a company going public that was started there. And that that culture of like we can all do better in a system where there's good equity markets is really important to equity investors, right? And then the last component that Simon, you've probably heard it a billion times for me, but the Indian equity market has basically matched the returns of the U.S. market.

So, yeah, why settle for a one and a half percent in your portfolio to India? Because other emerging market countries don't have what's also important is the scale of a big consumer market. You know, why, you know, it, why does the U.S. have some of these big tech giants? Because we have a huge consumer market. And you've only got three. You've got U.S., Europe, and China. Having a fourth in India, I don't think they have a, you know, maybe their middle class is like 250 million. So it's not quite there yet. So I'm in to unleash this. But over the next 10 years, there will be some global giants that come out of India, not just tech services because they have this big domestic consumer market. So yeah, sorry, that's my sales

picture, India. This is one of my favorite charts you can find in the history of charts, which is data, electricity, accessibility for the Indian population from 2000 to data ending 2021 went from 60% to 99.7%. So virtually from six out of 10 people to virtually every single person in the country over 21 years. And since post-2021, that's probably asymptotically reaching 100% now. There's never been a scenario where there hasn't been a direct correlation from electricity, abundance, and access to GDP and, you know, productivity out of a country. Yeah, it's funny. That's an interesting chart.

When I went there with my family, like 15 years ago, I remember staying in this hotel in a relatively rural area, and the sun was setting. It's like everything went dark, except for like a couple of houses because they didn't have electricity, right? And, you know, I'd never seen that before. The other thing about penetration, which is true in India, but also a lot of other emerging markets, is availability of cell phones. That's one thing I didn't mention. And basically, they had this huge price war and some of very well-capitalized companies offered mobile phones to Indians at like five bucks a year or five bucks a month, like something completely affordable.

So you'd have a very similar chart for mobile phone access. and that solves a ton of problems right it brings everyone into banking it brings a lot of people into you know lots of different services logistics that they just didn't have pre-mobile phones so that's that's another major component yeah that kind of access to immediately being in web 2.0 is pretty special last question here for today on very generic question but We have a lot of young people who listen to the show. I'm an entrepreneur. You're an entrepreneur.

What are some, well, you know, if you could talk to your 22-year-old self about getting started and entrepreneurship, what are the things that really matter over the next 10 years of the journey that they'll go on? Do it now. So that's the first thing. When you're in your 20s, you have so much time to try. try different things. One of the things I advocate is also just try different kinds of jobs so you know what you like to do. So maybe, I'm sure not every listening to your pod is an entrepreneur, but maybe they're a journalist or whatever it is. I did an insane amount of internships in

college and afterwards because I didn't know what I wanted to do. And maybe I'm just odd that way. But trying something for a couple of months was a really great way for me to iterate on that. Now, I will say, keep swinging if you're an entrepreneur because I joined the company was when I was just about kind of, I worked for in the 20s, but I rejoined when I was like 30. And we only started our ETS business when I was in my mid-40s. So like, and that is 99% of the next business today, right? So like, there are a lot of older entrepreneurs and look, there were a lot of swings and misses earlier in my career. So keep swinging. You do, it's a lot easier to do when you don't have a

family and you have fewer responsibilities in your 20s, but don't stop just because that's one that's a good time to do it. Yeah. And it's not just for, it's a good point, not just for the people in their early 20s, you know, Bernie, Marcus, Home Depot fired at his job in his 50s. I don't think really Home Depot got going until really in his 60s. There's lots of situations of that. Colonel Sanders in his 60s for KFC. Same with Ray Crock and McDonald's in his 50s. There's all these situations where, you know, I guess start now, whenever now is, I guess the best time was yesterday and the second best time is now. Well, I think, you know, there's just a lot of things that you were asking about younger kids. I think there's a lot of things just

thrown at younger people like you have to work for the better you know the better known brand firm like you know like in new york is always better to work for golden sacks or whatever and or you really like theater but you also have to do statistics and pure signs because that's how you're going to get a job or this there's just all these narratives that people don't really know and you know don't major in history because it won't help you on wall street like there's just a lot of narratives and i think don't, you know, you just got to, you got to try stuff on your own and find out what you like to do is kind of my point. And don't, don't just listen to whatever the popular narrative is at the time. Yon, thank you so much for coming on the show. Me and Smil, both massively appreciate it

as well as all the listeners of the podcast. Where can people find more? I know you've done lots of discussions and you've talked a lot extensively about Bitcoin. We didn't talk about that as well too on other places. So where can we find some of your stuff and a little bit more about finding up about the ETFs? Yeah, my investment outlooks are on vaneck.com. I'm also on social, on LinkedIn and on X, you know, Vanek with the number three at the end, because obviously I was the third to figure out Twitter back in the day. But yeah, you know, so I like to share podcasts and different bits of research. I also do a quarterly outlook that's, you can find it on our website, but it's also on someone called Adam Taggart's thoughtful money. So you can look

at prior recordings and see if I had a good sense about the market. Again, in one sentence, what I focused on in the fourth quarter is this whole AI, you know, Mag 7 is such a big part of the market. Does it make sense? And the answer is yes. You know, in my world, you have to have a really, really, really good reason not to be invested in the markets, right? Because over time, you're doing way better in the markets than you are at the bank. Yeah, 100%. Oh, I like that. That's a great place to end it. Yon, thanks again. Thanks, Braden. Thanks, Simon. Thanks, Jan. The Canadian Investor podcast should not be construed as investment or financial advice. The host and guest featured may own securities or assets discussed on this podcast. Always do your

own due diligence or consult with a financial professional before making any financial or investment decisions.