Matthew, it's great to have you with us.
And let's start at the beginning, why did you
launch this fund? So we launched this fund for
for a couple of reasons. I mean the first
obvious reason is there's a lot of demand, you
know when we were looking at it, there was
like 2.7 billion that was short a r k K
. So we knew the demand was there. But
really at the end of the day there's two main
reasons. Number one is you look at the economic
environment, we're in, the Fed's going to raise
interest rates, higher inflation, that's toxic for speculative
technology, which is what's in our k the other
thing is, you know, we knew that we
were due for a correction at some point and in
in a correction, you know to us this is
a better way to hedge a portfolio than say shorting
the NASDAQ or shorting the S and P you know
, we'd much rather short Teladoc zoom and doc you
sign than short the fang stocks when the market is
going down. So those are the main reasons.
I'm wondering what communication you've had at all with our
core with Kathy would have you met her? Have
you heard from her? I have not met her
. I have not heard from her. I mean
we have some conferences coming up in florida so you
know maybe maybe we'll get a chance down there.
But no, I've never met her, I got
to say I am looking forward to meeting you in
Miami but I didn't know you were going, Katie
, Oh, I'm absolutely going, are you kidding
me, It's in april let's go. But in
any case I am curious, you know, what
is the pitch for investing in this fund? And
the ticker is S A R K, why do
that versus just short arc outright? So a couple
of reasons, I mean, number one, you
can't shorten an ira, So we're hearing from a
lot of people on twitter saying, hey, thank
you, you saved my ira, other people either
, you know, just whatever logistically can't short or
they don't like too short. You know, you
have a risk of it getting called away, We
may be depending on what type of broker you're using
, we may be able to borrow cheaper than you
might be able to borrow, you know, and
a lot of times people just prefer the convenience of
an inverse CTF. So at what point do you
, I mean, at what point do you what
do you think is your time horizon here? Because
Cathy Wood is pretty adamant about her five year time
horizon, is there a point that that that you
believe that it will no longer be worthwhile to too
short what her strategy is? No. So if
you look at what we're doing is really a tool
, you know, not unlike an inverse NASDAQ,
an inverse smp fund. I mean, you know
, she may be right and maybe they're able to
generate amazing returns over the next five years. Yeah
, I leave that to them, but it's not
going to go up in a straight line. And
the one thing we know about speculative technology companies is
, you know, that they're going to go up
and they're going to go down, they're gonna have
a lot of volatility. So, you know,
I'm not saying, you know, hey, take
Sark and buy it and hold it for five years
. I mean, maybe you could, but there's
a whole bunch of ways to use this product that
, you know, do not change if, you
know, they go on a massive run Matthew,
I want to talk about the fact that this fund
specifically targets another active manager because, you know,
there's a lot of strategies out there, that short
categories or sectors. But I think this is the
first one I've seen that actually goes after someone specifics
strategy and I do want to talk about gender because
if you think about managers such as Ray Dalio and
Bridgewater has underperformed for years and I haven't seen,
you know, the anti Bridgewater ETF. And I
just want to end with the question, I mean
, would you have launched this fun if Kathy was
a man definitely has nothing at all to do with
gender. I mean, I saw something like that
kicking around on twitter and I mean, I couldn't
believe it. Nothing to do with that. What
we wanted to be able to do is give investors
a way to go inverse speculative technology and we could
have either recreated the wheel and come up with our
own speculative technology index or why not use what's already
out there? I mean, they've already got it
. So, you know, why not use that
instead? So that was our only reason for shorting
RK Matthew, I want to ask about another type
of investment that often gets considered speculative by many.
And we're talking stacks here and if we take a
look at how spats have done over the last year
and it really hasn't been pretty. The the SPAC
index is down, wow, look at that more
than 43% from its high just under a year ago
in february weigh in on the spat crazier. So
there there's a whole bunch of different kind of ways
of looking at specs, there's a pre merger stacks
, which to me are still fine. And our
great bond alternative and we've got an E T F
for that SpC X. Then there's the dispatch acts
. That stuff is a lot of the toxic waste
. And you know, the companies that immediately,
once they merge, they go down to four,
you know, that stuff is having problems and the
sentiment is awful. You're seeing, you know,
redemptions and the 90% on dispatch act deals. So
that's also why we have so goo which goes in
verse the diss backed companies and you know, that's
obviously, you know, done pretty well this year
as well