Boutique ETF Rode Memory-Chip Stock Boom to a Billion Dollars in Ten Days

Dave Mazza runs a boutique asset manager in New York with a dozen employees. On April 2, his firm Roundhill Investments launched an exchange-traded fund called DRAM, holding a handful of memory-chip stocks. It had no seed investor, no model-portfolio placement, no wirehouse deal.

Ten trading days later, it has $1.5 billion in assets — a milestone that typically took the most successful thematic ETFs of the past decade between three and eight years to reach.