Retail Euphoria Turns Six-Week Fund Into Record-Busting AI Trade
Specialist products that once sat at the edges of the ETF industry are being pulled into its center.
Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/BloombergBrian Emes manages a retail store in Lethbridge, Alberta, a small city on the Canadian prairie about a two-hour drive from the US border. On the morning of May 11, before opening the shop, the 43-year-old launched his brokerage app and bought 55 shares of an exchange-traded fund that hadn’t existed until early April.
The fund is the Roundhill Memory ETF or DRAM. It now accounts for roughly 7% of his portfolio — a concentrated wager, made on the strength of Reddit threads and YouTube videos, that artificial intelligence has turned memory chips into the trade he could not afford to miss.