Ep. 307 Amplify Gains On Nvidia, Tesla And Palantir With This Aggressive Method, But Never Ignore The Risks
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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Investing with IBD podcast. It's Justin Nielsen here, your host, and it is February 12th, 2025. It's another Wednesday, live at 5 Eastern on YouTube here. And we're delighted to bring back to the show Will Rind from Granite Shears. How are you doing, Will?

Doing well, Justin. Yeah, all good. Thank you. Good, good. And so, of course, last time we had you on, Will, it was really interesting because we were talking about these single stock ETFs, how you use leverage and inverse. And, you know, it was kind of a newer product at the time. And now I feel like now it's old hat almost. It seems like, you know, it's really this space has exploded. There's a lot more offerings, you know, with a lot more stocks.

in a lot of different ways. So again, if you want a little bit inverse, if you want a lot inverse, if you want leverage, there's all sorts of different levels. So maybe as we get just right into it, talk a little bit about what kind of took off with these single stock ETFs. Yeah, so I think like any new product and new concept really within the industry, sometimes it takes a while to catch up.

fire, so to speak. And this is no different really with the single stock. So the good news was that leveraged ETFs more broadly are really popular, but leveraged single stocks were a new type of leveraged ETF that people hadn't seen before. And so when we bought those to the market, it did take a little bit of time for people to appreciate the new nature of these products. And so

I think the big sort of light bulb moment really was when we launched the 2x NVIDIA ETF, which was NVDL. And it wasn't a smash hit immediately, but we did launch it just a couple of months before the release of ChatGPT. And of course, when ChatGPT came out...

that was really the starting pistol was fired really in terms of not just everyone's interest in AI, but in also the levered single stock business as well. And so NVDL is now the largest leveraged single stock ETF in the world. Granite Shares is the largest provider by AUM of leveraged single stocks in the world. But the category has just taken off. And like you said, Justin, that

That's meant not just not just Granite shares, but other companies coming in with products. And this category is expanded to really offer a huge amount of offerings, both on the long levered side and short or inverse side as well.

Yeah. And I guess that's one of the things that I appreciate. I do deal with mostly cash accounts, Roth IRAs. I love trading in those vehicles. And you can't short, right? That's just not allowed in those vehicles. Now you've got the option of using some of these inverse ETFs to take a short position in things. And I

It's nice to have another way of doing it. Sure, I could do the options and stuff like that. I have that ability in my IRAs, but this kind of gives me another way of doing it. But as with any leveraged or inverse product...

we have to kind of give those disclaimers, right, of the things that people need to know. And, you know, two things that always stick out when you're looking at like an SQQQ, you know, how bad the contango can be on something like this, where because you're using derivatives, you're, you know, the expiration and everything like that. So can you talk about kind of what your warning is for people, right?

if they're maybe new to investing and maybe some of these leveraged products aren't exactly the place to start, as exciting as they can be sometimes. Yeah, no, that's right. So, I mean, that's just, you know,

common sense really that if you're new to investing then definitely leveraged ETFs are not the place to start. This is a sophisticated product for sophisticated investors. Typically these are people that in the retail world or in the self-directed world are already permissioned for active trading and those people are

graduating, if you want to say that, from other forms of leveraged investing, be it in futures accounts, be it on options, or even just leverage through margin accounts, and are kind of moving to the ETF world because it's a lot more efficient and a lot more cost effective. But yeah, first and foremost, clearly this is a sophisticated product with sophisticated people.

And then, you know, with leverage, it's the old risk and reward, you know, that you don't get, you know, twice the reward or the potential for two times the return without two times the risk. So, you know, when you have anything that's leveraged, you have the potential for amplified gains. But guess what? If it goes against you, you also have the potential for amplified losses. So that goes without saying.

And then to your point in terms of the... Maybe it goes without saying, but worth repeating. No, absolutely. Again, it's the... The common sense part. The common sense part of using anything that's leveraged that's fine on the upside, if it goes in your favor, but if it goes against you, there's amplified losses.

And the last part, I think, which you kind of highlighted was or is, I should say, the tracking performance or the return performance of these products. And they are designed to be daily leveraged products, which means that.

the investment objective for us and for other competitors is almost always to track the daily price, meaning if it's two times leverage, it's two times the daily return of Nvidia, of Tesla, or whatever it may be, or if it's inverse, the exact opposite. That's important because that's how we maintain constant leverage. In other words,

If you see a product that's labeled two times leverage or 2X, regardless of whether you buy it today, whether you buy it in three months' time or six months' time, you're going to get two times leverage for that given day, and that's what's referred to as constant leverage.

So the way that we achieve that is we rebalance the portfolio at the end of each trading day. And so what that means is it introduces a nonlinear return over longer periods of time. In other words, because the investor doesn't have the impact of margin and doesn't have to face margin calls, that's all taken care of by the fund.

That over periods of time, if you're looking at the difference between a levered single stock ETF like NVDL, for example, against the price of NVIDIA, you're comparing on the one hand a linear return, the price of NVIDIA versus a non-linear return, which is the ETF.

And that's why we suggest that for people using these products, they hold them for a short period of time or a shorter period of time. In other words, the longer you hold it, the more chance that the return will deviate from that linear return. Now, that's exactly by design. The product is doing exactly what it says. It's just that people sometimes in their mind might think, oh, it's…

it's two times the return of NVIDIA to infinity. So meaning that if I hold it for five years, at the end of five years, I'll have two times the return of what NVIDIA did. No, that's not what it does. It does it for one day, rebalances, does it for the next day, the next day, the next day, but that introduces what we call a path dependency, which may or may not mean that you meet or get close to that two times leverage over a long period of time.

Yeah, I'm really glad you said that because, again, that's something that a lot of people don't understand at first when they're looking at these. And they are sometimes surprised. Wait a minute, I held it for this long. Why was that discrepancy there? But as you said, it's by design to achieve the goal of the daily. Yeah, daily leverage without margin. That's the big selling point. Right, exactly. And so...

Let's talk a little bit about another issue. And I always think of Balmageddon, what was called Balmageddon back in 2018. Was it January or February of 2018 where a lot of these volatility products, you know, oh, using leverage on the VIX and volatility products was really in vogue. And, you know, it was going great for a lot of people until 2018.

these things like exploded and, you know, some of them just completely were gone. A friend of mine, he was like, oh, I had it one day and then I couldn't trade it at all. It was like, just blew up. So how does that happen? And is there any risk of that with these single stocks? Yeah, so that, I mean, that happens, you know, like with any fund where, you know,

is unable to meet whatever investment objective it has. It's just sometimes I think that typically that's an environment where the fund does something that is unexpected. So in the case of the Volmageddon, these were ETFs that were sellers of volatility. And that seemed like a great strategy in an environment where volatility was flat, if not declining,

And so there was a track record whereby people were sort of extrapolating that and saying, hey, this is always going to be the scenario. And, of course, when volatility spiked and you were a seller of volatility, the trade went completely against you, and therefore the fund lost all of its assets and closed.

just like the people that owned oil ETFs in 2020. Who could have imagined necessarily that the price of oil would go to zero and briefly went negative? So again, these funds are just doing what they're designed to do, but it's very unusual to have a major asset like that go to zero. So with these ETFs, the single stocks specifically, the worst case scenario is if you're two times leveraged,

Think about that. That means that the worst case scenario is the underlying stock has to drop by 50% or more in a day. So remember, these are daily leveraged products. They rebalance at the end of each day. But in that trading day...

If you imagine a scenario where the price of NVIDIA was to fall by 50% or more, you're two times leveraged. That means you're at 100% plus, and therefore the fund loses all of its assets. So again, that would be completely by design. That is what the fund is designed to do. Obviously horrible for anybody holding it and for us as the manager. We don't want that situation. But it's not to say that that couldn't happen. That is the worst case scenario. Yeah. And with...

With earnings, again, we've talked a lot on our shows about how when regulation fair disclosure came out, it seemed to bring a little bit more of a surprise with earnings. And so sometimes you have these very violent moves to the upside or downside. It could go either way. Is that something where...

you have any kind of caution? And look, for a while there, I would have found it very hard to believe that you could see some of these trillion dollar companies move as much as they have. But I mean, that's the situation we're in. 20%, 30% move sometimes for a trillion dollar company seems unfathomable, but it happens sometimes on these earnings announcements. So is there anything to kind of like

If 50% is kind of that limit, is there anything to kind of take from that as a warning? Well, I think I wouldn't necessarily view it so much as a warning as much as it is just a statement of fact around how markets are performing. And I think after several years of a bull market –

What you're seeing in those instances is a heightened sensitivity around earnings because if we're at all-time high or close to all-time highs in the market, for the market to go higher, I think the market is calling for ever higher expectations around company earnings. And if companies don't deliver, or even as we've seen from plenty of the major tech companies or the Mag7 companies,

If you just miss slightly or have a guidance, forward guidance that doesn't quite meet the expectations, you can sell off. Now, that causes the volatility. And of course, if you're playing that with leveraged ETFs, then of course, that will be outsized returns or losses.

But I would sort of say that there's the pro and the con, you know, that the vast majority of people, I think, that use these products, that's what they want. In other words, they're attracted to the volatility. They want to see big moves. And therefore, you know, particularly to trade around earnings is exactly what people are looking for, because people in some cases have kind of been disenfranchised a little bit through options.

Because you're not able to trade in the pre-market, you're not able to trade post-market. A lot of times, even if you get directionally the option right, the amount of premium that you're paying because of the implied volatility in some of these names is so high that you still lose money. So people are sort of moving away from those. And certainly a lot of our customers tell us that.

levered ETFs where they can be active in the pre-market, active in the post-market, where they can get in and out of the stock without paying these crazy premiums that you see in the options market. So I think, again,

People are just looking for these bigger moves. It's just a different mentality that traders have versus long-term investors. And, you know, when it comes to earning seasons, we see definitely a heightened level of trading volume in the products. It goes to show that you get heightened awareness and engagement in that period because people are bullish or bearish on certain stocks and looking to use, you know, our levered single stock ETFs to play that.

Yeah, no, it's a great point. I mean, you know, if they weren't attracted to it, they would just go with the stock itself. Or just not participate at all. So it's definitely, you know, that's the attraction is for people that are really passionate about, you know, trading and, you know, follow these stocks very, very carefully and are very active around the earning season. Have you ever spotted McDonald's hot crispy fries right as they're being scooped into the carton?

And time just stands still. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.

I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about, because again, I feel like last time you were on the show, we got to spend some time on this and it was relatively new. But you've got some new stuff out. And I think that's a little interesting. So talk to me a little bit about the Yield Boost product. Well, you know, and kind of maybe put it in the terms of,

of how many single stock ETFs you have now versus just a year ago and now where you're going next with these yield boost ETFs.

Yeah, so on the levered single stock side, we have 20 funds today. We'll be launching actually three more this week. So it takes 23 levered single stocks, both long and short. YieldBoost is a new family of ETFs that we launched the first one just at the end of December, kind of before Christmas time.

And that's another sort of spin off of the single stock ETF play. So we recognize that there's a market for leverage on single companies, but there's also a market for income or yield on single companies as well. So what YieldBoost is about is trying to create a high level of yield by selling options, in our case, put options on actual levered single stock ETFs in the case of Tesla to generate that high yield value.

but also offers some downside protection because the options that we're selling are out of the money, which means they have less of a likelihood to be exercised. So yield boost is a new concept. It will be not just single stocks, but it will be indices as well. The TSYY, which is our first offering, that's on Tesla.

That is the first of a potential family of 20 funds. And again, really looking to capture the market for income right now or for yield, which is also a really big market as people try and look to replace traditional forms of income or yield in the portfolio, mainly fixed income. So...

And it's funny because when we were talking in the pre-show, I made the assumption that it was, because usually when you say yield, I usually think, oh, covered calls. And you talked a little bit about it. It's that downside protection using puts. So can you kind of walk us through the mechanics? Because when I think of the protective puts or call writing, the two things, it's always a matter of,

How far out do you go with your expiration? And how do you choose your strike? So what, do you guys have a formula that you use or what are you doing there? Yeah. So I think with, with covered calls, there's a lot of, a lot of strategies in the market that use the covered call strategy. And, and,

The covered calls, people just need to be aware that when you sell that call option, the majority of these products do that at the money, which means that there's a 50% chance of being exercised.

So the upside's capped, so you receive the premium, but your downside is not protected at all. And I think that one sort of cautionary tale with covered calls, as we've seen, is that doing covered calls on growth stocks is challenging because clearly those products or those underlying stocks move up over time. And where we've seen...

Covered calls and growth stocks have typically been able to produce quite good yields, but that's come by sacrificing the principal. In other words, your NAV has been eroded, and there's big issues with NAV erosion. So YieldBoost tries to solve that problem by combining the selling the puts, in our case,

Like I said, I mentioned it's out of the money, typically one standard deviation. So your chances of being exercised go from 50% all the way down to 15.8%. So you have a much smaller chance of being exercised. Therefore, that gives you downside protection. And that's really what we're trying to do is solve for the NAV erosion problem by still giving people high levels of yield, but again, trying to protect some of that downside so you don't just get your principal eroded over time.

And that's really the yield boost philosophy of which I think TSYY is a good, so far, a good demonstration of the power of that sort of philosophy. And, you know, I'm going to show real quickly, just kind of, and this comes from your Granite Shares website. So,

Is this right? Distribution yield of 35.11%. So I paid the first distribution at the end of January. So if you take that distribution and annualize it, that yield is 35.1%. And at a time when the underlying Tesla stock was falling and has been falling since the inception of the product,

So yeah, generating a nice yield where the market, you know, S&P 500 returned 20% last year. So if we keep up this kind of performance, that's a very nice level of return that comes from the strategy. Yeah. And so how often are these distributions, are they on a set schedule? Monthly? Yes. Quarterly? Monthly payers. So we have another income ETF. It's not use options, but HIPS, which we've

We've already talked about it before briefly, but it's a monthly payer just like that. Yeah. And so just to kind of put this in a different bucket, and I should warn folks that if you do pull out using a market search chart, for instance, one of the problems with a product like this, if you look at just a regular price chart,

you know, the distribution comes out and it makes it look like the stock got hit. Um, I'm just going to show a, uh, a quick market search chart. And I, I want to make sure that people are very aware, um, that, you know, you, you have to make an adjustment. So here's TSYY. Um, and, and yes, you know, Tesla has come down, but you see, uh, this, this huge, you know, drop on this day, you see this, you know, uh, well, this is maybe, maybe real, but this one was a distribution. Um,

So you have to kind of backtrack

back that out and adjust for it. So that's something that you can't really use a comparison chart of, oh, let's compare this versus this, unless you're looking at a total return. And you were kind enough to bring us one from Bloomberg, so I'll just show that real quick. And this shows the white on the top is your yield boost, so that's TSYY. Then we've got a yield max and

Tesla itself, this lower part. So again, kind of walk us through the chart and what we're looking at here. Yeah, so here you see the total return performance of three different trades. So there's the yield boost since inception on the top, and then you have the two at the bottom, which is the stock price of Tesla, the company.

and another ETF, in this case a popular ETF on Tesla, covered call strategy. So you can see the difference really between the two.

And the point here is that on a total return basis that you see the yield boost product has maintained its value, total return of 4%, which includes obviously the distribution since inception versus a market where the price of Tesla dropped fairly significantly over 24% in this time. So kind of trying to demonstrate the value of that downside protection strategy while still giving that high level of income that we talked about.

Yeah. So, again, this is kind of a newer product, so I feel like we have to kind of... Maybe if you could walk us through a few different scenarios, because you show me this, and I'm like, oh, well, this is awesome. Tesla went down this much, and you didn't. You maintained the value and even got a little bit of a performance above zero, above the zero line. Where would you expect...

this to kind of what should investors be aware of like oh be careful of these situations where it's going to be a little bit negatively affected

I think, again, it's about the downside. So when you sell a put, when you sell an option of any kind, you're receiving premium. And that premium is the income you're paying up. So your upside is capped at that point. So regardless of whether you buy a put right, such strategy or a covered call, the payoff is identical. So you're capping your upside.

So therefore, you're just trying to limit your downside at that point. And therefore, your downside is just about the performance of the underlying versus the exercise price of the option. And so what any kind of strategy does

What any of these don't like is clearly when the underlying moves down a lot and through the excise price. And so that's how you can get these downward, downdraft movements. But that's clearly the risk with anything. So your ideal scenario is like if you imagine a scenario where it's almost like an insurance company.

where you're, let's say you're a car insurance company, and in this case, you're writing car insurance, you're receiving the premium. So clearly the scenario that you want is for everybody to drive around their cars and not have any claims or not have any accidents. And that way you just collect 100% of the premium and there's no payout. And then you go for the scenarios of, okay, well, if someone has an accident, but...

you know, the accident's not that bad and it's not more than the premium that you receive, then you're still winning because of that. But then you have the catastrophic scenario where everybody crashes their car on the same day and, you know, you don't have enough to cover. So,

you know, you, you, again, you've got to talk about the, the crash scenarios in the underlyings, um, where, you know, the price would crater like such an incredible amount in a day that, um, your performance would be highly correlated to that and, you know, lose a considerable amount of your, of your assets. Great. Um, one of the questions I'm looking at some of the YouTube comments. Uh, one of the questions coming from there is from Barry and he's asking about, um,

For these yield boost products, since you've got this distribution that's coming, is there a way to just automatically have that distribution reinvested back in? Is that something that you offer or something to your broker? Well, this is a great question because this goes to the, sometimes I call it the blessings and the curses of ETF issuance in that as an ETF issuer,

We manage the fund. And so we're responsible for the performance of the fund. It's our fund. We create it, we issue it, but then we list it on the stock exchange. And from that point, we're disintermediated from the point of sale and therefore ultimately our customer.

So the way you buy an ETF is through a broker. It's not through us. So therefore, any kind of reinvestment plan has to therefore be offered by the broker. It's not something that's offered by us directly. So a question for your broker is, do they offer reinvestment plans? Most do, but that would be definitely something to talk about with them. Perfect.

And since we did this last time, let's talk about, okay, you've got Tesla out there. Can you share at all some of the plans that you have going forward for some of these other yield boost products? Yeah, so the family will be a mix of single stocks. So Tesla, Nvidia, Coinbase, some of the greatest hits of the levered single stock world.

And then also on the index side, so baskets, targeted baskets, broad baskets in the form of indexes linked to the NASDAQ, linked to SPY, the Russell, et cetera, and even to Bitcoin. So huge different array of products, but ranging from very targeted to single stocks and Bitcoin to much more diversified in terms of broad index exposure. Great.

I think I've covered all the questions that I had. So is there anything I missed before we kind of go to the current market? Anything that you're like, oh, you know what? People really need to know this on either the single stock leveraged and inverse or the yield boost kind of a final thought on those.

I think we covered the basics. But, you know, again, like whether anybody was watching it and has more questions, you know, please feel free to reach out directly.

Perfect. And I should have mentioned that at a few places where people might kind of follow along what's going on, at Granite Shares on X or at Will Rind, that's R-H-I-N-D, for following on X. Do you ever do videos or anything like that on X, some instructional product? We do. We have our own YouTube channel.

sort of podcast ourselves. Um, so the high conviction podcast on YouTube. So if you just look up granite shares and I think while we focused more on just pure educational content, typically about markets, um, we'll start to do more educational stuff around products as well where appropriate. But for now, yeah, we do a lot of content on X. We have a sub stack as well. Granite shares sub stack where we post a lot of good stuff. So, um,

different ways people can consume what we're putting out. Yeah, perfect. Okay, let's kind of shift gears again and we'll go to the current market. And we're going to be kind of putting some of these products in the context of how you might use them in the current market. But I wanted to just kind of bring up the NASDAQ to start and get your thoughts on a few things because...

Certainly one of the things that sticks out on this chart is the ugliness of December 18th. And that, of course, was the Fed reaction. And it really kind of seems like we've had a little bit of a chop fest, something that we were talking about on one of our shows, IBD Live, this morning, where it just is a lot of back and forth, which I know for leveraged markets,

leveraged ETFs, you know, whatever, that's kind of like your worst case scenario because that's where you can really kind of lose that. You're tracking it on the daily, but you can really kind of lose that value long term. That's right. If you're a long term holder, but obviously for short term, it's an environment that people love because it's up and down and that's what people are looking for.

Yeah, yeah. So, again, just again that warning that if you've been holding over this period, your results will be very different than if you were just one day at a time kind of person, which, again, as you said, by design. But maybe put this in the context of...

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Some of these economic reports, I mean, it seemed like after our 50 basis point cut in September by the Fed,

It seemed like people were a little bit more lax on our economic reports. The CPI, jobs, it was kind of like not as big a deal. And then December 18th happened. Now it seems like everyone's focused on every CPI report, every jobs report. We just had a CPI report today. We have a PPI report tomorrow, jobless claims tomorrow. And it just seems like all this is a little bit more in focus. We had Powell speaking the last couple days and...

I mean, you look at the 10-year Treasury yield, and I mean, this was quite a day for the 10-year Treasury yield. So is this kind of environment, what would you say about it? How would you characterize it?

I think the environment is a little bit volatile and specifically the market, I think, is looking for some clearer direction around the policies of the new administration specifically. So the talk of tariffs, the talk of the different things, you know, having tariffs being put on, having them being put on pause is just causing some volatility and

Now, specifically today, obviously, we had a CPI number that came in hotter than expected, which caused the market to sell off. Now...

If you remember, we had a very similar thing happen last year where we came out of the gates with a hot CPI print. That then caused some volatility in the market, recalibrated expectations around the Fed, cutting rates. So I think that there's a lot of anomalies in this report. And to me...

While kind of interesting to look at it or like a little bit disappointing, perhaps, I think it's more noise than anything. And, you know, we shouldn't take this one number to mean that much at this time. And again, I go back to last year where there's a lot of anomalies coming off of the end of the prior year and the beginning of a new year. Hmm.

So I didn't really see anything in that report which would tell me that there's a big inflation problem or inflation starting to be a problem. So for me, more noise, but it just shows, I think, that we are sensitive as a market right now to almost any negative data point. And like I said, I mentioned earlier, we've seen that with the company earnings where

All things being equal, the company delivers an amazing set of results. But if the guidance is slightly below where market is expecting, even just for one particular product service, part of the business, then that can sort of knock the stock quite a bit. But it typically tends to be the case that stocks have bounced back from that because earnings have been resilient. And let's chat a little bit about the small cap because...

A lot of times when you talk about 10-year treasury yield rising, that does tend to hit small caps a little bit harder. And the Russell 2000, for as many times as I thought it was poised and ready to go, it's Lucy with the football all over again. And it feels like that's kind of the case again. So when do you think small caps will have their day again?

Look, it comes back to the point I was trying to make on interest rates and policy and certainly inflation, which is there has to be a bit more certainty around policy and around the direction of travel for interest rates and inflation. So,

So we had that. You remember when people started to get really bullish around small caps last year and felt like inflation was dropping like a stone and the interest rates were also going to come down by an order of magnitude. And then, like you said, when those expectations start to all be rolled back, particularly on the on the interest rate side,

at the end of last year, then small caps sold off and they're selling off again. Remember that 30% roughly of the companies in the Russell are not profitable. And so they're very sensitive to movements in interest rates and inflation.

Again, a lot of these businesses will be sensitive to tariffs potentially. So the environment just has to be a bit more solid than it is. And again, if we are in an environment where interest rates are going to stay higher for longer, again, that's not good for anybody that's carrying a lot of debt.

And so the market will switch back to what it's done before, which is prioritize the mag seven, you know, as one example of companies that are really sort of separated from the whole debt argument and, you know, trade, uh,

on their own massive, you know, cashflow generative companies that, you know, really is sort of completely removed from the whole debt argument and interest rate. They're not interest rate sensitive, but really either. Right. You know, another, another aspect here that is probably worth talking about is, is gold. And Granite shares has a bar BAR as a ticker symbol that, you know,

kind of tracks gold and this is, yeah, the way that gold has been acting, and I do have a position myself in gold. How do you think this is useful for people right now to think of gold? It can be certainly a volatile instrument and you always have your gold bugs and your gold bears, the people that won't touch it, but what's kind of your take on where gold stands right now?

I think gold has been sending a warning for quite some time now. So remember that when, for those of us in the kind of gold industry, when gold went through 2000, that was seen as a massive, massive number for the gold market. And now to think that we're knocking on the door of 3000 an ounce with interest rates as high as they are on a relative basis would be almost inconceivable a few years ago.

So what's changed? I think that gold is feeding off a lot of the sensitivities that we're seeing in the equity market and the fixed income market. In other words, the uncertainty, the more that stocks take higher, is certainly feeding into the gold market. The debt and deficit situation, which is a big part of the tariff conversation, is a big part of the uncertainty, again, feeding the gold trade.

particularly this idea that while the U.S. is certainly going to attempt to make some progress on the debt and the deficit situation with what Musk is doing with Doge as one example, there's a lot of major countries in the world that

really in a tough spot with debt and deficits and don't seem to be really going in the right direction or are perhaps even unable to go in the right direction. And so gold has become that hedge against these kind of problems. And I would sort of say that in the same breath, you're starting to hear more and more Bitcoin be mentioned. But this idea of an asset that's not correlated to the stock market, to the bond market, to, you

you know, government debt, other issues that are really sort of plaguing the business cycle and ordinary stock and bond investors. You're starting to see more traction, I think, from people saying, hey, you know what, what's the value of just holding a percentage of my portfolio that, in the case of gold, will never go bankrupt, something that doesn't have credit and counterparty risk?

It's just a lump of metal. It doesn't have a correlation longer term to the stock or bond market. And I think you're starting to see that in terms of the premium that people are finding in gold. So speaking of correlations, this kind of brings up another point that with a lot of the stocks that you have your leveraged single stock ETFs on, a lot of them

are the ones that are foremost on a lot of people's minds. And I would imagine the correlation among some of these stocks could be fairly high. So I guess when you have something like what we had on the 27th, where DeepSea comes out and everything AI just gets whacked in one foul swoop, maybe talk a little bit about how

how to weather those kind of storms if you are playing the leveraged ETF side. Well, that's where I think that people love these products. So on the one hand, you had the biggest one-day drop for NVIDIA down 16%, 17% at one point at the low. So 30% give or take if you were in the 2x levered NVIDIA funds. There's a huge drop in one day.

We saw people coming in and buying the most aggressive we've ever seen in our company's history. We had over a billion worth of inflows that one day into the 2X NVIDIA fund, into NVDL. Into? Buying? Into. Yeah. Just in that one fund in that day. So that shows you, I think, how engaged people are and how willing people are to buy the dip in the stocks that they love the most or have the highest conviction in.

And, you know, NVIDIA has certainly been one of those stocks, if not the stock, I think, for those high conviction plays. And, yeah, those days, on the one hand, you can say, you know, clearly if you bought the top and you lost money, it's terrible. But a lot of people who are trading these products live for those days because those are the days when you get that volatility and people are looking for an exit point or an entry point depending on what they're doing. Mm-hmm.

And then I know you also, when I've had you on before, you've kind of shared your thoughts on some other commodities and stuff. You kind of have a commodity basket. And I was telling you how much I appreciated you educating me on platinum versus palladium versus catalytic converters and all that stuff. So anything on the commodity side that we should be – I feel like commodities have been –

they were very top of mind on some of your past appearances because we were in more of a downturn for a lot of stocks. But is that kind of, are people still looking at particular areas of commodities in your mind? I'd say, honestly speaking, Justin, not as much as you might think. And the reason for that is because commodities have been in a down cycle for a couple of years now.

So if you want to talk about a value play in the market, then I would argue that perhaps the number one value play right now is in commodities, not including gold, of course, which is trading at all-time highs, the pro-cyclical commodities.

Oil, particularly energy, metals, agricultural commodities, as everybody probably knows, Warren Buffett has continued to buy shares in Occidental Petroleum, of course, in this particular environment. So I think...

If you're looking at something that's kind of depressed and has been sort of bombed out versus everything else, you know, Bitcoin's at all-time highs, gold's at all-time highs, stocks are at all-time highs, then, you know, commodities are certainly worth consideration. So, absolutely, it's something that I think people should be paying attention to, but...

Not on the majority of people's radar at the moment as they focus on momentum chasing in Bitcoin or in stocks or other parts of the market.

A few other, I'm again looking at some of the comments on the YouTube channel right now, and some folks were asking about the Palantir. Oh my goodness. Yeah, so they were talking about the return. They're like, wait a minute, is this right? Are we looking at this right? Yeah.

Certainly the best performing ETF we've ever launched in terms of return over that period. Yeah. And I do have to disclose, I do have a position in Palantir. I wasn't brave enough to go with the leveraged myself. Just Palantir was volatile enough for me. But yeah, talk about that. I mean, what a move here. What a move. What a company. So we start at $25. So the

The performance that people are looking at is absolutely real. That went from $25 when we launched back in September to now, as you're seeing on there, $289. Are you showing? Yeah, $289. Unbelievable. And when we launched probably about something like two or three weeks after we launched, they announced they were going to go into the S&P 500. So it was a big lift on that news.

Then not too long after that, there was an announcement they were going to move the listing from the New York Stock Exchange to NASDAQ so they could be eligible for the NASDAQ 100, the triple Qs. So there was a big lift from that as well. And as you know, the results have been stellar. The Q4 earnings that just came out, they absolutely smashed it again. And the stock's just been on a tear. I think it's one of these ones where the zeitgeist –

The retail zeitgeist is alive and kicking. Retail investors love this stock, and those that follow it have been very passionate about it for a long time. We have a business in Europe where it's a bit older than what we have here, so we've had a Palantir ETF in Europe for a number of years. It's a company that...

might be not known to everybody in the same way that perhaps now NVIDIA is, but for those that know, they know. And as you said, the passion is high. If you look on X, a lot of commentary, I mean, it's not just Palantir, of course, there are plenty of companies, but there's a lot of people very passionate about the company, its prospects, and particularly it's an AI darling, of course, just like so many of the other stocks, but

Yeah, one of these exciting companies that has just been on an amazing ride. Yeah, absolutely. And just for comparison purposes, I'm going to put the non-leveraged version here. Again, a very nice move. I'm going to switch to the weekly chart here, especially if you just go back.

you know, two years, uh, the move it's had off the bottom, it was certainly, you know, under, under the weather for a little bit as most things were in 2021. Um, so yeah, uh, a very, very impressive move. Um, and, uh, well, we'll, uh,

Any final thoughts? Because, again, I really learned a lot. The protective put side is, again, something that we just had someone on a couple weeks ago, Matt Caruso, talking about using puts to hedge. Yeah.

It seems like there's a lot of ways, new ways for people to kind of protect their portfolios with some of these products, whether it's an inverse ETF to protect some of their hedge going into earnings or something like that. There's just a lot of new ways of kind of doing portfolio construction. So, yeah, that's great. Any final thoughts?

Yeah, I mean, you hit the nail on the head. I mean, these are the two biggest trends in investing right now, leverage and income or leverage and yield. And so whether it's on the back of the credible performance that we've seen just from the market more broadly, but from certain stocks in the AI space and the crypto space, people are trying to take advantage of the momentum there. And then also on the yield side that...

with the advancements and the improvements and liquidity on the option side and the proliferation of options contracts themselves on all sorts of new stocks and products, we're seeing a lot more opportunity in the option space to deliver income. And again, that's replacing traditional fixed income strategies where people have been burnt with bonds in this bond bear market. Yeah. Well,

Well, Will, thank you so much for coming on again. Again, I think it's really exciting to have some of these innovations and to kind of hear about it so early in the process. We'll definitely be keeping our eye on the yield boost up. And as a reminder, folks can look at X both at Will Rind, W-I-L-L-R-H-I-N-D, and at GraniteShares.com.

for more information. And plus, you mentioned the YouTube videos that you produce. YouTube channel and Substack as well. So follow us on both of those. Yeah, so awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Okay.

that's going to wrap it up for us this week. Thank you so much for joining us. And next week, we're going to have Harold Morris on the show. He, of course, is one of our senior product coaches. He likes to go, he's kind of our options expert. He does a lot of options, a lot of spread trades. So we'll talk a little bit about some of those

trades that he is doing, how he chooses his strikes, how he chooses his expiration dates and everything like that. I'm actually going to be doing it remotely. I'm going to be doing it from Las Vegas, probably doing it from my hotel since I will be at the Las Vegas Money Show. So if any of you are going to be in Las Vegas for that money show, I hope you come by and see me. I