00:00 Speaker A

Of the over $13 trillion of total assets invested in ETFs, where exactly were investors putting their money? For a deeper dive on the biggest themes that defined ETFs in 2025, we’re joined by Christian Magoon, Amplify ETF CEO for this week’s ETF report brought to you by Invesco QQQ. Christian, thanks for being here.

00:13 Speaker B

Hey, good to see you, Julie.

00:14 Speaker A

I mean, I guess, I don’t I don’t know when the last time we didn’t have a record amount of inflows. I I guess I’m looking at the chart and it looks like uh maybe 2022 was not quite as strong, but like mostly it’s gone up into the right, right? In terms of the of the the inflows into ETFs.

00:30 Speaker B

Yeah, I mean it’s a great industry to be in and certainly for investors, there’s a lot of advantages looking at ETFs versus other vehicles. I like to say ETF, efficiency for tax efficiency and cost efficiency, T for transparency and then F for flexibility. Those benefits from the ETF wrapper are just hard to ignore for investors.

00:54 Speaker A

Okay, so let’s talk about some of the big themes that were affecting those inflows and where money was going. Um, I know you were watching what was happening in the precious metal space. Obviously gold itself, silver the itself were doing very well. How was that playing out with ETFs?

01:10 Speaker B

Yeah, silver and gold has been definitely a theme this year. You know, with gold up over 60%, silver up over 120%. So we’ve seen strong interest in both physical silver and gold as well as gold, silver and mining uh ETFs. Uh some of the silver mining ETFs are up over 170%. We have one SILJ. So uh these types of rocks are getting a lot of demand. You know, gold’s a little bit different than silver. Silver has a lot of uh future demand when when it comes to electronics, data centers, batteries. So uh we think that’s a really interesting area that will continue into 2026.

01:54 Speaker A

Um and then of course, this has been an interesting year for crypto, right? Because it’s sort of like there were almost two parts of the year when it comes to crypto, right? In terms of ETFs, enormous flows into crypto ETFs, but then of course, we had the price come down a lot in the second half of the year. So what did that, again, what did that look like in ETFs?

02:22 Speaker B

Yeah, so tons of inflows uh really up until October 10th when we’ve had this kind of crypto crash and markets really gone down to sideways since then. Uh we’ve seen a little continued inflows and some new launches with some of the smaller coins, uh though not quite as big. I’ve seen a little bit more interest in crypto option income ETFs. These are, you know, ETFs that own Bitcoin or Ethereum, Solana, XRP that write options on the crypto uh to generate monthly income. and we have a variety of those ETFs at Amplify and we’ve seen increased interest as markets have gone down a little bit or traded sideways. You can get income along the way and don’t just have to depend on price appreciation for your total return.

03:07 Speaker A

Interesting. Okay. And then of course, I mean, those were almost small little themes compared to the last theme, which is AI, which of course has dominated the discourse and the trading activity this year. Um, and there’s also been sort of a profusion of new AT AI ETFs like ways to play it. So what kind of stands out to you in that realm?

03:36 Speaker B

Well, you know, everyone’s interested in AI. Um as the year went on, we definitely heard from advisors and institutions. They’re a little bit concerned about maybe how top-heavy AI was and maybe some of the cyclical nature of spending within the industry. So, you know, we uh really thought that um kind of taking some of the waiting off top names made sense. We have an equal weight approach, AIVC, uh an index-based AI ETF that actually was the second best performer this year in all AI ETFs and again, it was because it took an equal weight approach, not only in security selection, but it equally weighted semiconductors, hardware and software as industries within AI and we think that was that prudent approach kind of ended up proving out this year. Uh we think it’s probably a prudent way to go into 2026 as well.

04:30 Speaker A

So talk to me a little bit more about 2026 and and you know, what do you think is going to be the the big dominant theme or themes next year?

04:39 Speaker B

Well, I think, you know, one issue is the mid-term election cycle. Certainly historically, we’ve seen that be kind of a interesting year with a lot of volatility, uh maybe a correction here in the first half of a mid-term year, but then a very strong historically second half or back half of a mid-term election year. So we have that playing out certainly with the dynamic with the Federal Reserve, uh probably uh loosening its purse strings, uh probably more towards middle of the year, also seems to be uh quite bullish. So, think if we looked at it, we’re cautious about the beginning of the year, more bullish towards the end of the year. A lot of that uh is because of liquidity uh opening up and the election cycle. uh maybe give us a chance to kind of uh refresh the market after three nice years from a broad-based standpoint.

05:22 Speaker B

Uh we still think metals are going to be a great place to be and I think we’d expect to see a crypto recovery uh going into uh kind of the second half of next year. Maybe is uh close as the uh second quarter. We think also potentially Ethereum and Solana could disconnect more from Bitcoin. Uh this move into stable coins and tokenization, these utility coins really benefit from that where Bitcoin really needs to see liquidity open up and again that may be a second half uh trade whereas utility coins, Ethereum, Solana, stable coins, tokenization could come early in the year and kind of boost prices sooner than Bitcoin.

06:17 Speaker A

A lot to buckle up for Christian. We’re ready for all of it. Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

06:23 Speaker B

Thanks Julie.