Investors hungry for semiconductor stocks have made a five-week-old exchange-traded fund the most successful launch in history. Since its April 2 debut, the Roundhill Memory ETF has accumulated over $6 billion in assets, outpacing even BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust.
The surge reflects Wall Street's conviction that booming data center demand is creating a long-term shortage of memory chips for AI. "People are jumping in with both feet," said Dave Nadig, CIO at ETF Trends. DRAM took just 10 trading days to pull in its first billion dollars and last Friday saw $1 billion in net inflows in a single session.
The fund offers a simpler way to play the semiconductor boom, particularly by providing exposure to South Korean giants SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, which aren't in many other U.S. chip ETFs. "A lot of investors view this as a proxy for hard-to-access Korean stocks," said Steve Sosnick of Interactive Brokers.
Retail investors bought $55 million of DRAM on Monday, the largest single-day inflow since launch. Vanda Research called it "the poster child for the ongoing semiconductor frenzy."
The downside: such momentum leaves the market volatile. Tuesday saw a 7% slump in DRAM as chipmakers pulled back. Still, the fund remains above key moving averages. "The uptrend remains intact," Sosnick said.