The manager of a major exchange-traded fund and mutual fund notes that successful gold trading is not talked about as much as trading with artificial intelligence – but maybe it should be.
VanEck CEO Jan van Eck believes that the best investment this year is “hedging against political cycles.” For him, this means investing in Gold.
“It's quietly the best performing asset this year,” Van Eck told CNBC's “ETF Edge” on Monday at the Future Proof conference in Huntington Beach.
On Friday, gold hit another record, its 37th this year. Year-to-date, the price has risen 28% since markets closed on Friday.
Van Eck, whose company VanEck Gold Miners ETFexpects foreign investment in gold bullion to continue to boost the commodity. This should also help to push up gold miners, which started the year lagging behind the commodity. But since Friday, the VanEck Gold Miners ETF has started to outperform, up 31% this year.
“I think you have both, because if the mining companies ever catch up, it's going to crash,” he said.
As for AI trading, van Eck says it's “amazing” how investors refuse to give it up.
“It's like part of people's model portfolios or core portfolios is to have this tactical overweight of equities. And some of our largest clients have actually been buying on dips in the last week or two,” the VanEck CEO said.
Last month, his company launched the VanEck Fabless Semiconductor ETF, a counterpart to its VanEck Semiconductor ETF Excluded from this are companies that operate their own foundries, such as Intel.
FactSet reports on the new ETF’s top holdings as NVIDIA, Broadcom And Advanced micro devices As of Friday.
“Why spend billions of dollars making chips if you don’t have to?” van Eck said.NVIDIA doesn't build its own chips. So that's a different kind of investment strategy.”
Since its launch on August 28, the VanEck Fabless Semiconductor ETF has risen half a percent.
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