Talk Your Book: The Bull Market in Real Assets

Today's animal spirits talk your book is brought to you by Van Eck. Go to vaneck.com to learn more about the Van Eck Real Assets ETF, ticker Racks, r a a x. That's vaneck.com to learn more. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben are solely their own opinion and do not reflect reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Ritholtz Wealth Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. This interview reflects the speaker's views as of the recording date and may change without notice. It includes forward looking statements about markets, economic conditions, and investment strategies that are not guarantees of future results. References to past market performance, asset classes, including gold or commodities, or prior cycles are for illustrative purposes only and do not represent any VanEck funds performance. The VanEck real assets ETF, RAAX, is a diversified fund of funds and does not track or replicate any single asset class. Welcome to animal spirits with Michael and Ben. Michael, one of the things that I think has always irked you and me a little bit about, like, the hard asset crowd is that it's usually, like, the the bull case for that stuff is, like, the bear case for everything else. Right? This stuff is only going to work because everything else is gonna fall apart and or the dollar is gonna collapse or whatever. We haven't heard many cases being made for well, what if, like, actual, it's more growth and the need for this stuff and things getting better innovation that is causing this stuff to go up? I love it. Maybe these things can go hand in hand. It's yeah. It's it's an optimistic take for owning an asset class that is otherwise well, it's I don't know if real assets are an asset class, but, like, gold, for example, is otherwise have, held because things might not be going so great, which is certainly part of the story here. But it's more than just that. Yeah. So we talked to David Schasler. He is the head of multi asset solutions at VINAC, and he runs the VINAC real assets ETF. And he made this case to us. He said, listen. What if the fact that we have all this innovation going on in AI, there's gonna need to be a huge build out. There's gonna need to be all this energy, and it's going to improve growth because it improves productivity. But to get there, we need to spend a lot of money, and that's gonna cause all these real assets to be in heavy demand high demand. So we did kinda get the and this is something you and I have been …