Shared LunchFund manager Dr. Joel Shulman is bringing private equity access to retail investors. Meet XOVR, the exchange-traded fund that includes private holdings like SpaceX—typically only available to big institutions or cashed-up individuals. Hear how deferred IPOs have made private equity a $13 trillion market, and why Dr. Shulman believes there’s still massive growth potential, even dwarfing cryptocurrency.
Discover the risks and advantages of XOVR, the unique entrepreneurial index it tracks, and the implications of including private assets that trade much more slowly. Plus, how do Elon’s recent controversies impact XOVR’s substantial SpaceX holdings?
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Many people are not allowed to get into private equity in the US. You have to have a net worth of over one million dollars and you have to have an income above two hundred thousand. I think the potential for private equity is larger than crypto. You've got many private companies that are worth currently thirteen trillion dollars. There's no question Elon Musk people you know, either love him or hate him. Arguably, he's one of the greatest entrepreneurs we've ever had, certainly the richest on Paperjora.
And welcome to Shared Lunch, brought to you by Cheesy's. I'm Helen Madison, and today on the program, we take a look at how retail investors might get the opportunity to invest in private equity. Normally you have to be a wholesale investor to do this, in other words, an institution or an individual who has access to millions of dollars. With fewer companies listing on share markets today, searching for other potential that's not publicly listed as a hot topic in a moment to the people behind the first private public crossover exchange traded fund, Dr Joel Schulman from er Shares Before we jump in, here's some important information.
Investing involves the risk you might lose the money you start with. We recommend talking to a licensed financial advisor. We also recommend reading product disclosure documents before deciding to invest.
Everything you're about.
To see and here is current at the time of recording.
Welcome, Joel, thanks for joining us from Boston tonight.
Thank you, it's great to join you. Joel.
You're all about democratizing access to private equity. I'm really curious to see why you're so passionate about that.
Well, so, for the last twenty years, we've seen etl's increase from about one trillion to about thirteen trillion dollars. In corresponding with that growth in ETRS, we've seen a similar, almost identical increase in private equity, growing from one trillion to thirteen trillion. And now so we've seen this parallel path of two fairly large markets increase in size, considerably increase in size thirteen acts. But yet we haven't seen any sort of crossover, no linkage, and so we're excited to provide opportunity for retail investors to finally access to this private market that they've been precluded from investing in all these years.
One thing we can't ignore though this week, Joel, is the sort of sea of red that Will Street has been experiencing. They're still pretty bruised even the second week. And now the tech stocks particularly, I know that's one that you favor quite a bit, have been hit. What's your perspective a on where things are going?
But also is.
This constant volatility sort of making a sort of statement whereby some companies may not really want to list anymore and remain private.
Well so, independent of whatever has been going on in the last couple of weeks here in the US, and they've peaked about mid February, and since mid February, things have been on the decline. And that corresponds probably more so with policy issues and maybe valuation issues to some extent, a lot of things going on that you probably hear about New Zealand that is addressing sort of our internal situation with you know, potential concerns and.
Backlash on tariffs.
Independent of that, however, the reason why private equity has not been coming to market more frequently, there's been a hesitation among many of the issuers to go to the IPO market. Public markets for the last few years, and there's a variety of reasons for that, perhaps nuisance lawsuits and other things which have caused many companies to pause. So when we think about, you know, twenty five thirty years ago when Amazon went public at five hundred million dollars and in Nvidia went to market a five hundred and sixty million dollars. This is back in ninety eight ninety nine around that time period. We're not seeing that anymore. We're seeing companies stay private longer and come to market you know, ten billion, twenty billion, thirty billion, levels that twenty five years ago would have been unheard of. And so it's more of that, you know, compared to the you know, the recent tumult in the marketplace.
Okay, so this volatility, you thinking too, that this is going to be the new normal.
For example, Well, I think the current volatility is a temporary, a temporary happenstance in the US markets. In fact, if anything, I think this may be a buyer's opportunity to come in. And the reason why I say that we're the last tip we had was in twenty one twenty two, we actually had a recessionary environment. Recessionary conditions. We had interest rates going up, we had the economy slowing down. We a lot of problems stemming from the COVID nineteen.
You know crisis. And the follow from that.
Is now we're seeing a volatility associated with internal and concerns regarding your terrif issues. But the economy here in the US one of the strongest economies in the world. The economy is generally okay. I mean there's that, you know, the economy is you know, is chugging along at a two three percent you know, or so clip on GDP, and and so I don't see the same sort of issues we've had in the past when we've seen markets slow down. So I see this particular drop the last month more temporary than long term. I think actually in twenty twenty five, we're going to see the markets end in a very strong path, you know, particularly here in the US.
I see the markets on a strong note.
John, Just thinking about the popularity of private equity. I mean, we've seen the likes of governments and pension funds, a number of kind of traditional institutions if you like, want a piece of the pie. What's behind that? Are they feeling that it's least risky because I mean it is classed as an a liquid a seat.
It is a liquid And unfortunately, retail investors are not allowed to get into this. You have to be an accredited investor, at least that's the case in the US and most markets.
You have to have a net worth.
Again, in the US, you have to have a net worth of over one million dollars and you have to have an income above two hundred thousand or two hundred thousand if you're a joint filer between you and your spouse.
And so many people are not allowed to get.
Into private equity and they have to watch these opportunities pass them by. So when they read about an anthropic or an open AI or a scale AI, or an and a ROLL or an r case space X, they're not allowed to invest in. And so it's only the accredited investors, the institutional investors, the big pension funds, endowments, and the rich individual investors, the ultra high networth high network that can invest in private equities and sharing these rewards.
Joel, lets have a look at XOVR, which is the private public crossover exchange traded fund which I think you launched back in August last year, so not that long ago. And it's called the first of its kind, but is that because it is actually excess for retail investors? What's the difference?
So it's the it was the first etr to allow private equity in the ETF wrapper, and so private equity has been around for a while in open m mutual funds or closed them mutual funds, or even something called an interval fund, but this is the first time it's been in an ETF wrapper. And there's some, you know, some nuances to that. The interval fund may not trade as often or allow it may trade, it may trade more, it may trade, but it may not allow liquidity very often. I should have said that a closed end fund may trade in a premium or a discount to NAV and so the net asset value. So if it trades the premium, that means that the true value of the assets are one level and the price that you pay to access them may be at a higher level. With an ETF, it's chairly price very close to net asset value, and it allows trading through the day, which enables people to have liquidity to go in and out, which for a private equity for an et for an ETF to have private equity as unusual, it's eighty five percent. In our index. We have an index called the Entrepreneur thirty Index. It has a track record that goes back for many years and it's a growth oriented index. And importantly, when we built the index, we built the index on a VC platform. So by way of background, I'm a professor at a school called Batson College, which some people in New Zealand may have heard of. It's the number one school notnchpreneurship and I've been a ten yearful professor there for many years. And I built this model to invest in publicly traded companies based on how venture capitalists investing private companies, and so we've been doing that for many years. So for us to now go into private equities, it's consistent with the way we've invested right along, where we look at companies as if they were a private or venture capital backfirms, and we look at those companies both in the public form.
But now we're going back and getting them right before they go public.
So Joe, that index is that what this ETF private public crossover actually tricks? Is that right?
Right?
So the index is called the entrepreneur thirty index. It actually has a ticker. The E is an Edward Ars and Robert three zero thirty. If people, investors, or anyone chooses to look at XOVR, they'll see that it's highly correlated, moves very closely with the ER thirty tier indexes. We've relaunched in August twenty ninth, twenty twenty four, So prior to August twenty ninth, the fund was investing differently.
Okay, so the CTF tracks that entrepreneurial index. If you like an inseet basket of thirty entrepreneurial stocks, but you have the private equity aspect as there included, and that like I know, SpaceX is eleven percent I think of the holdings you have currently and any of these other things like open AI.
So the index does not include private So the difference between the index and XOVR. XOVR has the index for the majority of the fund, but also now has ten to fifteen percent private equities. The largest holding SpaceX. So SpaceX is around ten or eleven percent of our total portfolio and it represents the majority of our private equity holdings. We have another stock, another private stock called Klarna, which is a buy and LP later stock. It's a Swedish company. They just announced that they're going to come up with their IPO and that we expect that news to be forthcoming in the next.
Week or so.
So the holding of say ten to fifteen percent private equity, is there a cap like would the regulator come down on you if you increased that? Because I've seen, you know, some of the other competitors are thinking about maybe up to thirty five percent private equity in an eating right, What sort of constrains you for keeping it there? And is there a good reason to keep it, say fifteen percent.
So private equity is, as you point out, an illiquid asset.
And even though space x is.
A three hundred and fifty billion dollar market cap as of the last tender offer, it's still it's it's you know, it's widely held among high net worth and institutional investors. It doesn't trade is frequently obviously as a public equity security, So it's still considered illiquid. And even though it may be more liquid than other private equities, it's still in the general scheme of things illiquid and as a result, a regulatory body here in the US called the SEC the Securities Exchange Commission restricts having too much of an ETF or any it's they're called forty Act funds, which means they're regulated by the nineteen forties Acts, which includes mutual funds, open end closed end funds, and ETFs. Those instruments which go to the retail market could be limited need to be limited to fifteen percent. And I think it's a good rule because it protects the retail investor. And we're being very careful to stay underneath that fifteen percent threshold.
So it's a sort of a guard viol in some ways the font PAS, so that particus the retail and vista Right, what about in terms of excess as the no minimum investment I think is what I read. And also I mean sort of the cost you talk about it being relatively low, I mean, actually how accessible is it for someone who doesn't have lots of money?
So access for an ETF and our ETF has no minimum, so we have daily liquidity, you can come in. We have investors who come in for one hundred dollars or you know, you know, I'm sure we have probably some investors that come in for fifty dollars or one hundred or a thousand, So there's no limit, no minimum investment. Daily liquidity you can buy and sell the same day through trading hours in the US which are nine thirty to four. We try to market pretty close to net asset value which on a daily basis to get that and so we think it provides and we try to keep our fees relatively low for this type of instrument. Other instruments that have access to equity charge appreciably more than our management fee were well below one percent, and so we try to make it attractive to any investor could do. Someone could be a retail investor with fifty or one hundred dollars to put to work, and they could be somebody.
You know.
We had an investor today to come in for three million, so we have a wide range of investors who come into our fund.
What are the risks though, because we've talked about a liquid assets being the private equity aspect, but as you've sort of said, it depends really on the likes of that private equity with SpaceX, it could be slightly different. I mean the risks are they as great as they would be for other investments, or how would a retail investor kind of assess that right.
So, first and foremost the fundamental risk that the investor has in XOVR, it's just the market movement. And so we are growth oriented. We have we have exposure to attack and we primarily enforced actors, information technologies, healthcare, consumer discretionary and communication services. We have some fintech as well, and we have of course exposure you know, to space exploration. So we tend to be in high growth industries, high growth companies. And so first and foremost the risk that investor would have in our funds, which is the same that they would have for example, if they invest in the qqques or other growth oriented indices that invest heavily in tech and healthcare, is the market movement. So if interest rates rise tech in other securities which are considered long duration, long duration means you get more of your benefits in the future, those types of stocks are going to suffer when interest rates go up or when this market volatility or when markets contract. So you investors tend to see when when investors, when investors get nervous, they tend to move more to value, or they tend to move to cash, or they tend to move to bonds. When you come to private equities, you'll see it's probably even more exacerbated in the marketplace like that. So for example, one of the stocks, and even though the private markets have been you know, showing with SpaceX, you know, some of the secondary markets are showing SpaceX you know, doing well and so forth, which you know, we would expect that, you know, to do well based on a lot of idiosyncratic conditions. Some of the pure benchmarks in this market are moving. So sometimes you'll see privates not correspond with those movements because the other public markets are moving daily and privates may be seeing a stationary They tend to move in step function. They can move into step function both up and they can move into step function down. And as we saw in twenty one and twenty two, privates, you know, we're moving in a step function down. Now we're seeing you know, over the last couple of years markets were more positive, more growth oriented. We saw privates appreciating during twenty twenty three and twenty twenty four, early part of twenty twenty five, and we'll see soon. For example, probably our best litmus test is going to be one of our holdings, Klarna.
We'll see how it comes out.
We bought it an evaluation of market evaluation twelve billion. Well, it's going to come out to peer benchmarks like a firm. There's a company in Australia called after Pay that was bought by Block. You'll we'll see very soon how the market is valuing these and we expect our stock to move comparable to these valuations as well. So we'll we'll have a pretty good insight fairly soon, probably within the next few weeks, how how that particular private security is holding up or not when market information comes out.
As the advantages to investing in an eighteenth flight this into of that private equity aspects, and would you get more transparency than if I would just went straight into private equity privately you know if you know what.
I mean, Well, if you went into a private equity directly yourself, that means you're again ultra you're either a high net worth ultra high networth individual investor. You can spread your legal costs and infrastructure costs in buying these things, and plus you'll have a better idea of how to negotiate.
If you're doing it frequently.
So for many investors or let's say putting to work five hundred thousand dollars or less. Even if you're an individual investor, even if you're a high net worth investor, you may not want to go directly in. And for everyone else it's you're not allowed. You can't get into it because there are restrictions in getting in. And for even ultra high networth people, they may want the liquidity because they may want to go in. Even if they have the ability to go directly into a private equity, they may want the liquidity. Maybe they have a wedding in the family than want to spend money or buy a new house, or you'll do a buy a boat. So the liquidity becomes very important to people. And that's the advantage of an ETF.
What do you think the potential for private equity is. I've seen you've quoted before saying it could be I think five to six times the size of crypto, and well bigger than as you've already explained to ETFs. Why do you think that and how soon are we talking?
Well, Crypto is an interesting acid class. I don't recall saying it's five to six times a larger than crypto. I'm not saying I wouldn't say that I think the potential for private equity is larger than crypto in that you've got many private companies that are worth currently thirteen trillion dollars. Crypto is currently I think one to two trillion dollars. I don't know after the most recent your price point. So currently it's five to six times higher. Maybe I was quoted saying that that's currently it's higher. In terms of the trajectory, I think private equity is going to continue to attract more and more capital. We're seeing it, you know, through the early part of well we saw in twenty twenty four, is attracting a lot more of the capital going into companies than even public equity. And as I mentioned before, many companies are choosing to stay private longer for a variety of reasons. And so as a result, and this is a global phenomenon. The fact that we're seeing Karna, which is a Swedish company, coming to market here in the US, you'll suggest that this is an opportunity for global investors. So they're probably companies in New Zealand that may choose to go public someday and maybe you know, it's going to take them a while. Maybe some of your best own companies down there, you know, would like to tap the public markets. The best markets to go public tend to be in the US. They tend to be the NASTAC and the New York SoC Exchange. So for example, we've seen in Europe the London Stock Exchange pale in terms of volume compared to the US markets. Maybe one of these types of vehicles where larger, better known brands are seeing private equity as of mechanism to get there in anticipation of going public maybe six months a year, within two years down the road.
It's rocket Lab one that you've looked at, or is it a conflict given you've got SpaceX.
Rocket Lab is is a pure company. It's an entrepreneurial company. It's what we looked at. It's currently a small cap. We tend to in our XOVR ETF. One of the things I did mention these are entrepreneurial, publicly traded entrepreneurial companies, but they're large cap, which means that they tend to be ten billion dollars or larger in cap size. So rocket Lab is a company that we've looked at. It's a little small by our standards in terms of the in terms of the fund we have. Moreover, we already have a very large position in SpaceX. We see that we see SpaceX is the dominant player. And so one of the things I did not mention beforehand. When we go into private equity, one of the things we want to do is pick the leader. We want to pick the company with the biggest mote, and the case of SpaceX, one of the things I didn't mention before him. It's not only an entrepreneurial company that obviously is involved in space exploration, but as your group knows in New Zealand, it has Starlink, and Starlink is the crown jewel of SpaceX. And because they have seventy two hundred plus satellites in low Earth orbit around the world, and because they're now supplying telecommunications to geographically remote locations both the land, sea and air around the world, because it has geopolitical importance for military capabilities, this is emerging. SpaceX, which holds Starlink, is emerging. Are one of the most critical assets that the United States has from a military perspective, and we believe that this is one of those companies that's going to continue to rise in importance globally, but certainly within the US. And that's irrespective of the fact that Elon Musk is part of the the Trump administration. So there's that extra political benefit that we see that makes us like this particular asset even more.
Have you had any backlash? I mean, el Musk isn't always the most popular with everybody around the world, right.
So the backlash is there.
I mean, there's no question Elon Musk people you know, either love him or hate him. You may know, our president also has has you know, people who are polarized around him that you love him or hate him. I saw a recent poll that says he's he's now has the he now has the most popular ratings he's ever had, But he still has a large percent of the population that don't like him. So irrespective of whether people think they he's great or not, we have to recognize that, you know, politicians whether and by the way, the same thing held true for the politician before him. You know, Joe Biden was very polarizing, so half the population didn't really like him. So so in these particular situations, you know, there tends to be a backlash among you know, various political groups.
Was with Elon Musk.
You'll arguably, arguably he's one of the greatest entrepreneurs we've ever had, certainly the richest on paper. A lot of people don't like him, but a lot of people do like him, and in terms of his capabilities and what he built with SpaceX and Starlink, we think it's an extraordinary company. We know that sometimes there's again geopolitical risks. So when the US and Canada we're having tiff issues, there is a politician in Canada said, you know, we want to we want to cut off the the Starlink. We want to cut off the Starlink contract. Well, what what they're really doing, what this politician was doing is cutting off you know, starlink access for ten or fifteen thousand people you're living in geographical remote areas of Canada, then weren't going to get the cell phone service and TV. So he wasn't really hurting Starling so much as he was hurting his own consumers. So the fact that some of these assets are becoming a geopolitical you know, hot potato, we don't believe is a long term concern. We realize it's an issue, but we believe the value and the benefit of starlink not only in space exploration, but more importantly with telecommunications and what it has in terms of capabilities you know, for weather sell like monitoring and helping to grow telecommunications globally is really important.
Just wondering where does sustainability come in with the index that the fun tricks for the listed equities anyway, is there any thought of that or is it purely on on entrepreneurship and picking a great entrepreneur as opposed to an average entrepreneur.
Well, it's interesting when people talk about sustainability or ESG the so first and foremost, most of our stocks are in tech and healthcare and communication services and consumer discretionary so it doesn't have a very large carbon imprint. But importantly, when we think about governance, these are the entrepreneurs globally. And I'm sure if you think about your top entrepreneurs, your top business people in New Zealand.
They're probably entrepreneurs.
And that's certainly true in almost every country around the world that the people creating the jobs, creating the wealth for societies around the world are these entrepreneurs. And this has been true forever, right, So if you go back in your country's history. You'll see the great entrepreneurs were the ones who created the wealth in your society, just as it's these entrepreneurs have done it in other places.
Getting back to XOVR, there's a fair bit of competition on your heels. I mean Black Rock are looking at this or maybe even launched something. I say that Apollo and State Street Global Advisors, they've put a fund up that said it's gone into a bit of trouble with the regulator, and it's probably slightly different when they talk about private credit being behind it. Are you worried that there's there's many more coming in or do you think it's a good thing to have a competition and the are the big differences between the funds.
Probably well so C Street and Apollo or as you mentioned, private credit, which is a completely different market. We're in private equity and we're trying to take the leadership position with EXOVR. We're working with some of the databases to take leadership role and how private equity is being priced on a regular basis. So we're working very closely there and we're continuing to try to advance the state of the markets. And so competition's inevitable others will come in. We've been grappling with this for a while. We didn't We launched the fund in August of twenty nine of twenty twenty four, but we didn't buy our first private equity until December third, so three months later, so only a small part of the overall fund can be in private equity. As I mentioned before, private equity is consistent with our model. Our entrepreneur model started on the private side. It was based on venture capitalists, and then we extended that over to the public. And we have a track record which goes back and shows how we were able to get into things like Nvidia back in two thousand and five and our funds when we first launched, and we got Amazon in two thousand and five. So our strategy, our approach enables to get into companies fairly early on, which we think is commenser with again our investment thesis. We're basically again taking private companies, venture capital back companies and seeing as they go through and identifying them once they become public if other companies try to PLoP in private equity and maybe inconsistent with their thesis. And in fact, we recently talked to a fund manager or a CIO of a major company who put a company in called app Loven into a value fund and we couldn't we couldn't disagree more. And app love and is one of the highest growth stocks in the market. We've owned it for several years. It's gone up something like three thousand times our three thousand percent now three thousand times three thousand percent in the last two and a half years. It's not a value stock, it's a gross stock. But yet this value manager put it in. So other funds that try to put private equity into it into their funds that they're probably not going to be consistent with the investment theme.
Just to finish off, Joe, I'm just wondering what sort of takeap have you head for the IXOVR and particularly in Australia mwsaland so.
We very much appreciate you asking the question. We don't see the flows as an ETF. We're not allowed to see where they're coming home from, but we know that they're strong demand. You're coming from your part of the world just recently started. We know there are some brokers in your area that have recently listed US, and we appreciate the interest that you're express in here. It's a great story space Ax and Starlink, great story around the world. Having access to private equity is certainly, you know, part of our story and with daily liquidity, so we appreciate you helping us get the word out. Is a pleasure speaking with you, and we hope to communicate with you more in the near future.
Really appreciate you joining us, Joel, and thanks everyone for tuning in. You can watch Shed Lunch on YouTube or follow us on your favorite podcast app. Leave us a rating and a comment about what you'd like to hear next.
