Young Jae Lee is a Senior Investment Manager at Pictet Asset Management — a Geneva-based firm founded in 1805, still owned by its managing partners 220 years later, and one of the largest asset managers in Europe. Young Jae joined Pictet in 2010, spent his first seven years covering emerging market technology as an analyst, and now runs the strategy behind RISE — the Pictet Emerging Markets Rising Economy ETF.

In this episode, Young Jae walks through a fundamental problem with how US investors get emerging market exposure today. The MSCI Emerging Markets benchmark is more than 70% Korea, Taiwan, and China. Its top five holdings — TSMC, Samsung, SK Hynix, Tencent, Alibaba — mirror the same technology-heavy concentration as the top five names in the S&P 500. Buying a passive emerging market fund alongside a US portfolio, he argues, doesn't diversify — it amplifies the risk you already have.

RISE was built to solve that problem. The fund invests only in emerging market countries where the working-age population is growing, which structurally excludes Korea, Taiwan, and China and shifts the portfolio into India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Mexico, and others. Young Jae explains the demographic thesis grounded in the Solow Growth Model, why he calls population growth in emerging markets structurally equivalent to what AI is in developed markets, and how the fund's 60% quantitative screen and 40% fundamental conviction sleeve are designed to work together. He also drops one of the more surprising statistics you'll hear on the show — that more than half of the MSCI EM benchmark's total return has historically come from dividend yield — and explains why that reframes the case for value investing in emerging markets.

Nick Frasse spent five years on Van Eck's internal wholesaler desk before making the uncommon move from sales into product management. He now covers the firm's thematic ETF lineup — semiconductors, robotics, data center supply chain, and most recently, space.

In this episode, Nick walks through WARP, the Van Eck Space ETF, launched in May 2025 with 20 pure-play holdings and a 50% revenue threshold for inclusion. We get into why the index was deliberately written to be forward-looking and open-ended given how quickly the space industry is likely to evolve, what Van Eck learned from its European UCITS predecessor JEDI, and how the four building blocks — satellite communications, rocket and propulsion, earth observation and data, and space exploration — actually break down in the portfolio. Nick makes the mass-to-orbit case with real specificity: from $50,000 per kilogram in the shuttle era to under $200 with Starship — a shift that reframes space from a specialty sector into an economic unlock that touches shipping, communications, data, and industries that don't yet exist.

He's also honest about the current revenue mix in the fund — still largely government-driven through prime and subprime defense contractors — and where he expects that mix to move as commercial applications scale. And he makes the case for a design philosophy that Van Eck has stuck to across its thematic lineup: build focused, pure-play, market-cap-weighted vehicles that let the winners win, and leave position sizing to the advisor.

Keith Fitz-Gerald has spent 45 years as a global investor, researcher, and strategist — starting at Wilshire Associates, building One Bar Ahead from a yellow pad in his dining room into a publication read by tens of thousands worldwide, and earning a quiet reputation as one of the most independent voices in the business. Suze Orman called him "someone you should pay attention to" on her podcast, and that recommendation triggered the kind of viral moment most publishers spend a career chasing.

In this episode, Keith walks through the research that underpins his entire investment framework — the finding that roughly 4% of US publicly listed companies have contributed essentially 100% of the wealth created in the stock market over the past century — and what that means for how investors should actually allocate capital. We get into why he believes diversification has become a problem rather than a solution, how the structural changes in modern markets (passive flows, zero-DTE options, ETF cross-correlation, 24-hour trading) have eliminated the non-correlation that diversification was originally designed to capture, and why concentration in must-have companies is the path the industry's best investors have quietly taken for generations.

Keith then breaks down FITZ — the Fitzgerald Must-Have Portfolio ETF, launched in May 2026 in partnership with Nicholas Wealth and David Nicholas. The fund holds 20 to 30 names selected through the 5D framework: digitalization, plus four other structural drivers Keith identifies as the foundation of the sixth wave of human economic evolution. He explains why companies like Walmart get classified as retail and missed by sector-driven allocators when they're actually among the most consequential tech companies on the planet, why Intel got cut from the portfolio, why he rebalances three times a year instead of four, and why he sees FITZ as a core equity holding rather than a satellite sleeve.