DRAM Hits $1 Billion, But EWY Keeps Rolling
DRAM crossed $1 billion in assets two weeks after launch, but EWY, the fund it was supposed to replace, keeps gathering money too.
The Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM) crossed $1 billion in assets under management on Friday, just two weeks after its launch on April 2. That's a remarkable run for a niche product and a home run for Roundhill, which now has one of the most successful ETF launches of all time on its hands.
I've written twice about the fund already, first previewing its launch and then flagging it as one of the smartest products I've seen from a smaller issuer this year.
The thesis was that memory stocks have been among the biggest winners of the AI boom, but investors had no clean way to play the trade, since two of the three dominant high bandwidth memory producers, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, trade in South Korea and aren't held in major U.S. semiconductor funds.
Investors had been getting around that by pouring money into the iShares MSCI South Korea ETF (EWY), where Samsung and SK Hynix together make up more than 40% of the portfolio. The demand signal was buried in those flows, and Roundhill read it correctly.
EWY Keeps Rolling
What makes the story more interesting is that EWY hasn't slowed down either. Since DRAM launched, EWY has pulled in another $235 million, pushing its year-to-date haul to $6.2 billion and its one-year total to $8.7 billion.
You could argue those numbers would be even larger without DRAM siphoning off some of the memory-specific demand, and that's almost certainly true. EWY's inflows were running hot through early March before the Iran war selloff knocked global markets lower and flipped the fund into outflows for a stretch.
As stocks have rebounded and memory names have surged back, the flows have picked up again, though not quite at the pace we saw in January and February. 
Source: Bloomberg
Given that EWY is trading right near its February highs and memory stocks are ripping again, the current inflows look fairly modest relative to where they probably would have been without a competitor on the shelf.
Different Buyers, Different Bets
Still, plenty of investors clearly want what EWY offers even with a cleaner memory vehicle available. Samsung and SK Hynix account for about 44% of the fund, but the rest of the portfolio is a long list of Korean companies across industries that have nothing to do with memory chips.
Some of those, including Korean defense and industrial names, have had strong runs of their own this year, suggesting that the Korea bull thesis may extend beyond just memory.
For investors who like the memory trade but want exposure that goes beyond that one niche corner, EWY offers something DRAM doesn't.
