Interview with Geir Espekog — Boreas ETF

Geir Espekog speaking to Patrick Dewayne at the Finfluencer Circle at castle of Kronberg

Interview with Geir Espekog — Boreas ETF

Who are you, and what makes Boreas different from the large ETF providers?

Boreas is a new and innovative thematic ETF brand, managed by Lunate, an Abu Dhabi institutional asset manager with around 115 billion dollars under management. The team behind the brand has spent careers building and scaling ETF businesses at some of the largest names in the industry, including BlackRock iShares, FTSE Russell and Flow Traders.

The large providers are very good at one thing: scaling broad, low cost exposures, the index trackers that form the core of most portfolios. They have won that game. But scale does not equal innovation. A large house has little incentive to move early on a new theme, because a young theme is too small to matter on its balance sheet. That leaves room for a focused boutique to innovate, build higher quality products, and identify structural themes early.

Our approach is to combine active thinking with index discipline. We do the research and conviction work of an active manager, then deliver it in a transparent, low cost index format. The best of both worlds, applied at boutique scale with institutional infrastructure behind it.

What have you launched so far, and why these themes?

Geir Espekog from BOREAS ETF presenting LUXY, QQCC and POWR to Patrick Dewayne

We launched three UCITS ETFs in under two months, all listed on Xetra and on the Abu Dhabi exchange. Each targets a structural, decade long theme rather than a passing trend.

QQCC gives exposure to quantum computing, built on the earliest quantum index in Europe. We think of quantum as a new sector forming inside the semiconductor industry. Just as GPUs revolutionised AI, quantum looks set to revolutionise science, from chemistry to materials to drug discovery. The chips already exist and the breakthroughs are arriving.

POWR captures the capital investment flowing downstream from semiconductors into data centres, power and grid infrastructure. If you own a standard index you already hold the chipmakers, but you hold relatively little of the utilities, industrials and infrastructure that physically power AI. We expect around 650 billion dollars going into data centres this year, with a large share spent beyond the chips themselves, and that total could approach a trillion dollars a year by the end of the decade.

LUXY is a focused, pure luxury ETF and a play on long term global wealth creation. Other providers stretch the definition of luxury into ordinary consumer brands. We do not. Luxury runs on aspiration, heritage and status, behaviours that persist across cycles, and it is one of the clearest ways to express the wealth being created globally.

The thread across all three is concentrated, high conviction exposure to structural themes that we believe are underrepresented in standard indices like the MSCI World and the S&P 500, and whose importance we expect to grow over time.

Why is now the right moment for private investors to engage actively with thematic ETFs?

Two things are happening at the same time. First, a new generation of investors is taking a more active role in their own savings. Digital platforms have removed the old barriers, and people who once left everything to a bank adviser are now building their own portfolios. They also recognise they need to be more deliberate about retirement than the previous generation was.

Second, the thematic category is still early and it is accelerating. European defence ETFs raising around 20 billion euros in roughly 18 months is one recent example of how quickly demand can move when a real theme meets the right product. The category is maturing the way the broader fund market did, and the houses that move first on a theme are rarely the largest ones.

So for an investor the question is less about whether thematic exposure belongs in a portfolio, and more about timing. The themes that really work and compound tend to be the ones held before they become obvious or mainstream.

Thank you Geir, I am happy to see you at the Finfluencer Circle!

Birgit