Animal Spirits Podcast Talk Your Book: Public & Private Opportunities in AI
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Nov 10, 2025 Jonathan Shelon, COO at KraneShares and leader behind AJAX ETFs, dives into the burgeoning AI investment landscape. He discusses the innovative inclusion of private companies in ETFs to capture foundational AI models. Shelon also compares today’s AI trends to the dot-com era, emphasizing sustainable revenue growth in the sector. The conversation covers the fund's diverse portfolio strategies and highlights key players like NVIDIA and ASML, while exploring the future of AI, from hardware to humanoid robotics.
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AI Needs Hardware, Infrastructure, Applications
- Building an AI portfolio requires hardware, infrastructure, and applications as distinct but interdependent layers.
- Ignoring private foundational-model companies leaves a meaningful part of the AI ecosystem uncovered.
Limit And Fair-Value Private Holdings
- ETFs may hold up to 15% in illiquid securities, so plan private exposure carefully.
- Fair-value private holdings daily and build infrastructure to produce a NAV each day.
Secondary Markets Signal Private Prices
- A large secondary market now trades private AI shares, giving price signals and liquidity.
- Craneshares uses secondary-market data plus qualitative overlays to set private fair values.