Forget meme stocks and bitcoin. This fund investing in SpaceX and OpenAI may be the latest Wall Street mania.

By Isabel Wang

Destiny Tech100 fund's premium to its net asset value signals a 'speculative frenzy', analyst says

Animal spirits are again running wild on Wall Street, and some analysts hear echoes of past market excesses.

A new publicly traded fund, the Destiny Tech100 Inc. (DXYZ), which gives individual investors exposure to a number of private tech companies including Elon Musk's SpaceX, OpenAI and Fortnite maker Epic Games, on Monday saw its shares soar as much as 1,008% since its listing on the New York Stock Exchange in late March.

The fund, which trades under the ticker symbol "DXYZ," originally opened at $8.25 on March 26. Its shares surged to an intraday high of $105 earlier this week before giving back over half of its gains in the next three days to settle at $50.41 on Thursday afternoon, according to FactSet data.

DXYZ has seen nearly $2 billion worth of shares change hands since April 1. Fast-growing attention has allowed the fund to enjoy "a cultural moment that has taken on a life of its own," said Sohail Prasad, founder and chief executive officer at Destiny XYZ, the parent company of the fund.

Prasad attributed the recent volatility in share prices to the fact that most individual investors are still "discovering" what DXYZ has to offer, he told MarketWatch in a phone interview.

DXYZ currently contains shares of 23 private tech companies as holdings, with SpaceX being its largest position, at 34.6% of its portfolio. The fund seeks to eventually expand its holdings to buy stocks in 100 startups, according to its website.

How the fund works

DXYZ is a closed-end fund. Unlike an ETF or a traditional mutual fund, a closed-end fund issues a fixed number of shares at its initial public offering to raise capital that is plowed into its investments. The shares of the fund can then be bought and sold on an exchange, but no new shares are created and no new capital flows into the fund.

Unlike DXYZ, however, most closed-end funds often trade at a discount to their net asset value, or NAV, reflecting the value of their holdings minus the cost of operating the fund.

Prasad and his team built DXYZ on the heels of their success in founding Forge (FRGE), a marketplace for buying and selling private securities, in 2014. They have leveraged their relationship with the startup community since then to get access to the shares of some of the hottest private companies.

"One way is we invest directly in the company as part of their later-stage venture financing rounds, while the other is we purchase shares from early employees and early investors who are looking for liquidity," Prasad said via phone on Wednesday.

With Silicon Valley startups staying private longer these days, senior executives, investors and employees are increasingly eager to sell their shares and cash out early, usually via tender offers or forward contracts.

By the time these startups go public or get acquired, the returns on the investment will either be reinvested or distributed to shareholders as a dividend, the firm said in its prospectus. The fund charges an annual fee of 2.5%.

'Egregiously overpriced'

DXYZ had a NAV of around $53 million, or $4.84 a share, as of Dec. 31, while its market capitalization stood at over $600 million, or $50.41 a share, as of Thursday afternoon, according to FactSet data. The fund has 10.9 million shares outstanding.

Unlike an open-ended fund, the NAV of a closed-end fund isn't calculated at the end of each trading day based on the closing market prices of its securities. DXYZ, whose holdings aren't publicly traded, computes its NAV quarterly, which means investors will not get an update on its fair value until the end of its fiscal first quarter.

Still, that 942% premium to its net asset value is concerning, said market analysts.

In theory, a premium to NAV is most often driven by a bullish outlook or increasing demand for the securities in a fund. Investors are generally willing to pay a premium because they believe securities in the portfolio will move higher.

But it's almost unheard of to see a closed-end fund trading at such a high premium to its holdings - it's "egregiously overpriced," said Jeffrey Ptak, chief ratings officer at Morningstar Research Services.

Investors are effectively getting only limited exposure to the companies in DXYZ's portfolio, with their investments instead going largely to the fund's premium.

"You are not deriving any fundamental benefit that you expect to derive from paying that additional premium - you're just paying it, [but] you're not getting anything in return," Ptak told MarketWatch in a phone interview on Wednesday. "It's almost imagining that the closed-end fund suddenly possesses the ability to generate its own earnings and cash flow, which it can't - it's entirely beholden to its underlying holdings."

Prasad said the premium for DXYZ is not a concern, as "it's just a reflection of the supply and demand for the fund and, if anything, it provides that liquidity in the public markets for people to express their views."

Another Wall Street mania?

While analysts aren't drawing a direct parallel between the meme-stock craze and surging interest in DXYZ, they do see signs of a frenzy. The extent that its share price has disconnected from fundamentals makes it difficult to conclude that trading is being driven by anything other than a mania, Ptak said.

Retail investors took Wall Street by storm in early 2021. The frenzy began with speculative individual investors responding to a coordinated buying campaign on Reddit's (RDDT) "WallStreetBets" channel. Investors then engineered a huge short squeeze on shares of GameStop (GME), which skyrocketed more than 2,000% in January 2021. Several other publicly traded companies also saw a dramatic influx of individual investors into their shareholder base, pushing institutional short sellers out of stocks such as AMC Entertainment (AMC) and Bed Bath & Beyond Inc.

Shares of the latter were delisted from the Nasdaq exchange last year when the firm's bankruptcy plan went into effect.

See: The Game Stop meme-stock frenzy - what can we learn?

To be sure, many investors buying DXYZ appear to be betting some of the high profile names it holds could one day go public in a robust market debut, but several are so far still holding back from public markets. MarketWatch reported in January that SpaceX could potentially kick off an IPO process as soon as next year or 2026. Epic Games has been a privately held company since it was founded in 1991, but it has not announced any plans to conduct a Wall Street debut.

Despite the recent speculative trading frenzy, Prasad said the DXYZ is still designed to "exist long term" and focus on a "long-term investment horizon" of between five to ten years.

"This is something that we believe should change how vendors and asset classes work, where instead of it being a few ultrawealthy investors invested in [venture] funds, we now have a product that is publicly traded, transparent and has much lower fees relative to these private vehicles," Prasad said.

Why are investors so enthused right now about investing in this particular closed-end fund?

"It's scarcity," Ptak said, adding that it's also due to the fact that DXYZ offers average investors access to "very scarce assets" - the "ownership" of these pre-IPO unicorns.

"People are paying very, very steep prices to all these names, and it's highly unlikely that they, notwithstanding their good prospects, are going to be able to earn a return that confers benefits to investors," he said. "It's a speculative frenzy."

-Isabel Wang

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04-13-24 0946ET

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