Roundhill's CCML puts a quarter of the fund in Chinese names via swaps

Roundhill billed the actively managed MLCC & Electronic Components ETF —CCML as a pure-play on multilayer ceramic capacitors, the small parts that store and release charge so power stays stable on a circuit board. Dave Mazza, the firm's chief executive, said at launch that production sits with a few manufacturers listed in Tokyo, Seoul, and Taipei. Tuesday's holdings still have those cities. They also have two Chinese makers, Chaozhou Three-Circle and Guangdong Fenghua, as Goldman Sachs total-return swaps.

Four U.S. funds now package that theme. Together they held $14.6 million as of Monday. Roundhill already runs this template at scale: its memory-chip fund CDRAM, listed April 2 at the same 0.65% fee, held $25.7 billion as of Monday and uses the same mix of equities, swaps, and Treasury collateral. —CCML is the capacitor cut of that bill of materials, not a replay of those assets. TrendForce said on July 6 that Murata's first-quarter orders-to-backlog had reached 1.27, above the 1.25 peak at the start of the 2018 shortage, and on July 28 that June shipments from Murata, Samsung Electro-Mechanics, and Taiyo Yuden hit a five-year monthly high even as consumer-grade demand stayed sluggish.

—CCML seeks capital appreciation, not an index. The legal mandate is much wider than MLCC makers, with a $1 billion market-cap floor and $2 million in average daily trading volume. The adviser weights the book with a proprietary method, rebalances at least quarterly, and says it does not trade between those dates.

That is active in the legal sense. It is not a stock-picking desk that turns over the portfolio between meetings.

China in the swaps, Murata in the cash book

Tuesday's holdings are not a simple stock list. A 39.9% U.S. Treasury bill due October 8 sits at the top, with a negative cash line beside it: collateral for the derivatives, not a bond fund. The economic book is the equities and the swaps.

Chaozhou Three-Circle and Yageo are Goldman-identified total-return swaps, as is Guangdong Fenghua. The two Chinese swap lines are 25.7% of the fund.

Roundhill's page says the swaps are there "in order to maintain compliance with RIC diversification tests." The prospectus also allows China A-shares and warns that swaps add counterparty, valuation, and liquidity risk a direct holding does not. The implementation matches the warning.

A Samsung Electronics swap is in the same file. That is the memory and handset parent, not Samsung Electro-Mechanics, the capacitor affiliate the marketing points at. The launch book is mostly capacitor makers; the legal sleeve is wider.

Four funds, $14.6 million

Tema’s MLCC and power-semiconductor fund —PSOX listed August 17 at 0.75%. Defiance's AI capacitors fund CAPA followed on August 25 at 0.71%, as Defiance published that ratio on September 2. —CCML opened at 0.65%, with no waiver in its September 8 prospectus. Global X's MLCC and electronic-components fund MLCC listed September 10 at 0.75%.

—CCML is the cheapest of the four. The fee gap is real and small: six basis points versus CAPA, 10 versus the two 0.75% funds. Structure is the larger difference.

CAPA is a passive tracker of the BITA AI Capacitors Leaders Index, implemented as a 98.6% swap on that index. You do not see Murata in the fund file; you see the index. —PSOX is the least concentrated of the four, with Murata at 9.6% and a book that mixes capacitor names with power-semiconductor holdings such as Delta Electronics, Infineon, and Monolithic Power Systems. Global X's fund is the closest theme twin, but its prospectus limits eligible listings to South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. That screen is why Chaozhou and Fenghua show up in —CCML and not in the Global X portfolio.

Shared cash equities understate how alike the Roundhill and Global X books are, because Roundhill's Yageo and China lines are swaps and do not match ticker-for-ticker. The names that do match still tell the story: Murata, Samsung Electro-Mechanics, Taiyo Yuden, Walsin.

Assets as of Monday, September 14. —CCML is the largest of a small group.

—CCML trades on Nasdaq while the underlying stocks trade in Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, and Chinese sessions. As of late morning Tuesday, —CCML changed hands at $25.58, a provisional 1.43% discount to a $26.04 net asset value, with the regular session still open.

By August 18, TrendForce had cited standard-case lead times of 14–18 weeks, with some high-capacitance Samsung Electro-Mechanics parts listed around 40 weeks on DigiKey. Four tickers now sit on that tightness. Consumer-grade demand has not come with it. None of the four funds has a performance record worth reading.