What Is the DRAM ETF? The $26 Billion Memory Fund That Keeps a Third of Itself in Treasury Bills

The Roundhill Memory ETF trades on Cboe BZX under the ticker DRAM. It is an actively managed fund that holds the companies making DRAM, NAND flash, high bandwidth memory and hard drives, and it began trading on Thursday 2 April 2026. Phemex lists a DRAM-USDT perpetual futures contract against it.

Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM) at a Glance

DRAM closed Friday 4 September at $59.69, up 6.61% from Thursday's $55.99, on roughly 40.8 million shares according to Yahoo Finance's daily bars. SanDisk gained 11.90% and Micron 6.10% in the same session while the index perps barely moved.

If you bought a memory ETF, you probably assumed you were buying memory stocks. On 30 June the single largest line in the portfolio was a Treasury bill, and the reason for that tells you more about this fund than any weighting chart will.

What Is the Roundhill Memory ETF?

The fund is actively managed and tracks no index. Roundhill Financial Inc. is the adviser, Exchange Traded Concepts is the sub-adviser, and seven portfolio managers have run it since inception in April 2026.

The prospectus defines a "Memory Company" as one drawing at least 50% of revenues or profits from high bandwidth memory, DRAM, NAND flash and SSDs, NOR flash, hard disk drives, or specialty and embedded memory.

At least 80% of net assets go into those companies, held as shares or as derivative exposure. That last clause does a lot of work.

For the 80% test, the Form 497K filed with the SEC values swaps and forwards at their notional amount rather than their market value. A contract barely showing a profit on paper can still count as billions of dollars of exposure.

The rest of the rulebook is plain. Weights follow modified market cap with a 25% cap per company, and holdings need $10 billion in market cap and $5 million of daily volume.

The fee is 0.65%, which the prospectus illustrates as $68 in year one on a $10,000 position.

What Does the Fund Actually Hold?

On 30 June the fund reported $25.91 billion in net assets against $27.63 billion in total assets. These were the largest cash and equity lines.

Smaller equity lines in Nanya, Winbond, Phison and Macronix make up the remainder. Micron at 2.03% looks like an afterthought, and a screener that lists only stock positions will mislead you badly here.

Where the Real Micron Exposure Lives

Four total return swaps carry the rest. A swap like this works like a rented position, where the fund pays a floating financing rate to a bank and receives whatever the referenced stock does, without owning a share of it.

Those percentages are the value of each contract, not the size of the bet behind it. Add the notionals and you get $11.03 billion, or 42.55% of net assets, in swap exposure on 30 June per the fund's N-PORT filing.

Add each stock position to its swap notional and the picture inverts. Micron runs to roughly 25.8% of net assets, Samsung to 25.0%, SK hynix to 24.0% and SanDisk to 5.2%, so three names carry about 75% of the fund.

Anyone who bought DRAM for SanDisk's 11.90% Friday got about a fifth of the exposure they pictured.

Why Does a Memory Fund Own Treasury Bills?

Treasury bills plus that government money-market fund came to 35.56% of net assets on 30 June, per the fund's N-PORT filing on EDGAR. A third of a memory fund, parked in government paper.

Think of it as the cash in a margin account, which is not the trade itself. It is the collateral that lets the trade stay on, and here it backs the four swaps carrying the Micron, Samsung and SK hynix exposure.

The other half of the answer is tax law. Roundhill's own fund page explains that it uses total return swaps to stay inside the diversification tests a Regulated Investment Company has to pass.

Holding a quarter of a fund in one stock breaks those tests, and renting the exposure through a swap does not. It is also why published weightings sum past 100%.

The issuer's fund page states that its weight calculation combines the stock position with the position held through swaps, while the collateral behind those swaps is listed separately.

How Did DRAM Trade on Friday 4 September?

Friday's cash session opened at $56.92, ran to $59.79, dipped to $56.74 and closed at $59.69. The Phemex DRAM-USDT perp closed the same day at 59.57, about 0.20% under the fund, after 55.97 on Thursday.

The rest of the memory block moved together. SanDisk closed at $1,740.00 on Nasdaq for an 11.90% session and Micron at $1,016.59 for 6.10%, against a Nasdaq-100 index perp that finished 0.42% lower.

On Phemex perp bars the Tradr 2x SanDisk wrapper added 23.78% and the 3x semiconductor bull fund 9.38%. No dated company filing explains any of it.

SanDisk has published no 8-K since 5 August, and Micron's only August 8-K covered leadership appointments. The one dated primary released into the session was the BLS Employment Situation at 08:30 ET, showing 162,000 payrolls added and unemployment at 4.1%.

That is chronology rather than a cause anyone has evidenced. One thing to keep straight.

The perp printed 59.85 on Saturday and 60.05 on Sunday while US cash markets were shut, so those bars are drift on a closed underlying rather than sessions. Reading them as a trend is how traders on tokenized equity perps get hurt over a weekend.

What Are Memory Stocks?

DRAM is the volatile working memory in every PC, phone and server, and it forgets everything the moment power stops. Prices swing hard with supply cycles.

TrendForce, a research firm, reported conventional DRAM contract prices rising 58% to 63% in the second quarter of 2026 and server DRAM up 13% to 18% in the third.

NAND flash keeps its contents without power, and it is the storage side of the fund, carried by SanDisk, Kioxia, Western Digital and Seagate. Our profile of SanDisk CFO Luis Visoso covers where that business stands.

High bandwidth memory is the AI-adjacent piece, stacked DRAM sold into accelerators at a premium. SK hynix, Samsung and Micron are the three suppliers, and we've already broken down that rivalry in Micron vs SK hynix on HBM.

What Are the Risks of Trading DRAM?

Concentration Is the Design, Not an Accident

Three companies carry roughly three quarters of the effective exposure, and the prospectus classifies the fund as non-diversified. It also names North Korea tensions and a China-Taiwan conflict as specific risks, which reflects where the factories are.

Swap Risk Runs Two Ways

A counterparty can fail to perform, and the financing leg costs money every day. The Nomura Micron swap carried a floating rate at a 0.90 percentage point spread, and the two Korean lines at 3.50 points.

The Leveraged Wrappers Decay

RAM is a 2x daily DRAM product and SNXX a 2x SanDisk product. Daily-reset funds do not deliver twice the multi-day return, and our guide to 3x leveraged ETF futures works the compounding maths through.

The Record Is Five Months Long

The fund's first close on Thursday 2 April was $27.76, noted at the time in our launch brief on the first pure DRAM ETF. Friday's close is 115.02% above that and 26.05% below the June peak, and neither number is a track record.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the DRAM ETF hold Micron?

Yes, and far more than a stock screener shows. Micron equity was 2.03% of net assets on 30 June, but two Micron swaps added $6.16 billion of notional, taking the effective weight to roughly 25.8%.

Why do the DRAM ETF's weightings add up to more than 100%?

The issuer combines each stock position with the exposure held through swaps, while the Treasury bills collateralising those swaps appear as separate lines. Counting both sides of one position pushes the total past 100%.

Is DRAM the same thing as the RAM ETF?

They are different funds. DRAM is the Roundhill Memory ETF, and RAM is the Roundhill T-REX 2X Long DRAM Daily Target ETF, a leveraged wrapper listed as its own Phemex perp on 27 August 2026.

What is the DRAM ETF's expense ratio?

0.65%. The prospectus illustrates that as $68 in the first year on a $10,000 position, and the fund is actively managed rather than tracking an index.

Bottom Line

Treat DRAM as a levered bet on three memory manufacturers with a Treasury bill sleeve attached, because that is what the filings describe.

The next real information arrives at the quarterly rebalance and in the following N-PORT, where the swap notionals will show if the Micron tilt has grown or been trimmed.

Between those dates the things moving this fund are Micron, Samsung and SK hynix earnings and the DRAM contract price cycle, not anything the fund does itself. Watch $80.72, the June closing high, as the level it has to reclaim.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always conduct your own research before making trading decisions.