SETM Is Up 27% YTD and 150% Over a Year. The S&P 500? Not Even Close.

A friend forwards you a screenshot of an ETF chart with a number on it, and the number is 103%. That is what Sprott Critical Materials ETF (NASDAQ:SETM) has done over the past year, closing June 8, 2026 at $32.72 after starting the prior June around $16.10. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY), the easiest stand-in for the S&P 500, returned 23% over the same window. That is the headline. The honest version is messier, and the last month is where the mess lives.

The arithmetic, including the part that hurts

Run the math on a $10,000 starter. Put it into SETM on June 6, 2025 at roughly $16.10 per share and you owned about 621 shares. Mark them to $32.72 a year later and the position is worth roughly $20,300. The same $10,000 in SPY at $599.14 a year ago is about $12,300 now. That is the gap the title is pointing at, and it is real.

Year to date, the picture is less dramatic and quietly more interesting. SETM is up 13% from a December 31, 2025 close near $28.95. SPY is up 8.4%. Still a win for SETM, by a far thinner margin than the one-year number implies. The reason for the compression is sitting in the most recent prints. SETM is down 14% over the past month and 12% over the past week, after touching $37.98 on May 8. The huge year was assembled mostly in the first three quarters. The most recent month has been giving some of it back. A reader who only sees the trailing one-year box is reading a number that already belongs to the past.

What the fund actually owns, and why that owned 2025

SETM is a concentrated thematic fund, a bet on the companies that dig up, refine, and move the materials the energy transition and the AI buildout cannot happen without. The fund launched February 1, 2023, charges 0.65%, and crossed $100 million in AUM in September 2025. The materials inside are uranium, copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and rare earths, and the names doing the heavy lifting are the obvious ones, including Freeport-McMoRan, Kazatomprom, First Majestic Silver, Albemarle, and Pilbara Minerals. Geographically, the book leans Canada, the United States, and Australia, which is the same map a national security analyst would draw if you asked them to color in the parts of the world that are not China.

The mechanism behind the run has three legs and they reinforce each other. The first is real demand. AI data centers need copper for power distribution, and they need power, which increasingly means nuclear, which means uranium. EVs and grid storage need lithium and nickel. None of this is a surprise to anyone who reads, but the pace of capex announcements in 2025 forced a repricing of the inputs, not just the equipment.

The second leg is policy. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio launched a critical minerals club with more than 50 countries in February 2026, structured around preferential trade and price floors meant to make non-Chinese supply economic. The Trump administration’s proposed $12 billion critical minerals stockpile sits on top of that, functioning as a long-dated demand signal whether or not the full amount is ever appropriated. Over 60% of global critical minerals demand is met through international trade, and most of the processing capacity sits in one country. That asymmetry is the entire reason a US president is talking about a stockpile.

The third leg is the one investors tend to underweight, which is sentiment about what these companies are. A copper miner has historically been priced as a late-cycle industrial. A uranium miner has been priced as a permanently broken story from 2011. Sprott’s own framing calls it a new commodity supercycle driven by deglobalization, energy security, and fiscal dominance, and the multiples paid for these businesses started moving toward strategic-asset territory rather than commodity-cyclical territory. That rerating did a lot of the work in 2025.

What the last month is telling you

The double-digit pullback over four weeks is a tell, even if the thesis still holds. When something this concentrated drops 12% in a week while SPY drops 3%, the message is that the marginal buyer was a momentum buyer and the marginal seller is a position-trimmer who already booked the year. Concentrated thematic funds rip on the way up and reverse harder on any wobble, and SETM behaved exactly to type.

The technicals reflect that ambivalence. Intellectia AI flipped to a Sell read on February 23, 2026 after running a Strong Buy on January 29, which is less a forecast than a sign that the trend strength stopped being one-way. The fundamental story did not change in those four weeks. The crowd around it did.

What to watch from here

The setup that produced the gain is broadly intact, but at a price level that already prices in a lot of it. If you want to keep a finger on the pulse without staring at SETM all day, three things matter more than the rest.

• Copper and uranium spot prices. SETM is a basket, but copper and uranium are the swing factors because of AI power demand and data center electrification. The LME copper price and the Sprott Physical Uranium Trust spot indication are the cleanest daily reads.

• Policy follow-through. The $12 billion stockpile and the critical minerals club are demand signals only if they fund. Watch the appropriations language and any signed offtake agreements with allied producers, not the press releases.

• China’s processing posture. Export controls on rare earths, gallium, and graphite have been the strongest single-day catalysts for this basket. A relaxation is the bear case. A tightening is the bull case. There is rarely a middle.

The one-year number is real and the YTD lead over the S&P 500 is real, but the trade has become consensus, where it was contrarian in 2024, with the multiples to match. The honest read is that the mechanism behind SETM’s outperformance is structural and worth tracking, while the entry price matters more than it did a year ago, and the last month is a reminder that concentrated thematic funds do not give you the upside without the corresponding downside on the days the story stops being new.