March 3, 2021
Five years ago, I met a really nice guy named Jamie Wise on the conference circuit. Wise had fascinating ideas about scraping public internet chatter about stocks to build an index that tries to ping stocks currently in favor with retail investors, using a bunch of AI and other carefully curated data sources.
I — having run a fund that included a lot of thinking about this in the late ’90s that crashed and burned — was skeptical. Jamie got a fund launched with Sprott as a partner (which we covered back in the day). The fund did okay but didn’t gain a lot of traction and closed in March 2019. Now it’s back in a new form with partner VanEck. There’s real work here under the hood, and I have no beef with either the idea behind the index or VanEck jumping in. If anything, jumping into something fun and new is very on-brand for VanEck. (See also fallen angel bonds, BDCs, Rare Earth Metals, Agribusiness, Videogames, Bitcoin, Gold miners, etc. Totally on brand.) I wish both Jamie and VanEck nothing but success here. Seriously. I’d love my old-man, thousand-yard-stare, knee-jerk skepticism to being completely wrong.