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.)
ARK COO Tom Staudt: A Deep Dive on Liquidity etftrends.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from etftrends.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
February 1, 2021
(The following are my compiled notes for a recent presentation at ETF Trends. I’ve included the slides for reference in line, however you can also watch a replay here. Thanks!)
[[Note: I have talked to a lot of people in the past two weeks, through phones and Zooms and IBs and texts, and who knows what. I’m sorry if I discredited something or misrepresented some of your thinking here or adopted something of yours as my own. Please don’t sue me, my note taking is just not what it used to be.]]
Let’s start with a couple of quick asides: what we’re seeing in GME, and whatever else comes next, is most likely a blip. If you believe it’s a blip, here’s your narrative cheat sheet: