Ever wish you could have a mini Bill Ackman, Stanley Drunkenmiller, or Michael Burry in your pocket making all of your investment decisions for you, Ratatouille style?
Now you can, thanks to ETFs.
ETF provider VistaShares is trying to attract investor inflows with a set of funds that don’t focus on an investment theme or an index, but on a person. For example, the VistaShares Pershing Square Select ETF tracks the holdings of Ackman’s firm Pershing Square. There’s also funds mimicking Burry and Druckenmiller’s investments, which will join another ETF that tracks Warren Buffett’s stock picks.
The weird world of ETFs has been getting even more niche lately, but the newest trend seems to be tracking specific people. Just yesterday, another one dropped—this time reflecting the investment theses of Wedbush equity analyst Dan Ives.
Ives has made a name for himself on Wall Street for his bullish tech picks and even bolder fashion sensibilities. The Dan Ives Wedbush AI Revolution ETF (IVES) holds 30 of Ives’ favorite AI stocks, including top holdings like Microsoft, Nvidia, Broadcom, and Tesla.
Ives told Brew Markets that the ETF is for retail and institutional investors alike who want to play the AI theme based on his years of research. But really, it’s for the fans.
“It’s for the investors that followed me my whole career,” he explained. Ives noted that he’s been asked when an ETF based on his AI picks is dropping every day for the past year. Clearly he’s just giving the people what they want.
The catch
The problem with ETFs that focus on specific investors is that they’re usually not actually controlled by said investor. While Ives is behind the fund that bears his name, others, such as the VistaShares Target 15 Berkshire Select Income ETF that attempts to recreate Buffett’s investment empire, are not.
Making sense of market moves
Stay up to date on the latest market news with daily analysis of the investing landscape, served up Brew-style.
That means these funds lag the investors’ actual investments, since the funds’ holdings follow SEC filings that can arrive weeks after investors pulled the trigger on their stock picks.
ETFs are the new wild west
We’re a far cry from how Jack Bogle thought investors should use index funds: to position themselves for long-term success through low-cost, passive investing in major indexes.
Now, we have a whole corner of the ETF market focused on crypto, leveraged single-stock funds, and even meme coin funds. Just this week, we witnessed the debut of the Canary PENGU ETF, a fund that invests in an obscure crypto token. And today, Trump Media & Technology group announced it has filed with the SEC to launch a new Truth Social Bitcoin ETF.
Most analysts argue it’s best to keep it simple when it comes to ETFs. After all, the largest ETF on the market, the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF—which tracks the S&P 500—boasts about $660 billion in assets for a reason.—LB