By Suzanne McGee
Jan 22 (Reuters) – Defiance ETFs and Futurum Equities have jointly launched a new exchange-traded fund aimed at providing exposure to stocks that they believe are of greatest interest to individual investors, a group that is an increasingly significant force in the U.S. stock market, the two firms said Thursday.
The Defiance Retail Kings ETF will hold an actively managed portfolio of between 30 and 50 stocks that the team believes will appeal to self-directed retail investors who are interested in tapping into high-growth, high-momentum investment opportunities.
The ETF’s backers say the fund does not try to capture the latest vagaries of the meme stock universe, characterized by dramatic rallies and equally sharp reversals in what had been thinly traded small-cap companies that have attracted the attention of social media financial influencers.
“These are companies that we think will be around for the next decade or two decades, and in which a new generation of investors are particularly engaged in following,” said Sylvia Jablonski, chief investment officer of Defiance.
The initial portfolio includes companies like Micron, Palantir Technologies, and Robinhood, a brokerage that caters to these self-directed traders. Other holdings include Oklo, a manufacturer of small nuclear reactors that is emerging as a way to play the AI boom and the resultant surge in demand for power. Its stock has soared 170% over the last 12 months.
The growing importance of the group of investors whose interests Defiance and Futurum Equities seek to track and who they also see as logical buyers of the new ETF has been underscored in the recent market turmoil.
According to the most recent report tracking their activity from JPMorgan Chase analysts published Thursday, investors steered $12.9 billion into U.S. stocks and funds in the week ended Wednesday, nearly double the 12-month average of $6.7 billion per week. Buying activity on Tuesday was particularly strong, according to a Wednesday report from Vanda Research, which tracked $1.8 billion of purchases that day even as stocks fell. That made it the biggest day of net purchases by individual investors since last October, the firm said.
(Suzanne McGee in Providence, RI; editing by Diane Craft)
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