Investors looking to hop on the bandwagon of the hottest companies among millennials can now put their money in the first millennial-focused ETF.
The Millennial Generation ETF is one of 12 new niche funds launched by Global X. The Millennial ETF tracks the performance of companies operating in the favorite sectors of those born between 1980 and 2000. This includes companies involved in social media, digital media and technology, e-commerce, mobile technology, healthy lifestyles, travel and leisure, and the “sharing economy,” according to the prospectus Global X filed with the SEC.
This presumably will include companies like Apple (AAPL), FitBit (FIT), Twitter (TWTR), and Netflix (NFLX). The Millennial Generation ETF has not yet been assigned a stock ticker although, as Bloomberg reported, LOL and WTF are available.
First noticed by ETF.com, the youth-based ETF is not the only demographically-focused fund. Global X also launched an Aging Population ETF, which targets companies that caters “to the oldest quartile of the population,” the prospectus states. Global X also offers a 3D Printing ETF, a Nanotechnology ETF, and an Urbanization & Smart Cities ETF.
The cohort of investors who may very well be the most interested in the Millennial Generation ETF, incidentally, are millennial investors themselves. Millennials account for 40% of investors who hold ETFs, almost twice the number of ETF-investing Gen-Xers, according to a study by market research group Cogent Reports.
As Coins2Day explained in a recent story on millennial investors, ETFs are increasingly popular among young traders because they are perceived as a low-risk entry point into the stock market. A new breed of financial apps, such as Betterment and Wealthfront offer ETFs as a primary foundation for users’ portfolios, and the majority of their customers are millennials.