macrocephalopod

Here's an interesting thought experiment. Assume 1. You are a notorious public figure 2. You have a large audience of day traders who are active on social media, giving you some ability to guide the online conversation 3. You would like to become very rich How would you do it?

One way would be to start a hedge fund, pick stocks and charge high fees, but this won't really work for you because retail won't be able to invest and institutions will do too much due diligence - you will never raise enough money (also you are no good at stock picking).

Another way is to start an active ETF where you pick the stocks. You can promote it to retail and earn a cut of management fee but it's a lot of work for not a huge reward unless you get *really* big.

As the ETF manager you would also be very heavily restricted in what you can do in your personal account, there would be huge conflicts of interest if you traded in the same stocks you held in the ETF. So strike that one out.

Alternatively you could start an index business with a pre-announced, quantitative methodology where index weights based on some measure of online "buzz" about stocks, and license the index to an existing ETF provider.