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.

Now you can still heavily promote the ETF to retail and still earn a cut of the management fee, which is great. But importantly you are two steps removed from the investment decisions (one because are not running the ETF, two because you are not directly picking the stocks)

That frees you up to do whatever trades you like in your personal account. For example, say you wake up one day and decide you really like $NOK so you buy some for your personal account. Obviously you use your youtube/twitter/tik tok/whatever to tell your audience about

this awesome new stock you are getting into, then they go and talk about it on reddit/twitter/youtube/whatever and promote it to their day trader buddies, friends, family etc. Your excitement about the stock creates a big online "buzz" about it