Leaning into Feels, These ETFs Test the Wisdom of the Crowd

The popular kids always end up the most successful adults … er, right?

There are a few exchange-traded funds that invest according to the wisdom of the crowd. One such product, the SoFi Social 50 ETF (SFYF), holds the most popular stocks among SoFi customers. And that firm is extending the strategy to a new fund with a high-income flavor. 

There are some similarities with momentum funds, which means there’s a lot that can go right or wrong: They are more volatile than the broader markets. “A lot of sentiment is going to be based on what’s doing well and what’s not doing well,” said Daniel Sotiroff, senior manager research analyst at Morningstar. “Momentum has risks and rewards with it. It works really well in environments where the market is stable and you have consistent leadership.” On the other hand, such funds “do poorly when you get into really volatile environments,” he said.

Hot or Not

Social sentiment may be used by numerous actively managed funds to help inform their stock selection, though only a couple of products rely almost exclusively on that kind of data. For example, VanEck’s Social Sentiment ETF (BUZZ), launched in 2021, makes decisions based on AI analysis of millions of data points from news coverage, blogs and comments in online forums. That fund holds 75 stocks, with no single name getting more than 3% weight. The company on April 1 added the VanEck MSCI EAFE Analyst Sentiment ETF (VEFA), which invests according to aggregated data from analyst forecasts and revisions. It has also filed for an emerging markets fund that would similarly use analyst sentiment.

A look at how some funds have performed:

• The SoFi Social 50 ETF has dipped 5% year to date but still boasts a 45% gain over the past year.
• BUZZ has dropped 10% so far in 2026 but is still up 40% over 12 months.
• The iShares US Thematic Rotation Active ETF (THRO), which uses social data but is not entirely a sentiment fund, has slipped less than 1% year to date, remaining up 26% over a year.

Social Currency: The Social 50 High Income ETF (SFYI) that Tidal recently filed with the SEC would invest in SFYF or the constituent stocks and use options for income. Tidal did not respond to a request for comment about the forthcoming fund or SFYF. The existing fund, which launched in 2019 and represents $35 million in assets, has net fees of 29 basis points. Its top holdings are Tesla, NVIDIA, Amazon, AMD, Alphabet, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, Microsoft, Meta and Palantir. 

That’s what you get when you follow the crowd.