Vegan ETF Issuer Preps an International Flavor

All investors love a bull market, but some don’t want to have a cow.

Vegans, who avoid eating, wearing or using animal-based products, don’t have a lot of options to make their portfolios fauna-free. There is currently one vegan-themed ETF in the country, the US Vegan Climate ETF (VEGN), though the advisor to that fund, Beyond Investing, filed last week for an international version. It would give vegans (an estimated 1% of the US population) another investing choice that seeks to avoid animal cruelty.

“That is really handy for a lot of my clients that are vegan or vegetarian, or at least want to invest that way. It basically tracks the S&P 500, so it’s not way off on a risk deviation,” said Tom Nowak, advisor at Quantum Financial Planning; he has 20 to 30 clients who are vegan, most of whom include VEGN in their portfolios. “Even though it’s not a super low-fee fund … it seems to be a fair price to filter out oil and animal cruelty.”

Vegan as Apple

The passively managed VEGN ETF avoids “large-cap problem companies,” the company states on its page. At first glance, its top holdings look a lot like those of other large-cap funds: It has nearly 7% of its assets allocated to Micron Technology, 5% to Alphabet, 5% to NVIDIA, 4% to Mastercard, 4% to Visa and 4% to Apple. The fund has about $135 million in assets and charges 60 basis points on the first $150 million in assets in the portfolio and 50 bps on everything thereafter. 

Some indicators of demand:

• VEGN pulled in $13 million in flows last year after just $3 million in 2024 and 1 million in 2023, per data from Morningstar Direct. It started trading in 2019, and its highest annual flows were in 2021, at $27 million. 
• A fund that took a different approach, the VegTech Plant-Based Innovation & Climate ETF (EATV), launched in 2021 and shut down last year. That actively managed fund focused on companies working on plant-based products or mitigating climate change.

What Clients Want: “I don’t advertise, and people keep finding me. So there is demand,” said advisor Brenda Morris, whose firm Humane Investing caters to vegans. “I work with people I love, and wherever they are in their journey, they’re looking at their portfolio and saying, ‘I want to do more.’” Morris had used EATV in portfolios before it shuttered, as it was unique. She has started mutual fund and ETF portfolios on Charles Schwab’s platform and has a goal of making those available to other advisors this year, she said.

It’s hard to pick winners on an individual stock basis but easy to spot losers on a macro level, Nowak said, referring to fossil fuels and animal agriculture potentially trending downward in the future. “People are going to become vegan for cost reasons, which is the reason people get motivated to do a lot of things,” he said. But, “to me, the large play is the environmental play.”