Will AI Give the Free Markets ETF an Edge?

Michael Gayed got an idea last November, shortly after President Donald Trump was elected — design an ETF around opportunities created by deregulation. 

There wasn’t anything like it at the time, and there was a big reason for that, Gayed told ETF Upside. The data analysis necessary to enable such a fund to get ahead of likely regulatory changes would have required an unreasonably large team of managers. Artificial intelligence, however, could help the fund take on tasks that weren’t practical before, such as parsing the smallest bits of public information to identify potential changes to regulations. “There’s no other fund out there that’s focused on deregulation,” he said. “We built out an entire AI that looks at things ranging from executive orders, legislative actions, speeches, and myriad information on the government side.”

Changing Tides

The Free Markets ETF, which launched June 10, represents a collaboration among several companies. The actively managed product is subadvised by Sykon Asset Management, Point Bridge Capital, and Gayed’s firm Tactical Rotation Management. “The combination of those three groups working together is just powerful,” said Michael Venuto, chief investment officer at Tidal, which provides third-party services to the Free Markets ETF. “It’s doing rather well. I’m quite impressed with the organic flows.”

The ETF represents about $12 million in assets and saw more than 400,000 shares traded on its first day, Gayed said. At least some of the interest in the new product is attributable to his own brand — he publishes The Lead-Lag Report and has a large social media following. He asked an audience of small business owners via a poll on X whether tax cuts, tariffs, or deregulation would affect them the most, with the latter winning by a considerable margin, he said. “You can argue that this is Trump’s last real play … Deregulation is the one thing people can agree on.”

Some other details about the Free Markets ETF:

• It charges 76 basis points.
• Its top holdings are First American Government Obligations money markets, Uranium Energy, the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF, McKesson and Robinhood.

Free as Free Can Be: The tightly regulated utilities sector is less volatile than the broader market, but that may change with deregulation, Gayed said. While such a shift could create opportunities for active managers, the ETF also has significant allocations to gold and bitcoin. “Those are sort of your purest expression of free markets,” he said.