The One Stock To Buy If You Want To Invest In The Gig Economy and Side Hustles
So you believe the gig economy is the future and more people will soon be turning their passions into side hustles. You think creators are the new Fortune 500 companies, and high-paying Fiverr gigs are the future of work.
And you want an easy way to invest in this worldview.
Unless you’re a VC with the resources to seed a portfolio of startups, or know a way to buy shares in Dude Perfect and MrBeast, investing in the gig economy isn’t exactly easy.
You could research, identify, and manage a basket of publicly-traded stocks. Or you could let someone else do that for you, by allocating a portion of your portfolio to an actively-managed exchange-traded fund that focuses solely on such investments. Luckily, such a fund exists: SoFi’s Gig Economy ETF (GIGE).
Inside GIGE, The Gig Economy ETF
GIGE doesn’t simply hold names that utilize gig workers, a la UBER, Fiverr and Lyft. The actively managed fund aims to invest in companies that push the gig economy further (tools that benefit creators and side hustlers, like Shopify and Upwork), as well as companies that leverage the gig economy to expose cracks in more traditional institutions (Airbnb vs. hotels, Square vs. big banks).
Here’s a current breakdown of the fund’s top ten holdings:
| Weight | Name | SYM |
|---|---|---|
| 3.51% | Airbnb | ABNB |
| 3.44% | Square | SQ |
| 3.26% | TWTR | |
| 3.22% | Upwork | UPWK |
| 3.15% | Shopify | SHOP |
| 3.11% | Baidu Inc | BIDU |
| 3.02% | PayPal | PYPL |
| 2.77% | Spotify | SPOT |
| 2.76% | Fiverr | FVRR |
| 2.62% | Tencent | 00700 |
GIGE Performance
The ETF launched in May 2019, before a number of its current holdings were trading publicly, and it’s spent the past two years navigating IPOs and hockey-stick charts from some huge names in the space.
Unsurprisingly, given the pandemic’s acceleration of both work-from-home adoption and side hustle time allocation, the fund has outperformed the broader market during year one of COVID-19. GIGE has returned 130% over the past 12 months, vs. 51% for the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY).
Learn More About GIGE
Ben Carlson (A Wealth of Common Sense) and Michael Batnick (The Irrelevant Investor) of Ritholtz Wealth Management recently talked to GIGE’s portfolio manager, David Dziekanski, for their Animal Spirits podcast. They discussed actively managing such a unique fund, major gig economy themes, whether Airbnb is the next $1 trillion company, what the space looks like outside of America (including “the Amazon of Africa”), and more. Listen here: