Finlister - January 2021: Week 4
Edition #029 - Big updates! in a largely red week for Tech ETFs while $GAMR stays green
2 Major Updates!
The first half of this email is slightly different, the second half is normal as per usual.
Web App + Newsletter Upgrade
It’s been just over 6months of writing this newsletter, and I’m incredibly grateful for those of you who have joined me on this journey, whether you’ve been there from the start or been one of the 30+ people to sign up over the last few days.
It’s very humbling to have over 400 of you tune in, I hope the value that I try to bring every week is there for you.
There are still 1-3million people out there that visit the two most popular ETF sites every month. I hope that you get more out of this than they do on those sites.
The goal of Finlister has always been to make investing easier for you.
What gets delivered here is just the tip of the iceberg.
Behind the scenes, are multiple databases, thousands of lines of codes and 10’s of thousands of API calls, all firing every. single. day.
My goal over the next 6months, 2 years, and maybe 10 is to keep revealing that iceberg to you.
“How can I give you more access to better financial data, so that you can make better financial decisions, quicker” is a question I ask myself every day.
When the best performing Blackrock asset, is not one of the 700 ETFs they manage, but its own shareprice; the waters are clearly dangerous (let alone frustrating).
Given the start of the new Retail Investing Revolution of 2021, the time to push forward with Finlister has never been better.
For Finlister, that starts with modest goals inside the ETF space, a grossly under-covered area of Fintech despite ETF fund volume hitting all-time highs, with retail investors in key ETFs seeing triple-digit year-over-year consumer growth
With this newsletter just targeting 59 of the 2050+ ETFs out there, there is clearly still a lot of work to do and show.
The next two (and a half) steps for Finlister are very exciting.
A New Email
Over the next week we will be upgrading the newsletter service.
This will come in the form of a new email service provider, allowing more flexible and customizable content.
That means, better, more actionable insights to you.
You will likely only receive 2-3 more emails from this address, so please keep your eye open for that.
In-Depth Monthly Recaps
The second part of this email change will be the addition of a monthly recap.
Initially, this is going to be a 65+ page report, containing breakdowns for the 59 Tech ETFs that I cover weekly, as well as 5-10 other interesting carveouts of ETFs in this category.
Here’s a screenshot of what most of the pages look like.
Web App
The second move forward is sharing progress on finlister.com , which has been great! It’s still very raw and the data is all placeholders.
By creating a dashboard layer on top of all the code I’m running for these reports and others, I’m hoping to give you the ability to screen, rank and analyse ETFs however you choose, in literally 1/1000th of the time that it would take you to do this manually.
Go try and research 5 ETFs without Finlister and see how much progress you can make in 5minutes.
I’m sharing it with you now, because it’s unbelievably close to being very real and I’m super excited about it…but I’m always looking for feedback, general or specific.
Next Steps
Finlister is becoming a real business.
Part of that is understanding what the product is and who are the customers.
The Product is simple: The first stage of Finlister is a blend of a web app, supported by a series of high quality newsletters.
I’m not trying to recommend specific stocks or ETFs for you to buy or sell. I want to empower you to make better decisions on your own, by giving you access to tools and researched historically reserved the Wall St financial elite or hardcore programmers in Silicon Valley.
RE: Customers.
I do NOT want my customers to be faceless hedge-funds and corporations or advertisers and have you, your information/data and your investment actions sold to them for a profit. The user is NOT the product (see above).
I DO want my customers to be real people, who want to make positive changes to their lives and situations. I want to be surrounded by optimists, people that want to aspire to be something financially better so they are closer to living their ideal lives.
You are a real person, you clearly want to invest better, I would love it if you became a true customer, and part of this new financial movement.
While certain parts of Finlister will continue to be free (like this portion of the newsletter), the monthly/quarterly/annual recaps and the web app will be reserved for paying customers.
This move to paid is a somewhat of a premature announcement, as the first paid offering will probably come out on this Friday. In the long run being part of Finlister will likely cost around $150-$500/year.
In the short term, if you are interested in being an early supporter, it will be less than that.
The full January recap will be your first reward (and there will be more). And I promise you, you will be better off for having it in your hands.
The price you pay this week (and only this week), I hope will be the lowest price I’ll ever offer.
To show your support and get this first paid report, simply respond to this email by hitting the reply button and I’ll get back to you.
Whether or not you choose to join me and others on this journey immediately, I want to say thanks again, and hope you enjoy the rest of todays email :)
Best,
Stuart Sim
In a week which saw the $SPY drop 3.57%, Tech ETFs managed to fare slightly worse…on the aggregate anyway.
Out of the 59 Tech ETFs that we are tracking weekly (over $100m AUM, non-inverse, non-levered), the average ETF fell 3.96%.
58/59 were negative for the week, with 42 of those underperforming $SPY
The game continues
The one ETF that managed to not only have a positive week, but return a massive 20.25% was the only one that held the most talked about, and most traded stock on the US exchanges on Tuesday, was $GAMR; the stock it held was $GME (Gamestop).
The stock was trading at $65.01 when I wrote about it last Monday, now it’s trading at $325 and is up another 10% after-hours over the weekend.
When I said that the stock was in for an interesting couple of weeks, even this continued gain from the Reddit short squeeze even surprised me.
The stock is now worth a staggering 27% of $GAMRs ETF
The top 3 stock returns over the last month from $GAMR were
$GME 1,625%
$HEAR 39% (The Turtle Beach Corporation is a global gaming accessory manufacturer based in San Diego, California)
$BILI 33% (Bilibili, a China based video game publisher)
Strength of the Chain
Removing $GAMR from the weekly total, Tech ETFs returned on average -4.38% for the week.
As mentioned above, even places 2-5 had negative returns.
$BLOK continued its strong start to the year as positive moves from holdings like $MARA and $MSTR continue to benefit from the strength of Bitcoin.
$MARA (Marathon Patent Group) is up over 1,800% over the last 12months and is on the verge of breaking through the $2m market cap barrier.
$SKYY’s best performing stock over the last month was also $MARA.
Where is the momentum?
Continuing to look at the strongest performers from 2020, only $LIT managed to get through January without a positive return.
What will be interesting to continue watching with $LIT is how quickly Lithium resources become scarce.
This report from Mining.com shows Lithium needs for 20m Tesla’s at 165% of 2019 lithium levels, a clear potential shortage.
Given its strong 2020, somewhat off of the back of Tesla and the EV market, this may have already started to be priced in but despite $TSLA implying 2021 sales of 750,000-800,000 vehicles
$TSLA reportedly shipped 499,550 vehicles in 2020 implying a growth rate of 60%. At 60% growth rate $TSLA it will take the company until 2028 to hit the 20m/year mark.
The question is, will global Lithium production have significantly improved, (not to mention assuming other EVs aren’t eating into this supply aswell, potentially bringing Lithium shortage issues much sooner)
If you got this far, thank you again for this great first 6 months.
This is just the beginning and I look forward to chatting with you shortly.
Stuart
Nice recap in this issue, I liked seeing cell tech and TSLA covered as well. Great work on rolling out the web app, I’m excited to see where this goes.