Wall Street prognosticators tend to huddle around the consensus, afraid to stand out for fear of being wrong. Then there’s Tom Lee.
The chief investment officer at Fundstrat Capital has made his name with bold calls (the S&P 500 at 15,000; Bitcoin to US$10 million). His unabashedly bullish takes, for which he makes no apologies, have drawn legions of online followers in this anything-goes era of market speculation — fueled by do-it-yourself retail investors.
Now, the former JPMorgan Chase & Co strategist is looking to cash in on his renown with a new exchange-traded fund, the Granny Shots US Large Cap ETF (ticker GRNY), which launched earlier this month and has already raked in more than US$400 million. It’s the first of what he hopes will be many to follow.
The fund’s name, like the list of equity recommendations Lee has provided clients since 2019, is derived from an unconventional basketball free-throw style he likens to his systematic, theme-based stock-picking process. It may not look the coolest, Lee says, but it has the highest chance of success.
“Our clients and their loyalty and the fact that we’re still growing really rapidly as a research firm is not just because we’re bulls,” Lee said in an interview, adding the firm has a dedicated institutional following as well. “It’s because we’ve given them many reasons to understand why markets should do what they’re doing.”
The ETF is off to a strong start. GRNY is up 2.2% since its early November launch, compared to a 0.2% advance for the S&P 500 over the same span. Its US$412 million of inflows puts it in the top 10% of fund debuts this year based on speed of asset accumulation, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence.
Still, GRNY is launching amid a difficult run for stock pickers. Roughly two-thirds of large-cap managers have underperformed the S&P 500 this year through the end of October, data from Strategas Research show. In fact, more than half of active managers have trailed the benchmark in 14 of the last 15 years.
Thematic ETFs have also fallen out of favour recently, with outflows in nine out of 10 months this year through October, Bloomberg Intelligence data show.
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That won’t deter Lee. GRNY is based on four longer-term themes, including easing financial conditions and global labour suppliers, and three shorter-term ones like seasonality and style tilt. Stocks that aligned with two or more of the themes are included in the fund. Meta Platforms Inc falls into five themes, for example, while Google parent Alphabet Inc and Garmin fit into four.
“It’s not a black box process,” said Lee, who added that he and his team have received positive feedback for their transparency. “Granny Shots is giving people a really good understanding of why they’re owning this.”
Top holdings include police and military equipment producer Axon Enterprise Inc, Tesla Inc and CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. The fund, which consists of some 35 stocks, will be rebalanced quarterly. The themes, too, are dynamic.
Being perennially bullish doesn’t always pay off, of course. Both 2018 and 2022 were difficult years for risk assets and, in turn, Lee’s optimistic outlook.
Yet last year his S&P 500 forecast was the most accurate among more than 20 Wall Street strategists tracked by Bloomberg as the gauge advanced 24%. This year is likely to be a similar story as the benchmark’s 26% advance has exceeded even the most bullish estimates. He recently told Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast that the S&P 500 could hit 15,000 by 2030.
When it comes to Bitcoin, he’s been predicting the digital token would hit $100,000 since at least 2018. In February, he forecast the virtual currency would reach US$150,000 by year-end, mainly because of a supply-demand imbalance due to a planned reduction in the rewards miners receive, and incoming president Donald Trump’s pledge to set up a national Bitcoin stockpile.
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Lee, who co-manages the fund with Ken Xuan, is the latest in a growing list of prominent economists and investors to launch ETFs, joining the likes of Nouriel Roubini, Research Affiliates’ Rob Arnott and others.
Still, it takes more than just a recognizable name to launch a successful fund, he said. “I don’t think just because someone has a name that suddenly they can put out an ETF and it attracts assets,” Lee said.
Ultimately, the plan is for GRNY to be the first of numerous ETFs based on Lee’s investment philosophy.
“We’re already planning a full phase of what follows this one,” he said.
