Wedbush tech analyst Dan Ives is putting his theory of the artificial intelligence boom to the test with a new fund that will allow his audience to follow along and invest in his favorite ideas. The Dan Ives Wedbush AI Revolution ETF is set to begin trading on Wednesday under the ticker “IVES.” The fund will track an index that consists of the companies from Wedbush’s Ives AI 30 research list. “It’s based on our research. So as new companies come in, then some companies could come out. This is a living organism, in terms of this AI 30. It’s not static. And that’s a key part of the theme here, because the theme will continue to evolve,” Ives told CNBC. The current index includes many of the biggest tech funds in the market, such as Nvidia , Microsoft , Alphabet , Amazon and Tesla , according to a Wedbush report last month. Smaller names in the index include SoundHound AI and CyberArk Software . The index will be reconfigured quarterly and can be changed more often in the event of a corporate action, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing for the fund. Cullen Rogers, chief investment officer at Wedbush Fund Advisers, is in charge of the ETF’s day-to-day operations. The fund is technically a passive investing product. “We’re kind of walking this line between active and passive. … We’re just looking to leverage Dan’s ideas as well as we can in an institutional framework, in this index, that kind of gives investors a consistent, predictable structure,” Rogers said. AI-themed ETFs have been something of a puzzle for fund issuers given the fast-developing nature of the industry, the obstacle of some large players like OpenAI being private firms , and the fact that the biggest public companies, like Nvidia, are already widely held by investors through other vehicles. The Wedbush team thinks their fund is launching as the AI boom is expanding beyond those initial big winners. “The AI revolution theme is now going from semis to software, to infrastructure, to consumer and the other derivatives,” Ives said. There are some notable competitors for the Ives fund, however, including the Global X Artificial Intelligence & Technology ETF (AIQ) , which has more than $3 billion in assets under management. That fund has gained 22% over the past 12 months, which is well above the S & P 500 but basically in-line with just holding Nvidia alone. The Ives fund comes with a management fee of 0.75%. That is higher than the cost of many popular thematic ETFs, but it’s lower than the equal-weighted average fee of about 1% for active U.S. equity funds, according to Morningstar . For comparison, the AIQ has a fee of 0.68%.
