How Are Sentiment-driven ETFs Doing?

Do exchange-traded funds (ETF) designed to exploit sentiment indicators beat the market? To investigate, we consider three such ETFs, all currently available, as follows:

• • VanEck Social Sentiment ETF (BUZZ) – invests in common stocks of U.S. companies with the most “positive insights” collected from online sources including social media, news articles, blog posts and other alternative datasets.
  • Relative Sentiment Tactical Allocation ETF (MOOD) – invests based on “relative sentiment” factors in other ETFs that hold equities, bonds, commodities, currencies and gold.
  • Stocksnips AI-Powered Sentiment US ALL Cap ETF (NEWZ) – invests in securities of U.S.-listed large, mid and small capitalization firms based on a proprietary, AI-derived News Media Sentiment Signal.

We use Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund ETF (VTI) as the benchmark. We focus on monthly return statistics, along with compound annual growth rates (CAGR) and maximum drawdowns (MaxDD). Using monthly total returns for the three sentiment-driven ETFs and VTI available through March 2025, we find that:

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