SoFi’s New Social 50 Income ETF (SFYI)

this morning from the launch of the Social 50 income ETF.

Now this fund begins trading today on the NYCRA under ticker symbol SFYI it invest in the top 50 US listed stocks held by so Ives self-directed brokerage accounts and joining me fresh off this.

Announcement is Brian Walsh, who's the head of advice and planning at SoFY.

Brian, good morning.

Thank you so much for joining us while we're fresh off this announcement.

So take us through the launch of SFYI today and tell us why you're providing exposure to the top 50 holdings on the Soi brokerage accounts.

Yeah, first of all, thank you for having me today.

We are really excited about this because it combines two trends that we're really seeing with our members.

Number 1, really a quest for yield in an evolving landscape.

And then number 2, the ability to really invest.

In the conviction of the community of our SOFI member base.

So this fund combines both by taking the top 50 holdings of our self-directed and best members and then leverages options, strategies on those holdings to generate monthly yield.

And Brian, for our viewers out there, can you take us through the names that are included in this fund and what benefits that you think it offers investors out there?

Yeah, so the, the big names in the, in this fund are going to be Tesla, Nvidia, Amazon, Berkshire, uh, Micron.

And what's great about this is these names will rotate on a monthly basis.

So, every month we go in there and we see, OK, what are the 50 US equity holdings that our members have the highest conviction in, and that determines the weighting of the fund.

And this is actually something we've been doing for, you know, close to 6 years now with Another ETF we have SFYF.

Now what we're doing is we're saying, OK, our members also want yield, especially we see the inflows going into other yield focused funds and requests from our members.

Now we added that yield layer on top with the option strategy.

And I understand that you say option ETFs have officially gone mainstream, so give us the lay of the land.

Yeah, we've seen this both internally with the, um, our existing options ETF strategy, um, that's been up, you know, 40, 45% year over year in assets.

We also saw last year, you know, roughly $80 billion flowing into options, ETFs.

And really, we see this coming about because the traditional playbook of relying solely on Fixed income or dividend paying stocks.

In this quite uh tight credit spread environment, the evolving yield environment, we're seeing investors search other places.

And whether that's doing, you know, covered calls and options strategies on their own, or existing ETFs really using this to kind of round out their overall fixed income, uh, strategy.

Yeah, so expanding on this, what does democratizing complex options, uh, complex options trading actually look like for investors?

Yeah, we really see this because, yes, you know, we see covered calls on a regular basis, you know, with our, our sofi best platform, but the reality is you have to have 100 shares of the underlying security in order to execute on a covered call strategy.

So, what this does is it allows people to use less capital to generate yield off of names that they want to hold anyways.

And on top of that, it helps them diversify further by relying on having less capital and owning 100 shares of 50 different names.

That would require a ton of capital for everyday investors.

This just in turn allow them to get exposure in those types of names that our community already invests in, while being able to generate the yield with much lower capital requirements.

And finally, Brian, before I let you go, you're seeing rotation into defensive ETF.

So take us through this and what do you think are the factors that are behind this rotation?

Yeah, I think, you know, over the last few months, we've seen a shift away more from the precious metal side of things on the ETF side of things, and then we've seen this more into, I guess, tech and more defensive plays.

Um, I think our members are having confidence and conviction in recurring investments into their, their accounts, but they're adjusting their strategy as they see volatility in the marketplace, and they're just adjusting that on a go-forward basis.

Well, Brian, we will have to leave it there for today, but thank you so much for joining us and thank you so much for sharing your insights as well as your perspective.

All right, thank you.