The Racetrack Gambler Kevin Depew Home

8/1/2005
The New ETFs

Sector funds and ETFs must be losing fashion. No worries. Lifestyle/philosophy funds and ETFs must be imminent. If not, then I can propose a few I'd like to see:

• The Rand ETF (RND), which only invests in companies seeking to pursue their own goals of rational self-interest, or truly "reasonable" growth-oriented companies.
• The Kant ETF (KNT), which only invests in companies that "appear" sound, but which may occasionally to be unsound given the limits of human understanding, though certain data can always be restructured to seem normal depending on your senses, which would make their quarterly results rather OK, as far as anyone knows.
• The Organic ETF (ORF), which only invests in companies where all employees, officers and directors consume foods produced without the use of artificial pesticides, herbicides, and genetically modified organisms.
• The Popper ETF (KPO), which only invests in companies whose annual reports can be quickly falsified - in an open forum, naturally.
• The Hegel ETF (HEG), which only invests in Yoga centers.
• The Deconstructionist ETF (DER), which only invests in companies whose results are indeterminable; perhaps positive, but necessarily, even simultaneously, negative; self-referential, a contradiction that reveals itself in the price of the underlying securities as secondary concepts that are themselves grounded in hierarchies that cannot be easily extracted from the cultural texts which both constrain them and, paradoxically, give them their meaning.