Gaming gained its popularity in the 1970s and 1980s, and from there, it increasingly dominated leisure activities in peoples’ living rooms, resulting in global revenues rising to USD 134.9bn in 2018. Since the beginning, the idea of competition was deeply entrenched into the development of games, sparking another movement within the history of gaming: esports, which is also a billion-dollar industry. To grant investors access to the rapid growth of both the video gaming and the esports industries, Global X issues its new Global X Video Games & Esports ETF, tracking Solactive’s ARTIS®-based Video Games & Esports Index.
99.6 million people watched the finals of the 2018 League of Legends World Championships. These viewing figures give a glimpse of the vast potential that lies in esports and gaming. Enormous prize pools of up to USD 30 million give testimony to the growing appeal amongst young people and adults alike. The popularity of esports even lets the International Olympic Committee elicit the official inclusion of esports into the Olympic Games in Paris in 2024. New York-based ETF provider Global X recognized the potential in companies associated with esports and video games, releasing an ETF involving this dynamic topic. The index functioning as the underlying for the Global X Video Games & Esports ETF is the Solactive Video Games & Esports Index, which, to date, includes 38 companies picked by Solactive’s proprietary Natural Language Processing Engine ARTIS®.
ARTIS® utilizes advanced algorithms to parse large volumes of public documents evaluating companies’ relevancy to various themes or topics. The sophisticated procedure ranks potential index constituents according to proprietary criteria, considering not only a company’s exposure to a theme but also the company’s importance to the theme.
“I grew up witnessing the rise of personal computers and games, and it was, back then, unimaginable to me what economic potential would lie in video games and the gaming industry,” says Timo Pfeiffer, Chief Markets Officer at Solactive. “Global X’s push to translate both the gaming and esports industry’s potential into an investable product shows its foresight and innovative spirit. We are proud to function as Global X’s partner in the release of this novel ETF.”
The launch of the Global X Thematic Growth ETF accompanies the ETF issuance from the Manhattan ETF provider. For the first time, Global X releases a fund-of-funds ETF, combining the performance of individual thematic ETFs, and thereby giving investors exposure to a combination of different themes. The ETF tracks the Solactive Thematic Growth Index, which currently contains seven underlying Global X ETFs, three of which are tracking the following Solactive Indices:
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ETF
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Index
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Global X E-Commerce ETF (EBIZ)
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Solactive E-Commerce Index
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Global X Lithium & Battery Tech ETF (LIT)
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Solactive Global Lithium Index
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Global X Social Media ETF (SOCL)
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Solactive Social Media Total Return Index
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