Wall Street has a new way to market the AI trade: Take the shares of companies that investors most want to own, including some they still cannot buy, and turn them into an acronym.
It is no secret that stock-market investors love acronyms. During the 2010s, the hottest tech trade was the so-called FAANG names — Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google. More recently, members of the “Magnificent Seven” have helped to power this AI-driven bull market. In late 2024, the so-called “BATMANN” stocks swooped to the market’s rescue.
Over the past year, investors have latched on to the “TACO trade,” and the “NACHO trade,” as geopolitics has become more relevant to markets during President Donald Trump’s second term.
Now, there is a new label on the scene: The “MANGOS,” shorthand for Meta Platforms, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google parent Alphabet, OpenAI and SpaceX. The acronym has drawn attention after SpaceX’sblockbuster market debutlast week, which finally gave public-market investors a chance to buy into one of the most closely watched technology companies in the world.
A handful of ETF filings have already been proposed for funds that aim to invest in these MANGOS stocks, even though two of the names in the cohort — OpenAI and Anthropic — are not yet publicly traded. Both companies have filed paperwork to go public later this year, however.
The pitch is simple: MANGOS is supposed to represent the next generation of high-profile tech companies, now that some members of the “Magnificent Seven” have started to lose their luster.
Now, some investors are trying to figure out whether leadership inside the tech sector is shifting again, especially as the spoils from the AI boom look set to spread from chip makers and cloud giants to large private companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, as investors await their IPOs.
That has made the hunt for the next group of market leaders more urgent. Some investors may be trimming parts of their “Magnificent Seven” holdings to make room for a newer generation of high-growth AI names, according to Joseph Powers, chief investment officer at RWA Wealth Partners.
The nature of the AI buildout is also evolving. Earlier in the boom, large tech companies could largely pay for their own infrastructure buildout, giving them an advantage over smaller competitors, according to Powers. But as the spending needed to support AI grows, more companies may need to turn to public markets for capital. “We’re going to see how much can be absorbed by these three companies [SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI],” Powers said.
The MANGOS ETFs
A few small ETF issuers are already trying to turn that interest into investment products. Corgi ETF Trust I filed for the Corgi MANGOS ETF, which would invest at least 80% of its net assets in securities, derivatives or other instruments tied to Meta, Anthropic, Nvidia, Alphabet, OpenAI and SpaceX. Because OpenAI and Anthropic remain private, the fund may use derivatives, private investment vehicles or other structures to get exposure to those companies, according to the filing.
Yorkville America Investment Trust separately filed for two proposed funds: the Yorkville America MANGO Plus ETF and the Yorkville America MANGO Plus Premium Equity Income ETF. The MANGO Plus ETF would invest at least 80% of its net assets in securities, derivatives or other instruments tied to the MANGOS companies, as well as a separate basket of chip and hardware names including Advanced Micro Devices, Broadcom, Micron Technology, Intel and Dell Technologies.
The filing says the public MANGOS holdings are expected to be held in roughly equal weights, while exposure to privately held OpenAI and Anthropic would mainly come through perpetual futures contracts. The Premium Equity Income version would invest in a similar group of companies and instruments, while also writing call options tied to the MANGO Plus group.
The filings are still preliminary, and have yet to be approved by the SEC.
However, some ETF analysts say the rush to turn MANGOS into a fund might be more about slick marketing than actual substance.
Such products may be “slightly too clever convenience packages,” according to Dave Nadig, president and director of research at ETF.com.
“There is zero academic justification for taking a couple of non-public companies that maybe you can get an SPV for exposure and a couple of extraordinarily large hyperscalers and sticking them together and calling that an investment thesis,” Nadig said in a phone interview.
The grouping mostly reflects a set of high-momentum, high-visibility names, rather than a clear reason those companies should belong together in one portfolio, he said.
For investors who simply want exposure to the public companies they believe are driving the AI boom, Nadig said buying those stocks directly may be simpler than paying for an ETF wrapper around a small basket of names.
He said such funds may have a place as short-term trading tools, since it is easier to buy one ETF than several individual stocks. But he was skeptical of treating them as long-term investment vehicles.
“There’s some room for these things as trading sardines,” Nadig said, “but there’s not really an investment thesis.”
That may be the larger risk for investors. Wall Street acronyms can be useful when they describe where market power has already concentrated. They can be more dangerous when they turn a story into a product before the story has been tested.
MANGOS captures where investors’ imagination has moved: Toward AI labs, chip makers, cloud giants and newly public growth companies. Whether that becomes the next durable market-leadership group is still an open question, said Nadig.
Representatives at Yorkville America Investment Trust and Corgi ETF Trust I didn’t respond to requests seeking comment.