Innovative Index cuts through the noise of millions of online posts to identify stocks with strong collective conviction

New York City, USA, March 03, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- It’s a new era of investing. Platforms like Twitter, Reddit, StockTwits and dozens of others, have become online destinations for a wide variety of people to share opinions and perceptions about stocks and investments. What people are saying about stocks matters more than ever. That’s why prominent investor and celebrity, Dave Portnoy, has signed on as a partner of BUZZ Holdings ULC. The company’s flagship BUZZ NextGen AI US Sentiment Leaders Index^TM (“BUZZ”) has been exclusively licensed for use within the VanEck Vectors Social Sentiment ETF (NYSE: BUZZ), which begins trading on March 4^th, 2021.

BUZZ uses analytics models which feature Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing technologies to scan over 15 million stock-specific online posts a month. The models measure whether investor sentiment is positive, negative, or neutral on a collective basis. BUZZ then ranks each stock based on the degree of positive sentiment and breadth of the discussion. Each month, the 75 stocks with the highest scores are featured in the BUZZ Index and weighted according to their rank.

“This is all about the power of the retail investor fundamentally changing the balance of the market.” says Portnoy. “BUZZ recognized this shift early on - if you're not adapting… you're dying.”

President and CEO, Jamie Wise explains, “We’ve long believed in the individual investor and in the insights of the community’s collective conviction. BUZZ was the first to use a data-driven approach to measuring investor sentiment at the individual security level. With a five-year track record of outperformance, BUZZ is the proven benchmark of broad investor sentiment across large cap US equities.”

BUZZ launched in December 2015 and has outperformed the S&P 500 in 4 out of 5 calendar years and over multiple trailing periods since its inception. In 2020, the Index outperformed the S&P 500 by over 40 percentage points with a total return of 58.65% versus 18.40% for the S&P 500. You can access BUZZ through their flagship ETF, which beginning March 4^th, 2021, will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol NYSE: BUZZ.¹

“I believe in what we’re doing. It takes a lot for me to put my reputation on the line, and I am doing it for BUZZ because this is brilliant. And it works.” - Dave Portnoy

¹ BUZZ is licensed to the VanEck Vectors Social Sentiment ETF (BUZZ)

About BUZZ

BUZZ creates and maintains quantitative portfolio strategies based on proprietary analytics models. Buzz utilizes models which incorporate state of the art Natural Language Processing algorithms and Artificial Intelligence applications to derive actionable investment insights from alternative datasets including online social content. Their revolutionary process is used to create indices that can be licensed to product sponsors and serve as the basis of investment products such as exchange-traded funds. Learn more at investwithbuzz.com

CONTACT: Stephanie Woods BUZZ 647-270-7833 stephanie@investwithbuzz.com