In an ever changing market, more workers are taking advantage of the side-hustle or the quickly rising gig economy that has been etching into the traditional workplace. Investors can also capitalize on the growth in this gig economy through a targeted exchange traded fund play.
Chris Guillebeau, author of “100 Side Hustles”, explained that generating a significant amount of money using alternative platforms like Fiverr that recently went public can be lucrative, Yahoo! Finance reported.
“If you’re creative enough, they have lots of little up-sales and things,” Guillebeau said. “And then if you can take customers or clients from Fiverr, Upwork, all these other networks, eventually to become your own customers, then you can do it that way.”
According to a recent Bankrate.com survey, almost half of millennials utilize gig economy to earn more cash on the side. The survey revealed that 48% of millennial workers surveyed moonlight to earn extra money, compared to 28% of Baby Boomers and 38% of Generation-Xers.
“People are turning to these types of projects because there’s so much opportunity, there’s so many possibilities, there’s so much potential,” Guillebeau said.
However, there are downsides to the new gig economy. For example, Uber and Lyft have been censured for how their drivers work long hours with relatively low pay and no benefits, highlighting the low levels of job security from these types of new gigs.
As a way to target this rising market, investors can look to the SoFi Gig Economy ETF (NASDAQ: GIGE). GIGE is an actively managed fund, advised by Toroso Investments, that is designed to seek long term capital appreciation by capturing exposure to the economic shift toward gig-oriented companies.
The “gig economy” refers to a group of companies that embrace and support the workforce in which employment is based around short-term engagements that allow for flexibility and personal freedom and temporary contracts. The fund is structured so that most companies that IPO can be included in the portfolio within 31 days of their IPO, as opposed to traditional passive funds that must likely wait 60 to 90 days to include a new IPO. For example, GIGE includes some well-known, side-job names like Uber and Lyft, which recently launched their IPOs.
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