BUZZ vs MEME: The Battle to Turn Online Hype Into Returns
The meme trade is back in the spotlight. BUZZ and MEME are taking different paths to profit from investor sentiment.
Earlier this month, the Roundhill Meme Stock ETF (MEME) made headlines when it relaunched, bringing back the same name and ticker, but with a revamped strategy aimed at the same goal. It’s the first time an ETF has ever been brought back in this way.
MEME originally debuted in 2021 at the tail end of the meme-stock frenzy, when GameStop and AMC were everywhere on social media. It closed in 2023 as the retail-trading mania cooled. Now, with meme activity once again picking up, Roundhill is giving it another shot.
But while MEME was going through its launch–shutdown–relaunch cycle, another ETF operating in a similar space kept chugging along: the VanEck Social Sentiment ETF (BUZZ).
Launched in March 2021, about nine months before the original MEME fund, BUZZ remains alive and well with $153 million in assets and an impressive 52% gain so far this year.
Tracking the Market’s Mood
BUZZ’s strategy captures far more than meme stocks in the GameStop mold. It tracks the BUZZ NextGen AI US Sentiment Leaders Index, which aims to “identify the U.S. common stocks with the most positive insights collected from online sources including social media, news articles, blog posts, and other alternative datasets.”
According to the index provider, “with BUZZ, we use AI to monitor 15 million online posts a month to measure which stocks have the most positive investor sentiment. Then, we rank the top 75 stocks each month to feature in the BUZZ NextGen AI US Sentiment Leaders Index.”
That process results in a broader portfolio than what most people associate with meme stocks. Alongside clear meme stocks like GameStop and Opendoor Technologies, BUZZ also holds mega-cap names such as Tesla, Nvidia, and Amazon.
It also holds retail investor darlings like Palantir and AST SpaceMobile, which are companies that generate significant online discussion but aren’t necessarily “meme” plays.
MEME’s New Look
Roundhill’s relaunched MEME ETF takes a different approach than before. The original version selected 25 highly shorted stocks that were trending on social media, which was an attempt to mirror the retail-fueled “short-squeeze” phenomenon of 2021.
The new version no longer starts with social media. It first screens for the 200 most actively traded U.S. stocks, then narrows that down to the 30 with the highest implied volatility, using the options market’s expectations for price swings as a proxy for identifying meme stocks.
Only after that does it consider social media activity, selecting 13 to 25 stocks that show spikes in online engagement.
The fund is actively managed and rebalances weekly, giving it a much faster turnover than BUZZ, which adjusts monthly. MEME’s expense ratio is 0.69%, and it has already gathered $36 million in assets in less than two weeks, surpassing the AUM of its predecessor, which closed with just a few million.
Top holdings currently include Navitas Semiconductor Corp. and Critical Metals Corp., each with just over 10% weighting in the fund.
BUZZ, by contrast, caps its holdings to a 3% weight and the ETF charges an expense ratio of 0.76%.
Different Paths, Similar Idea
The two funds now reflect slightly different interpretations of the same big idea—that online activity can serve as a meaningful signal of investor sentiment, and that retail investors now wield enough influence for that signal to matter.
But the contrast between the two funds shows how differently firms are trying to harness that signal and turn it into an actionable strategy.
