Late last year someone posted about INFL, an ETF that looked for companies that benefited or were resistant to inflation. The post has now been disappeared of course along with the rest of our history.
At any rate, over the last 12 month INFL has gone from $29.86 to $30.52 while SPY is down 14%.
DB2
What happens as this inflation cools and all stock prices continue to slide? 
Stop ONLY playing in the past.
INFL has a very high expense ratio compared with many other ETFs. Its strong performance is due to its high concentration of energy stocks which have done well in 2022. But energy is notoriously volatile.
INTF was started in January 2021. It’s a brand-new fund with no significant history of management. It hasn’t been around long enough to develop a beta.
I wouldn’t buy it.
Wendy
One assumes the managers would pivot out of energy stocks if they weren’t doing well with whatever the inflation turns out to be. They also have ag, timber, mineral and gold companies.
It is new, and I haven’t bought any. However, I didn’t want it to get lost in the board transition.
DB2
The whole idea of an ETF is that the managers don’t have to “pivot” out of sectors depending on what’s going on. That’s active management, which is the antithesis of an ETF.
If they have (somehow) picked sectors/companies which are inflation resistant, one would expect those to be, well, inflation resistant no matter what the market conditions. No?
FWIW, based on my very, very casual research, consumer staples and utilities suffer less than most during inflationary periods, so I have been shifting money into VDC and VPU ETFs.
Seems relevant to resurrect what looks to be the post in question. Please correct me if it’s not the one you’re referring to.
Author: Notehound7
Subject: An Inflation-Hedge ETF idea
Date: 11/20/2021 7:12 AM
No. of Recommendations: 6If you or anyone you know uses ETFs, a Seeking Alpha writer whose handle is Stanford Chemist took a look at INFL, an actively-managed ETF designed to purchase assets the fund manager considers to be inflation beneficiaries.
His assessment and the sponsor’s slide deck may be found at the following links, respectively:
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4470964-infl-good-inflation…
https://horizonkinetics.com/app/uploads/INFL-Power-Point-Pre…
I looked at some of the fund’s holdings and found that they are consistent with the fund creator’s thesis and logic. Whether the fund survives and/or thrives in the coming year(s) depends entirely upon whether fund investors are willing to pay future management fees for today’s timely investment idea.
DISCLAIMER: I do not presently own any shares of this ETF and I do not play an investment advisor on TV or in real life.
(Not available here: https://boards.fool.com/an-inflation-hedge-etf-idea-34984107.aspx?sort=whole)
So, while that blew away the S&P as well as cash (by a couple of percent), it was down around 5% when measured against inflation.
My current thoughts of what will work long-term as an inflation resistant store of equity value is holding an over-weight group of miners. These have traditionally spewed out substantial dividends (which I reinvest) and should increase in nominal value as Chinese manufacturing ramps up again. A substantial portion of the position is held in foreign currency as a hedge against loss in the value of the USD.
Not recommending the strategy, just mentioning the route I’m taking.
Jeff
Some are, some aren’t.
“An actively managed ETF will have a benchmark index, but managers may change sector allocations, market-time trades, or deviate from the index as they see fit…An actively managed ETF features many of the same benefits of a traditional exchange-traded fund like price transparency, liquidity, and tax efficiency, but with a fund manager that can adapt the fund to changing market conditions.”
DB2
Thanks for finding that.
DB2
I heard somewhere, probably in a podcast, that if you want to roughly keep up with the SP500 and reliably beat inflation AND have lower volatility, just buy utilities. I assume there are some utility ETFs out there. In what I was listening to, they seemed to assert that over periods of decades this holds true.
What if beating inflation is the not the play in 2023?
Utilities are the old standby but over any reasonable time period the boring old S&P beats inflation pretty handily. It is up about 50% over the past five years, for example.
Thank you for that, I had forgotten. The only ETF’s I have are passive; there’s a criteria, it doesn’t change, I’m not at the whim of some “manager” who changes his mind. I may change my mind, but that’s a different thing.
I completely forgot that there are ETF’s with higher expenses, changing rules, and the chance that it’s going to be taken over by a 12 year old 