The next hot theme in tech may just be transportation.
As senators work to pass the Biden administration’s $579 billion infrastructure bill — a sweeping plan to put new money into the transportation, telecommunications and utilities industries — investors are acting accordingly, Global X’s Jay Jacobs said Monday.
“People are very focused on playing the Biden administration because there’s a lot of money coming out of the federal government right now looking for places to invest, and mostly, that’s in infrastructure,” Jacobs told CNBC’s “ETF Edge.”
“There’s a lot of money really pushing towards this new era of transportation using electric vehicles, using different clean tech and really advancing infrastructure in the United States.”
Three percent of all car sales in the U.S. in May and June were electric vehicles, the highest rate yet, said Jacobs, Global X’s head of research and strategy.
With global automakers including Mercedes, Volkswagen and BMW doubling down on electric vehicle production, Jacobs expects “a massive shift” in driving habits.
At Global X, this has manifested into roughly $4 billion of inflows for two of its ETFs: the firm’s U.S. Infrastructure Development ETF (PAVE) and its Lithium & Battery Tech ETF (LIT).
Those ETFs have accrued around $4 billion in assets this year collectively, and each has roughly $4 billion in total assets, Jacobs said.
“What’s interesting is that the kind of pure technology stocks are not necessarily what’s in right now. We think of cloud computing and we think of video games or e-commerce, some of those tech names that were really popular during the stay-at-home economy. It has kind of shifted away from that and more towards what I’ve called kind of like tech transportation stocks,” Jacobs said.
“We’re seeing transformation in the transportation industry,” he said. “So, there’s a lot of investor appetite for this segment of the market.”
