Transcript:
Easan Arulanantham:
Um, so another kind of a little bit of cool news, “On Friday, the infrastructure bill passed. Are there any kind of ETFs that look interesting because of the infrastructure bill?”
Tom Vaughan:
Yeah. So the infrastructure bill, I think it’s actually going to be signed on Monday. So, it’s still going… Actually, there are two Exchange Traded Funds that I find kind of interesting in the infrastructure area. One of the things to keep in mind and keep in mind for example, iShares which is owned by BlackRock, which is… they’re one of the largest money managers in the world has identified mega trends, right? That they saw robotics and artificial engineering, Clean Energy, artificial intelligence, sorry, Clean Energy, and etc. One of the trends that they said that they established was infrastructure, because they just looked at infrastructure as a whole, here in the US and even around the world, and how much of it needs improvement, how much growth is going to happen in that area? And so they’ve identified infrastructure as a mega trend, before the pandemic and before this bill came out. And obviously interesting enough, this even had bipartisan support, which is fairly unusual in our current situation. And so, what they’ve identified here, in this mega trend is exactly what’s happening with this bill, there is a need, there’s a lot of interest. You know, broadband is a huge issue, right? I mean, if you’ve got kids that are trying to get things done, that can’t get into broadband, because their area doesn’t have as much.
So excuse me, iShares has an infrastructure ETF, the ticker symbol’s IFRA. So that would be definitely something I would look at, we’ve had that in our portfolio in the past. And I think even if it doesn’t have a huge pop right now from the bill that’s coming out, because the bill is gonna be spread out over eight years, I still think it’s worthwhile to look at it just because it’s an overall mega trend that I think is going to continue to play out as far as that goes. Another way to play, this is just through kind of transportation. And so you’re going to see a tremendous amount of this infrastructure bill pushed into transportation of all types, airlines, airports, railroad… railroad transportation, etc. So what we’re looking for there, there’s another ETF called XTN, which is a transportation index that I would look at also, for kind of the infrastructure play, as far as that goes. That’s been doing quite well, just recently, probably because of the news about the infrastructure bill, but there’s some individual stocks that you can play, along those lines, but it might be better to kind of own a whole basket. So those are things that I would look at in that area. But it goes beyond keep in mind that this goes beyond just this bill, this is something that’s happening worldwide, this push to kind of increase the infrastructure the US hasn’t done anything for a long time, especially in the area, say bridges, they identified 10 bridges that they think if they went down, would actually have a pretty sizable impact on gross domestic product here in the US. And so they want to go through with this bill and redo those, or at least retrofit those bridges. And so that’s a huge deal hasn’t been done in forever. So there’s, there’s some pieces that I think are, you know, long term investment options, opportunities in infrastructures is still there. It’s a, I think it’s a viable area.