Singapore headquartered DOO Group is probably most famous in the UK for its alliance with the world famous Manchester United football club, but DOO Group has a wide range of business activities around finance and technology: Brokerage, Wealth Management, Property, Payment & Exchange, FinTech, Financial Education, Health Care, Consulting, Cloud, and Digital Marketing.
The firm has today launched three thematic, sector-specialist, Hong Kong listed ETFs that also happen to leverage its own expertise and experience in some of these areas.
Doo Wealth Selected Digital Payments ETF (A DOO PAYMENTS / 3412) invests in companies that facilitate digital payments. DOO itself runs the Doo Payment division which provides international money transfers. More broadly, many Asian countries have much higher levels of adoption of mobile payments, with nine of the top ten countries globally being in Asia. Mobile payments are being used instead of credit or debit cards for both point of sale transactions in shops, and e-commerce online.
Doo Wealth Selected AI and Automation Active ETF (A DOO AI 3413) invests in companies driving the revolution in AI and automation, which could range from generative AI semiconductor chips to robotics. DOO Group itself is increasingly using AI to automate processes internally and for customers.
Doo Wealth Selected Web3 ETF A DOO (WEB3 3426) invests in companies that support Web 3.0, which includes the inter-related trends and innovations of decentralized finance, blockchain technology and tokenisation, which together are creating a new financial ecosystem. Doo Group itself recently attended Token 2049 Dubai and boasts of, “a vast ecosystem offering a range of services, including FinTech, brokerage, wealth management, and more, aimed at the Web3 space”.
Although DOO’s home state, Singapore, unusually shares the UK’s prohibition on crypto ETFs for retail investors, Asians in many countries have been enthusiastic adopters of cryptocurrencies, for both longer term saving and shorter term trading.
Thematically, these ETFs are somewhat similar to many listed in the US and Europe, but the key difference is the company behind them. Time will tell if a financial and FinTech conglomerate actively involved in digital payments, AI, automation and Web3 proves to be better at picking stocks than professional fund managers, who may not in many cases have any practical experience of operating these sorts of businesses.