ETF Description:

• Mental illnesses are on the rise and existing medications have been found wanting. A staggering 30% of depression patients do not respond to any currently available treatment.1 Research budgets for psychiatric medicine in large companies have fallen dramatically over the last decade, as confidence wanes that more investment in the same direction will produce improved results.
• Recent breakthrough studies in the medical repurposing of psychedelics and ketamine have found significant benefits to sufferers of anxiety, PTSD, OCD, eating disorders, depression and others. Declared a “breakthrough therapy,” by the FDA in 2018 and 2019, studies on the use of psilocybin have found rapid, marked, and enduring anti-anxiety and depression effects.
• PSY is the first US-listed psychedelics ETF. It seeks to track the BITA Medical Psychedelics, Cannabis, and Ketamine Index, a rules-based index that tracks the performance of a portfolio of companies listed on North American Exchanges conducting legal activities under the national laws of the applicable country related to medical psychedelics, medical cannabis, cannabis pharmaceuticals and cannabidiol (“CBD”) derivatives, and ketamine.
• Companies included in the index must have a minimum market capitalization of $75 million, and operate in the production, distribution, or services related to medical psychedelics, medical cannabis or other medicinal drugs and their derivatives.

Top 10 Holdings:

• Number of holdings - 1
• cash.

Growth Opportunities and Strengths

• Mental health across the globe is dramatically increasing with about 1 in four people being affected by some sort of mental or neurological “disorders” and one and 10 people are currently suffering from a psychopathology.
• The estimated cost of mental disorders in the USA is around 467 Billion dollars in the USA and 2.5 trillion dollars globally.
• the increased amount of isolation, anxiety, and loss experienced by many due to the Covid lockdowns. the rate of adults with major depression increased from 6.1% in 1996 to 10.4% in 2015 with prescriptions skyrocketing.
• I recent study showed that 30% of depressed patients do not respond to any available treatments.
• Psychedelics (serotonergic hallucinogens) are very powerful substances that can alter perception, mood, and affect numerous cognitive process.
• Psychedelics are distinguished by their reliable capacity to create states of altered perception, thoughts, and feelings that are usually not achievable
• between the 1950s and the mid 1960s there were more than a thousand clinical papers discussing more than 40000 patients, many books, and several conferences on the psychedelic drug therapy. by the late 60s and 70s psychedelics received a bad rap mainly due to their political associations.
• As time has past views have started to evolve and the current paradigms of a malfunctioning brain chemistry has caused many researchers to return to psychedelic research.
• a 2013 study that sampled 152 respondents, 13.$% of them states lifetime psychedelic use and no associations were found between the lifetime use of any psychedelic or past year use of LSD had an increased rate of mental health outcome.
  • in several cases the use of psychedelics was associated with a lower rate of mental health problems.
  • later the researcher analyzed a much larger data set of 135095 randomly selected US adults that included 19299 users of psychedelics. again they found no signification associations between lifetime use of psychedelics and increased likelihood of plans or attempts. the studied found that the use of psychedelics was associated with decreased inpatient psychiatrics treatment.
• The Canadian government has allowed health professionals to use Psilocybin mushrooms in end of life care. propelled by studies performed by Johnny Hops, University College London, and others. in which they demonstrated the potential positive effects of psychedelic's in treating a range of mental disorders
• many patients have come out and said that their psilocybin experience was among the most personally meaningful experiences.