US stock market investors have chased the FAANG stocks, then the Magnificent Seven. Now, a new acronym is doing the rounds, and it comes with a twist: two of its six members aren’t even publicly traded yet.
The acronym MANGOS comprises Meta, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, and SpaceX. Six companies are identified as key players expected to shape the next decade, similar to how FAANG influenced the previous one.
What’s Driving The Shift
The shift is reflecting changes in investor preferences. Investors are shifting from traditional hardware and consumer platform companies to firms focused on AI and commercial space technology.
Almost every MANGOS company is creating infrastructure for other companies to pay and use. Nvidia develops the CPUs that train and serve almost every major AI model. Google and Meta are developing AI systems that companies pay to include in their own products.
OpenAI and Anthropic sell API access to developers, who then create consumer and enterprise solutions on top. SpaceX’s Starlink connects businesses and geographies that traditional broadband cannot reach.
In other words, these are not just companies selling to consumers; they are the picks and shovels behind the AI and space economy.
Two of the six MANGOS, Anthropic and OpenAI, are still private. Reportedly, Anthropic may come out with an IPO in October. SpaceX was listed recently, and the share price ($135) is up by 16% in the last month but still below the listing price of $150.
Meanwhile, Nvidia is up over 21% in the last year and Alphabet (Google) is up 65% during the same period. This mix of listed, recently listed, and still-private names is part of what makes MANGOS a harder basket to actually invest in, compared to its predecessors.
Wall Street Is Already Packaging It Into ETFs
The market has witnessed several MANGOS ETFs launched in the last 2-3 months. “More than ten MANGOS ETFs have been filed with the SEC since the name went viral in June, and not one of them is trading yet. Research in the Review of Financial Studies found that such specialised ETFs lose about 30% on a risk-adjusted basis over their first five years, because they launch once the underlying stocks are already expensive,” says Shlok Srivastav, Co-founder and COO, Appreciate.
Do You Already Own Most Of This?
“An Indian investor holding a broad US index already owns most of this. Nvidia alone is about 7.5% of the S&P 500 and the Magnificent 7 about a third. The basket concentrates exposure that is already in the portfolio. Index weight has delivered those companies without the drawdown that concentration brings,” adds Srivastav.
For investors chasing the next big theme, the MANGOS story is a reminder that being early to a name is not the same as being early to the trade. By the time a basket gets its own acronym and its own ETFs, the exposure it promises may already be sitting quietly inside a portfolio that never needed a new ticker to begin with.
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