(New York)

In our ongoing coverage of the best funds and products we met at the Inside ETFs conference (and in our regular course of business), we today want to highlight Exponential Funds’ American Customer Satisfaction ETF (ACSI). We met with the founding team of the issuer and the fund last month and were impressed with both their concept and implementation. The fund itself takes a different tack in choosing quality companies with good outlooks—instead of focusing solely on financial performance as most other funds do, it looks to extensive customer satisfaction surveys, and chooses the companies which are scoring most highly with consumers. It uses the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which was founded in 1994 at the University of Michigan, as the basis for its models. Customer satisfaction is a widely recognized metric and is ultimately a statement of economic value, so companies that score highly in the area are serving their customers well and are likely to thrive. The fund has an expense ratio of 0.66%.

FINSUM: We really like the angle this fund has developed as it takes a totally different view than mainstream ways of judging company outlooks. We see this as a long-term play that could have significant rewards.