Here’s a sobering statistic: Every year, around 647,000 Americans die from heart disease.
For perspective, we’ve lost about 620,000 Americans to COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic. Heart disease kills more Americans every single year than the worst pandemic in a century.
This is not to minimize the risk of COVID-19. I just want to drive home how serious the heart disease epidemic is.
And this trend isn’t likely to reverse soon.
Heart Disease Isn’t Going Away
While heart disease can affect anyone of any age, risk dramatically increases with age. The average age for a heart attack is 64.5 for men and 70.3 for women.
Here’s the thing. There’s a lot more people in that critical age group coming down the pipeline. More than 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every day… That’s seven boomers per minute, every minute of every hour of every day.
This means heart disease numbers will continue to rise … along with the costs associated with them.
Americans aged 65 and older make up about 16% of the population today but account for 36% of all healthcare spending. And those numbers are more extreme the older you get. An 85-year-old has a life expectancy of about 6.5 years beyond 85. But if you make it to age 85, you can expect to spend more than a third of your entire lifetime healthcare spending in those final years.
I take this to heart (no pun intended). You might not know this about me, but before I fell in love with trading, I was studying to become a doctor. So, health has always been something near and dear to me.
HART ETF Has a Healthy Outlook
If there is an upside to a crisis, it’s that it creates opportunities. And that brings me to the IQ Healthy Hearts ETF (NYSE: HART).
The HART exchange-traded fund (ETF) is exactly what it looks like. It’s a collection of companies seeking heart disease treatments and promoting healthy living.
As you might expect, Big Pharma has a presence here. Eli Lilly and Co. (NYSE: LLY), Novartis AG (NYSE: NVS), Merck & Co. Inc. (NYSE: MRK) and other large pharmaceuticals are all major positions. But the ETF also includes the stocks of “healthy living” companies like Nike Inc. (NYSE: NKE), Peloton Interactive Inc. (Nasdaq: PTON), Under Armour Inc. (NYSE: UAA) and outdoor lifestyle companies like Yeti Holdings Inc. (NYSE: YETI).
And as a nice bonus, New York Life Investments, the fund’s managers, also donate a portion of HART’s management fee to the American Heart Association.
I like the story behind HART, and I like that the ETF stands to benefit from a wave of demographics-based spending on medical care and healthier living. But I also like to drill down and choose the individual stocks that I believe are best positioned to play those trends.
In the August issue of Green Zone Fortunes, I do exactly that. I recommend an innovative company that saw a massive spike in demand for its core products during the pandemic. But importantly, demographic trends all but guarantee that demand will stay strong for a long time to come.
You can become a member of Green Zone Fortunes today, and you’ll be one of the first to learn about this new stock recommendation when the August issue hits email inboxes on Tuesday!
Click here to see how you can join now. In this presentation, you’ll learn about a technology I call “Imperium.” Health care is only the beginning for the biotech company behind this innovation. And this stock mega trend has the potential to be bigger than internet stocks in the 1990s! Find out more here.
To good profits,
Adam O’Dell
Chief investment strategist, Money & Markets