Oct 8 (Reuters) - Roundhill Investments relaunched an

exchange-traded fund it shuttered two years ago that is designed

to track the constantly changing universe of "meme" stocks and

the activities of the retail investors who love them, the ETF

provider said on Wednesday.

The new actively managed fund, the Roundhill Meme Stock ETF,

trading under the symbol "MEME," seeks to capitalize on a trend

that has gripped U.S. stock traders intermittently since the

pandemic, when a wave of new retail investors took to social

media platforms like Reddit to chat about their investment

theories and share their hottest stock picks.

Roundhill first launched the ETF in 2021 to capture that

initial bout of meme stock exuberance, one dominated by

companies like movie theater chain AMC Entertainment ( AMC ) and

GameStop ( GME ). The firm closed the fund two years later amid

flagging investor interest.

That earlier ETF was a passive fund that relied on social

media mentions and short interest to construct its portfolio,

said Sumit Roy, an analyst at ETF.com. The new ETF, Roy said,

emphasizes trading volume and volatility. It will be actively

managed and can rebalance as often as once a week to capture the

latest twists and turns in the world of meme stocks.

The current ETF portfolio includes companies like

residential real estate platform Opendoor Technologies ( OPEN ),

fuel cell technology venture Plug Power ( PLUG ) and quantum

computing stocks like Rigetti.

"Retail attention moves in cycles," said Dave Mazza, CEO of

Roundhill. "But the drivers behind them are structural" and

create recurring waves of enthusiasm by retail investors in

myriad concepts. Those drivers, he said, range from the debut of

commission-free trading platforms to the creation of online

communities of retail investors.

The new ETF, he added, will capture the behavior of online

retail communities and include "the companies that become

cultural and market touchpoints."

Dan Sotiroff, an analyst at Morningstar, places the revamped

ETF in the category of thematic ETFs, a group he says tend to

underperform over the longer term.

Analysts, academics and trading organizations that have

studied the growth in self-directed retail investing and its

impact on financial markets calculate this group now accounts

for anywhere from 10% to more than 20% of all trading.

Marco Iachini, senior vice president of research at Vanda

Research, said the figure is significantly higher for stocks

capturing the imagination and interest of the retail investor

community, including meme stocks.