The Cybersecurity ETF With the Worst Ticker on Wall Street Is Tripling the S&P 500

SPAM surged 27% through May 2026 as AI capital expenditure repriced its 36 cybersecurity holdings from discretionary IT costs to durable infrastructure plays. A $10,000 SPY investment grew to just $10,820 over the same window, while the same amount in SPAM returned roughly $12,750. Zacks projects cybersecurity spending hitting $699 billion by 2034, though Goldman warns an AI capex reversal could quickly erase SPAM's outperformance. It sounds nuts, but SoFi is giving new active invest users up to $1,000 in stock for a limited time, and all it takes is a $50 deposit to get started. See for yourself (Sponsor) The cybersecurity ETF that some marketing committee decided to brand Themes Cybersecurity ETF ( NASDAQ:SPAM ) is having the kind of year that makes you forget its ticker is the universal shorthand for unwanted email. Through the first five months of 2026, SPAM is up 27.54%, climbing from $30.65 on December 31, 2025 to $39.09 on June 5, 2026. The S&P 500, via the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust ( NYSEARCA:SPY ), is up 8.16% over the exact same window. That is more than three times the broad market, achieved by a fund whose entire pitch is sitting in a basket of 36 companies that sell digital locks. The ticker irony is real. The performance is genuine. If you put $10,000 into SPAM on the last trading day of 2025 at $30.65 and walked away, you were holding roughly $12,750 as of the June 5 close at $39.09. The same $10,000 in SPY bought in at $681.92 and finished at $737.55, worth about $10,820. One of those balances pays for a used car. The other pays for a tank of gas. What makes the gap stranger is how recently SPAM was the laggard in this story. As of February 10, 2026, the fund had returned just 19.4% since its December 2023 launch, well behind the S&P over the same stretch, with a tiny $2.4 million in assets under management and a portfolio dragged down by losses in top names like CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks. Four months later, the same fund is the one putting up the numbers people screenshot. SPAM tracks the Solactive Cyber Security Index, holds 36 cybersecurity stocks, and charges 0.35%. That is the wrapper. The engine is something else. Cybersecurity in 2026 is a sector where the demand side and the threat side are both being fed by the same money. AI capex is at multi-year highs (Vanguard pegs the baseline forecast for corporate capital expenditure growth at 7.0% through 2026, well above the 2023 to 2024 pace of 3.8%), and a meaningful share of that spending is going into infrastructure that needs to be defended. At the same time, attackers are using the same generative tools to write better phishing, automate intrusion, and probe networks at scale. When the offense and the defense are both buying more compute, the companies selling the defense product line collect from both sides of the trade. SoFi Active Invest is offering a limited-time promotion. Open an account, fund it with $50 or more, and you could receive up to $1,000 in complimentary stock for Active Invest accounts. See for yourself by clicking here now. That backdrop is showing up in analyst coverage. Zacks projects cybersecurity spending growing at a 13.8% CAGR from 2026 to 2034, reaching $699.39 billion, and frames the category as a beneficiary of both AI adoption and rising geopolitical tension. Goldman Sachs goes further in its 2026 outlook, calling out economic security as a prominent theme for 2026, tied to NATO defense commitments, reindustrialization, and supply chain resilience. Cybersecurity sits at the intersection of every one of those. Which is to say SPAM is winning because the names inside, the CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, and Akamai of the holdings list, are being repriced as durable beneficiaries of the same AI capex cycle that is carrying the rest of the tape, rather than as discretionary IT line items that get cut when budgets tighten. Most of SPAM's 2026 gain came late. The fund is up 14.61% in the last month alone, climbing from $34.10 on May 6 to $39.09 on June 5. SPY, over the same one-month window, returned roughly 0.5%. A run that concentrated tells you something. Either the market just figured out a thesis it had been ignoring, or a thesis it already believed got a fresh catalyst. The bullish technical coverage piling up in late May, including a Stock Traders Daily note on May 29 calling out a sustained breakout and compelling upside potential due to a lack of resistance levels above the current price, fits the second story more than the first. One number to file away. SPAM is down 2.56% over the last week, with the most recent session a 4.44% drop on June 5. A fund that just ran 14% in a month and then gave back a couple of percent in five sessions is doing what concentrated thematic funds do. The volatility is part of the price of admission. The honest read is that SPAM's 2026 run is real, mechanism-driven, and tied to a spending cycle that the major investment houses expect to keep running through next year. It is also a $2.4 million AUM fund holding 36 names in a single thematic sleeve, which is the textbook setup for sharp drawdowns when the AI capex narrative gets challenged. Goldman flags exactly this risk, noting that a marked reversal and broad unwind of AI-related investments could be the precursor to a hard landing. The indicators worth tracking are the quarterly capex guides from the hyperscalers, the billings and net new ARR numbers from CrowdStrike and Palo Alto when they report, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis private fixed investment data that Vanguard cites in its 7.0% baseline forecast. If those three keep printing in the same direction, the mechanism that produced this gap holds. If any of them rolls over, a 36-stock concentrated cybersecurity ETF with a four-letter joke for a ticker is going to give back the outperformance faster than it earned it. That is the trade you are taking when you buy SPAM today: the next print of those three numbers, not the run that already happened. Looking to grow your money but unsure where to begin? SoFi Active Invest is offering a limited-time promotion—open an account, fund it with $50 or more, and you could receive up to $1,000 in complimentary stock for Active Invest accounts. From $0 commission trading to fractional shares and automated investing, this app is designed to simplify investing for everyone, whether you’re just starting or already experienced. Its easy to sign up and secure your bonus .