A leading exchange operator is getting in on investor enthusiasm for Fangs, a small basket of highly valuable technology stocks, with the launch of a futures contract branded with the catchy acronym.

The Fangs — Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Alphabet, the parent company of Google — are joined by six other tech names in the futures contract that began trading Wednesday on Intercontinental Exchange. “Trade the top of tech,” said ICE in an announcement to customers.

ICE, which also owns the New York Stock Exchange, created the NYSE FANG+ stock index in September. The equally-weighted basket is up 58 per cent in the year to date, compared to a 16 per cent gain for the S&P 500 stock index.

It is the latest instance of a derivatives market trying to cash in on excitement happening outside its gates. Last week CME Group, the world’s biggest futures exchange operator, said it planned to offer bitcoin futures as prices for the cryptocurrency soar.

ICE will next year lose the right to list futures on the Russell 2000 small-stock index as they migrate to CME. The Russell index family is owned by London Stock Exchange Group, an ICE competitor. The FANG+ index is controlled by ICE.

Trabue Bland, president of ICE Futures US, said his company invented NYSE FANG+ in response to customer demand. Futures volume had topped 40 contracts at midday in New York.

“We were out talking to customers about equity indexes, and this was the product that came back the most. It was the stocks that people were most excited about, and most excited about trading in one basket,” Mr Bland said.

In addition to the four stocks captured by the Fang acronym, the equally weighted ICE index includes Apple, Alibaba, Baidu, Nvidia, Tesla and Twitter. The total market value of the 10 stocks is $3.5tn.

Nicholas Colas of DataTrek, a research company, said it was unclear what question the product was supposed to answer or who the main users of the product would be, and called the US-listed stocks in the index “remarkably geo-centric”.

He was amused by the “trade the top of tech” announcement. “Is it really the top of tech, like 1999?” he asked.

Equity investors can already trade the stocks individually or gain similar exposure through exchange traded funds, baskets of securities that trade as a single name on a stock exchange. Last summer an ETF launched with the ticker “FNG” holding many of the same names.

In contrast to ETFs or cash equities, trading futures only requires traders to post margin against their positions, tying up less capital. ICE described its products as a “hedging mechanism to quickly increase or decrease tech exposure in equities portfolios”.