The coronavirus pandemic has changed the world. But it has also accelerated certain technological trends that investors should be tapped into. From automation to genomics, these advancements are here to stay and there are many growth stocks that are just getting started.

ProShares' Executive Director of Thematic Investing Scott Helfstein sat down with The Motley Fool to dive into some of the intriguing stocks in their new ETF: ProShares MSCI Transformational Changes ETF (ANEW -0.60%). He shared plenty of tips that all kinds of investors can apply to their own portfolios.

Corinne Cardina: Fools, for the next 30 minutes we are going to talk about ProShares' new ETF. It is called ANEW. I'm going to drop the ticker in the chat, and it tackles four transformational changes that are being accelerated by COVID-19. Scott, can you give us the highlights of what those four transformational changes are?

Scott Helfstein: Sure. It really has to do with how we've spent our time and our lives have changed over the months of the pandemic, and if we think about the hours of our day, if we're fortunate enough, we work, we try and to take care of ourselves. The way we consume has changed, the way we connect has changed. How many of us had FaceTime or Facebook (META -0.07%) apps open at holiday tables at some point in the last nine months? So really, what we wanted to do was put together a set of companies that really spoke to how our lives have changed, but more importantly, how those changes were already in place and were accelerating. Really, there's four of them that we focused on. The first is the future of work. So we have, for example, things like video conference, but we're also focused on how the changes in remote have facilitated things like automation and the automation revolution. We have genomics and telehealth, which many of us have now actually had a Teladoc (TDOC 2.33%) appointment at some point over the last few months. The number of people that use the services is up something like four or five times what it was last year, and now we're getting news about vaccines where messenger RNA in genomics really play a prominent role. The third area is digital consumer and that gets to social media streaming, gaming, and the explosion of e-sports throughout the pandemic. Then the fourth is food revolution, which is one that we think is a little different and people perhaps don't hear as much about. But we saw beef prices go through the sky and it was the largest increase prices the USDA had ever recorded back when we were seeing the shutdowns and trying to ensure the supply chain. If we actually step back, there is a really interesting story to tell about innovation in the food space that we think investors should be paying attention to.