On February 20, three Tradr ETFs were marked as delisted in the NYSE listings feed: AURU (2x Long Aurora Innovation), GSX (2X Long Goldman Sachs), and NETX (2x Long Cloudflare). All three launched in a batch in October 2025 alongside LYFX (Lyft) and OKTX (Okta) as part of an aggressive autumn expansion push. All three are now gone before spring.
This isn't a story about failure at least not in the way the word usually lands. It's a story about how a very particular kind of product factory operates, and what happens when the conveyor belt runs into the law of large numbers.
Tradr ETFs, the single-stock leveraged brand operated by AXS Investments, pioneered the category back in 2022 with TSLQ (inverse Tesla) and NVDS (inverse Nvidia). The premise was elegant in its audacity: wrap a total return swap on a single stock into an ETF shell, list it on an exchange, and hand retail traders leverage without the margin call anxiety or options literacy requirements.
It worked. By early 2026, Tradr had grown to 69 leveraged ETFs with over $2 billion in AUM. They launched 47 funds in 2025 alone, a pace that works out to roughly one new ETF every eight trading days. They were still at it on February 19 (the same day three of their funds were dying their quiet death), announcing three new launches: CLSZ, LEUX, and COHX.
That's the playbook in its purest form: launch aggressively on narrative-driven names, keep the winners, quietly euthanise the ones that never found an audience.
AURU — Tradr 2x Long AUR Daily ETF is probably the most tragicomic of the three. Aurora Innovation is a self-driving truck company that has been perpetually “about to revolutionise freight” for roughly half a decade. It launched commercially on public roads in April 2025, which was enough to make AUR stock interesting enough to wrap in a 2x ETF. The problem: AUR proceeded to fall roughly 54% over the subsequent year. A 2x daily ETF amplifying a declining stock through daily rebalancing compounding is not a financial product, it’s a controlled demolition. Peak AUM was around $2 million. The fund lasted less than five months.
NETX — Tradr 2x Long NET Daily ETF is the most puzzling of the three. Cloudflare is not
a struggling company. NET is a well-loved infrastructure name with a devoted retail following and strong institutional coverage. And yet NETX found no traction whatsoever – a problem of crowding rather than quality. The leveraged Cloudflare thesis is already served by options with deep liquidity and tight spreads. A 1.30% expense ratio 2x ETF doesn't compete favourably with a liquid options market when the underlying has $50bn market cap and heavy derivatives coverage. NETX was redundant before it was listed.
GSX — Tradr 2x Long GS Daily ETF is the irony champion of this particular class of 2026 departures. Goldman Sachs, let it be noted, has been absolutely cooking over the last year – the stock was up sharply in 2025 as the investment banking cycle turned. GSX should have had wind at its back. And yet it couldn't attract meaningful assets. The likely reason: Goldman's institutional identity works against it in the retail leveraged ETF crowd. Tradr's natural audience is the kind of trader who wants 2x exposure to Aurora Innovation or Cloudflare high-volatility growth narratives with meme potential. Goldman is a bank. A very profitable bank, but still: a bank. The retail trader who wants leveraged Goldman exposure is a niche within a niche within a niche.
Tradr's model is essentially a VC portfolio strategy applied to ETF launches. Launch broadly across themes. Most products get minimal traction. A handful become breakout hits that carry the entire enterprise. The overhead of maintaining a non-viable fund is non-trivial, there's regulatory compliance, swap counterparty management, listing fees, NAV calculations so periodic pruning is rational hygiene, not existential crisis.
The math checks out for Tradr at the portfolio level. Their flagship funds (TSLQ, NVDS, and the big-cap AI adjacents) likely account for the overwhelming majority of that $2B+ AUM figure. The October 2025 batch was fishing in territory that required specific narrative conditions to work: Aurora needed commercial trucking breakthroughs to sustain retail interest; Cloudflare needed to trade thin enough that a 2x ETF added something options couldn't provide; Goldman needed to be the kind of company Tradr's audience wants to leverage.
None of those conditions were met.
The single-stock leveraged ETF wave has, in roughly three years, demonstrated something important: product-market fit in this segment is highly concentrated. The vast majority of trading volume and AUM clusters around a small number of underlying names Tesla, Nvidia, and a rotating cast of AI-adjacent stories with sufficient retail attention and price volatility to make the leverage worthwhile.
Everything outside that core is a speculative launch. Some will work (the Palantir 2x funds were presumably well-timed; so was anything touching AI infrastructure in mid-2025). Most won't. And the firms operating at scale Tradr, GraniteShares, Leverage Shares by Themes have all implicitly accepted this reality. You launch fast, you price competitively, you kill what doesn't grow.
The AURU/GSX/NETX cluster delisted on February 20 is neither alarming nor surprising. It's the scheduled maintenance on a factory that remains, by any reasonable measure, in full production mode. As proof: on the very same day these three funds were being quietly removed from the NYSE listings file, Tradr's press team was announcing CLSZ, LEUX, and COHX three new launches, same exchange, same week.
The graveyard shift runs parallel to the morning shift.
That's how this works now.