New ETF Listings: A Bitcoin Trade Goes Full Circle

Most of the listings today are merely cross-listings of funds into Switzerland. One story, though, is a genuine callback, and it might be the best kind of irony: the industry spent years asking regulators for something, got it, and then quietly walked back to the thing it used before. 

iShares Equity Bitcoin Portfolio ETF (IBQT, Toronto Stock Exchange)

Before regulators cleared the way for funds to hold bitcoin directly, the only route into the trade was sideways: buy the miners, buy the exchanges, buy the corporate treasuries that had bet the balance sheet on the coin, and hope the correlation held. That equity proxy was the industry's best available workaround for years, born of necessity rather than choice.

Then spot bitcoin ETFs arrived. Canada has had one holding the actual coin for a while now: no proxy, no workaround, just custody and a ticker.

So it's a little disorienting to watch a new fund appear that goes straight back to the pre-approval playbook, building a portfolio of miners, exchanges, and treasury companies deliberately around bitcoin rather than through it. The industry spent years lobbying for permission to do the simple thing. Having got it, someone has now relaunched the workaround anyway, this time by choice rather than necessity. Full circle, purely voluntary.

Addendum

I do apologise, I flagged the L&G African Government Bond as a sensible / boring ETF, however I missed the genius behind it, the main USD listing ticker is LION, this now provides L&G with the following products.

These might not win ticker of the year, but this is one of the best ticker ranges I have seen...