Morgan Stanley already broke ranks among the big legacy banks by launching a spot bitcoin product, undercutting the giants on fees and pulling in real money within days. Evidently that was just the warm-up. This week the firm listed a spot Ethereum trust and a spot Solana trust simultaneously, both with staking built in, both charging the same low fee as the bitcoin fund, both custodied jointly by a household-name trust bank and a crypto-native custodian in the kind of arrangement that would have been unthinkable at this firm not long ago.
There is a neat irony sitting underneath the launch. Ethereum is trading well below its prior peak, and Solana has fallen even further from its own highs. A famously risk-averse institution has chosen this exact moment, with both assets deep in drawdown, to plant its flag in not one but two of them. Buying the dip is a perfectly respectable strategy. Doing it twice, simultaneously, with staking yield attached, in a wrapper built for wealth management clients who were told a decade ago that this asset class was a fad, is the kind of thing that deserves a small round of applause.
Memory chips have been having a moment. Demand from AI data centres has pushed contract prices up at a pace that would look implausible in a business plan, let alone a spreadsheet, and the handful of firms that control the supply have been reporting margins that most industries would consider a rounding error away from theft. The leveraged long product tracking this theme debuted with the largest first-day trading volume any leveraged or inverse ETF has ever recorded in the US, then gathered assets at a pace that made everyone briefly forget that leveraged products are supposed to be a niche corner of the market.
Then the sector fell into its own bear market, chip stocks gave back a meaningful chunk of the gains, and even the bank's own analysts started using the word "correction" out loud. Enter the inverse version, the first of its kind for this particular trade, arriving precisely one month after its long sibling's triumphant debut. The industry has, in record time, built both sides of the boxing ring for the same fight. Whoever wins, somebody was already positioned for it.
Here is where it gets recursive. The issuer behind this fund already markets an entire family of products under an "i3" brand, its own internal shorthand for intelligence, innovation, and investments, essentially a proprietary label for "we use some AI in our process." Layering an "AI Tech and Innovation" fund on top of a house brand that already means AI is buzzword architecture with a mirror inside it. It is AI, branded as AI, from a firm whose whole identity is built around a word that also means AI.
To be fair to the issuer, it is a genuinely old-school Canadian institution that has been listed since the 1960s, which makes the juxtaposition almost charming rather than cynical. It has also, notably, already wound down at least one other fund carrying the same house brand, a useful reminder that a good acronym is not the same thing as a durable strategy.