New ETF Listings – The ESG Shelf Is Quietly Being Cleared Out, the 3X Leveraged Quantum Shelf Is Filling Up

A meditation on what the industry is launching, what it is quietly liquidating, and what the gap between the two tells you about the cycle.
The new listings file tells a clean story this cycle. The ESG aisle is being quietly cleared out. The leveraged crypto and quantum aisle is rapidly expanding. In the middle of all of it, a Canadian issuer has launched an ETF that holds cash.

Corgi cross-listed from Cboe BZX to NYSE

The largest single-day ETF rollout in history was a Corgi affair listed on Cboe BZX a few weeks earlier, listing 34 products on one day. Much of the line has now cross-listed onto NYSE, which is the kind of distribution decision usually made over months rather than weeks. They are, at minimum, in a hurry.

The Hyperliquid three-way

Across the Atlantic, in a separate but symptomatic development, three different issuers filed ETPs on Hyperliquid in the same window. Grayscale has just launched a HYPE ETF. Bitwise launched a Hyperliquid ETF. 21Shares launched its own Hyperliquid ETF, just to be sure. The product slate reads like a hostage video in which three issuers are each forced, separately, to confirm that they have heard of perpetual decentralised exchanges.

The underlying token is currently trading near all-time highs. It is also a token whose principal use is leveraged speculation on other tokens, which gives the entire structure a pleasingly fractal quality. Investors can now buy a regulated European wrapper that gives them exposure to a token that gives them exposure to a venue that gives them exposure to leveraged perpetual futures on cryptocurrencies. This is what financial deepening looks like, apparently.

VanEck, meanwhile, has launched a BNB ETF, and someone has filed a 2X Avalanche product and a 2X Sui product. The crypto long tail is being securitised one altcoin at a time. By the end of this cycle there will be an ETF for every token whose ticker contains a vowel.

Leverage Shares 3X Long D-Wave Quantum (QBT3)

I want to discuss the D-Wave product specifically. The underlying stock has a beta of approximately 4.1 and average weekly price changes in the high double digits. The shares have lurched between the low teens and the high forties over a relatively short window, which is the price range usually associated with mid-cap biotechs awaiting FDA decisions rather than companies selling commercial quantum computers.

Someone at Leverage Shares looked at this profile and concluded that what the European retail investor needed was three times the daily move. They have also, helpfully, launched 3X Rigetti, 3X Oklo, 3X Joby Aviation, 3X Rocket Lab, and 3X NuScale Power. The basket is essentially every story stock that retail investors hold a strong opinion about, repackaged at triple velocity. Reading the list feels like watching someone hand out matches at a fireworks factory.

The quiet liquidation

And then, in the same listings batch, you find the cancellations. JPMorgan Green Social Sustainable Bond Active UCITS ETF: liquidated. State Street SPDR MSCI USA Climate Paris Aligned ETF: liquidated. State Street SPDR S&P SmallCap 600 ESG: liquidated. State Street Nuveen Municipal Bond ESG: liquidated. UBS European Physical Carbon ETC: liquidated. SPDR MSCI Emerging Markets Asia, SPDR Bloomberg Euro Corporate Screened, SPDR Bloomberg EM Local Bond UCITS, and the rest of an entire shelf of well-meaning Article 8 and Article 9 product, all leaving the building.

This is not, in itself, a story about the wisdom or folly of ESG investing. Funds get liquidated all the time, and these particular funds had presumably failed to gather meaningful assets. The story is about timing. In the same listings batch that contains a wave of leveraged crypto wrappers, triple-leveraged quantum and small modular nuclear products, and the largest single-day thematic ETF rollout in history, the ESG aisle is being quietly cleared out. Carbon, climate-aligned equities, social bonds, all leaving. 3X Rigetti, walking in.

The two trends are not directly causal. They are, however, sitting next to each other on the same day.

And then, the cash fund

Among all of this, the Ninepoint Cash Management ETF (NSAV) was listed in Canada. It is a fund that holds cash. Not a money market complex, not a short duration bond ladder, just cash management. Listed in the same batch as a 3X leveraged ETP on a quantum computing penny stock, an entire shelf of liquidated ESG product, and three separate wrappers around the same speculative crypto token.