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A short field guide to this batch of new ETP launches, in which the commodity supercycle acquires two new wrappers, BNB acquires a megaphone, and somebody, somewhere, calmly rebalances a 60/40.
If you wanted to summarise the state of the markets in three product launches, you could do considerably worse than this batch. Boom commodity: copper, listed at all-time highs. Bust commodity: lithium, listed almost exactly at the moment its multi-year bear market is officially turning. And in between, a leveraged crypto ETF that did not exist a few weeks ago but now very much does.
ETFS Global Lithium Miners ETF (VOLT)
Lithium has spent recent years being the cautionary tale of every “EV revolution” presentation. After hitting records during the last cycle, lithium carbonate prices fell more than 80%, settled somewhere uncomfortable, and every lithium miners ETF spent the better part of three years quietly underperforming most other things in the resources aisle.
And then, at some point recently, the cycle turned. Battery-grade lithium carbonate has roughly doubled. Major banks have lifted their spodumene forecasts by more than 50%. Analysts now talk about a “material market deficit” stretching well into the next decade. Demand from grid storage is growing faster than anyone modelled.
So naturally, this is the moment a new lithium miners ETF arrives on the ASX. I have no problem with this in principle. The cycle has clearly turned. The deficit is real. The miners are no longer radioactive. It is simply that there is something quietly wonderful about an industry that finds it impossible to launch a thematic product when the theme is cheap, and impossible to resist launching one the moment the theme starts working again. We do not catch falling knives. We catch the knife two stops past the floor and call it conviction.
ETFS Global Pure Play Copper Miners ETF (CPPR)
Sitting one row away in the same batch, listed by the same issuer on the same exchange, is the rather more triumphant sibling. Copper has spent the past year at or near record highs, with the LME briefly clearing fourteen and a half thousand dollars a tonne. Speculators have piled in, data centre demand has soaked up supply, smelter fees have collapsed to nothing, and Goldman is forecasting that prices will probably come down a little from here, which is the kind of thing Goldman forecasts about most things that have just hit record highs.
Where the lithium product feels like a “the bear is over” trade, the copper product feels like a "we are running out of copper, please help" trade. Both stories may turn out to be right. Both products may be excellent. The fact that they were listed on the same day, by the same issuer, on the same exchange is the kind of detail that future financial historians are going to find quietly instructive.
Teucrium 2X Long Daily BNB ETF (XBNB)
If you had quietly assumed that crypto's recent enthusiasms had peaked, the listings would like a word.
XBNB is, as far as I can tell, the first US-listed ETF directly tied to the BNB token, the native asset of the world's largest crypto exchange. It is a 2x daily leveraged product built on futures rather than spot. The launch was personally welcomed by the exchange's founder, who is now back in the role of thoughtful elder statesman after a brief sabbatical in the US federal prison system and obviously the pardon from Trump.
There is a lot to admire here. BNB itself is up several hundred percent over the past couple of years and recently set a new all-time high above one thousand three hundred dollars, having spent the previous cycle bobbing along in the low triple digits. Traders, of course, found that pace insufficient. So now, for the first time in a US ETF wrapper, you can have twice the daily move, complete with the volatility decay, the futures roll costs, and the elegant compounding mathematics that make leveraged daily ETFs such a reliable way to express directional conviction over any period longer than approximately one trading day.
I assume there is a market for this. There is always a market for this. There has never been a 2x leveraged crypto product that did not find buyers, and there has rarely been one that did not, in the fullness of time, find regret.
And then, three rows down, the Manulife trio
Tucked into the same batch are three Canadian asset-allocation ETFs from Manulife: a Balanced Portfolio (MBAP), a Conservative Portfolio (MCAP), and a Growth Portfolio (MGAP). Strategic asset allocation. Built-in diversification. Long-term capital objectives. Underlying investment management drawn from a roster that includes Mawer and Dimensional. Three steady, sensible, fund-of-funds wrappers designed for retail investors who would simply like to sleep at night.
The timing of this is almost funny. A new wave of single-commodity miner ETFs, a new leveraged crypto vehicle, and in the middle of all of it, three balanced portfolios quietly taking their seats, asking nothing of anyone, promising no doubling, no quantum, no AI, no megaphone.
Somewhere in suburban Ontario, an advisor is opening a fund factsheet, looking at a tidy split of equities, fixed income, and alternatives, and feeling, perhaps for the first time this quarter, calm.
That, in the end, is the part I keep coming back to. Every batch of new listings contains its share of leverage, its share of theme-chasing, its share of products that will be discussed mostly in the past tense within a few years. And every batch, if you look carefully, also contains something boring, something unfashionable, something that does the unglamorous job of keeping people invested at all.
This week the boring product happens to be Canadian.
Bernie Thurston works in ETF data at Ultumus. He reads new listing files so you don't have to. These are observations, not investment advice.
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