.png)
A short meditation on two crypto exchange tokens, a newsletter writer's portfolio, a photonics fund with the world's best ticker, and four minimum-volatility ETFs that would like everyone to please calm down.
There was a time when wrapping a financial asset in an ETF still felt like a deliberate choice. You picked the asset. You built a fund around it. You launched. We are now several years past that phase. The wrapper has become the industry's default response to any token, theme, or charismatic newsletter writer that has been in the news for more than a fortnight, and this week's batch of new listings makes the point with admirable efficiency.
VanEck BNB ETF (VBNB, Nasdaq)
VanEck has secured a listing for what would be, if approved, the first US spot ETF tracking Binance Coin. This is BNB. The native token of Binance, the exchange whose founder pleaded guilty to anti-money-laundering failures, paid one of the largest settlements in financial services history, and was briefly incarcerated. Spot BNB will now, in theory, be available through American brokerage accounts as a regulated investment product. The proposed management fee is 0.39%.
You can construct a perfectly coherent investment case for BNB on its own merits. The objection is not the asset. The objection is the slight cognitive dizziness of watching a token that was, until very recently, the centrepiece of a major US enforcement action become a candidate for the same wrapper that holds your retirement gold position.
Grayscale HYPE ETF (HYPG, NYSE)
While we are wrapping exchange tokens, we may as well do another. HYPE is the native token of Hyperliquid, a decentralised perpetual-futures exchange that offers its users up to 40x leverage on major pairs. The Grayscale product, if launched, will give investors a regulated path to the equity-like upside of a venue whose entire commercial purpose is providing very large amounts of leverage to crypto traders.
So, to be clear about the structure: the ETF holds the token of the exchange, the exchange offers the leverage, the leverage occasionally vaporises its users, and the resulting fee revenue accrues to the token holders. There is a certain Russian-doll quality to it. Grayscale has also filed amendments seeking to include staking rewards in the product, which means the ETF could pass through yield generated by tokens earning fees from the leverage business. We have effectively reinvented the financial conglomerate, and we have done it without anyone seeming to notice.
Porter & Company Porter Portfolio ETF (PCPP, NYSE)
Porter Stansberry has spent the better part of two decades selling subscription newsletters that variously predict American financial collapse, the end of the dollar, and assorted other varieties of imminent doom. He has now wrapped his “Permanent Portfolio” strategy, a four-bucket allocation of equity, insurance stocks, gold-plus-bitcoin, and cash, in an ETF.
This is a respectable thing to do. It is also a fundamentally different posture than the one his subscription business is built on. The cognitive negotiation required to hold both “the United States is finished” and “please buy units in my low-cost, regulated, broadly diversified equity-and-credit ETF” simultaneously is genuinely impressive, and I mean that as a compliment. The strategy itself, a modernised Harry Browne portfolio with gold and bitcoin replacing pure gold, is defensible. Whether the newsletter audience and the ETF audience can be the same audience is the more interesting question.
Tuttle Capital Pure Play Photonics ETF (FOTO, Nasdaq)
The ticker is FOTO. The ticker is FOTO. I want to start there, because in a market that has produced HYPG, VBNB and TEUP in the same week, FOTO is what an actual ticker is supposed to look like. It is short. It is memorable. It tells you, more or less, what the fund does.
The product itself is an actively managed photonics fund focused on lasers, LiDAR, optoelectronics, and the small and mid-cap names that benefit from the optical-interconnect demand driving AI data-centre buildout. The thesis is real. Photonics is the part of the AI supply chain that does not yet have a clean dedicated wrapper, and Tuttle has stepped in to fill the gap. Early asset gathering has been modest, which is what tends to happen when a thematic ETF launches into a backdrop of more glamorous competing themes. Photonics is, unfortunately, one of those ideas that goes mainstream well after the underlying stocks have already moved.
The closing beat: four BNP Paribas Easy MSCI minimum-volatility ETFs (London listings)
Listed in the same batch as the exchange-token wrappers and the newsletter portfolio: four BNP Paribas Easy MSCI minimum-volatility ETFs, covering China, EMU equities, broader Europe, and Japan. Minimum-volatility indices are constructed to deliver equity exposure with the least possible variance. They are, by design, the asset-management equivalent of a brown cardigan, but hey, they work!
Bernie Thurston is CEO of Ultumus. He reads new listing files, so you don't have to. These are observations, not investment advice.
Comments