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Most funds come with a risk section. This one has a risk heading that reads, in capitals, “Catastrophic Loss Risk”, and it has earned it.
Roundhill S&P 500 Target 10,000 2030 ETF (XX, Cboe BZX)
The strategy fits on the back of a ticket. The fund spends substantially all of its money buying long-dated FLEX call options on S&P 500 trackers (SPY, IVV, VOO or SPYM), struck at whatever share price corresponds to the index reaching 10,000. If the index is above that level on the target date named in the fund's title, the options pay out with considerable leverage. If it is not, the prospectus says investors “will lose substantially all of their investment”.
The worked example in the prospectus is worth a moment. At exactly 10,000 you still lose, because the options have to pay back their premium first. The index has to clear the target by a margin before anyone makes a penny. So this is not a bet that the S&P 500 reaches 10,000. It is a bet that it reaches 10,000 and then keeps going.
What happens if it falls short is described with admirable calm. The options expire worthless, the fund expects to keep somewhere between 1% and 10% of its assets in cash, it carries out a reverse split, and it files a sticker changing its name for the next target period. Then it goes again, indefinitely. It is the first fund I have seen that has written its own afterlife into the prospectus.
The fee is 0.99%, paid every year, on assets that are designed to be either several times larger or almost entirely gone. And the ticker is XX, which is either a nod to the two possible outcomes or simply what was left.
VegaShares Trillions ETF (TRIL, Cboe BZX)
Entry to this fund has one requirement: a market value of at least $1 trillion dollars. The issuer calls it “The Trillion-Dollar Club”, and the adviser picks from the BITA Trillion-Dollar Cap Index, which weights its members equally.
The fund page promises that it “tracks companies crossing into the $1 trillion threshold and rebalances the portfolio”. Put simply, it buys companies once they have already become enormous. That is a perfectly sound way to own the biggest businesses in the world. It is a less sound way to find the next one.
The risk disclosures are more candid than the marketing. Semiconductor industry risk is listed first, followed by technology sector risk, concentration, swaps and high portfolio turnover. A club with very few members, most of them from the same industry, turns out to be a sector fund with a velvet rope. At 0.49%, the membership is at least affordable.
Global X LLM ETF (LLMA, Cboe BZX)
This is an actively managed fund for companies that build their own large language models. To qualify, a company needs at least half its revenue to come from its own model and the products built on it. Failing that, its model must rank in the top 20 on the major public benchmark leaderboards.
That second route is the interesting one. A company can get into the fund because of how its chatbot scores on a leaderboard. Index providers have spent decades arguing over revenue classifications. This one has partly outsourced the question to benchmark tables that change every time someone releases a new model.
The reference index holds up to 15 names, rebalances quarterly and requires a market value of at least $5 billion. The obvious difficulty is that many of the model builders people think of first cannot be bought on an exchange. The fund charges 0.75% for a portfolio that has to be built from those that can.
Arrow Bitcoin GBP Hedged ETC (GBTC, London Stock Exchange)
HANetf's euro-hedged bitcoin ETC trades as EBTC, which the issuer calls the world's first euro-hedged crypto ETC. HSBC provides the currency hedge, the fee is 0.49%, and the pitch is sensible. Bitcoin is priced in dollars, so a European investor ends up holding a view on the dollar as well as a view on bitcoin.
The sterling sibling has now arrived in London, and the issuer's announcement does not mention it. Its ticker is GBTC.
I recently noted that a sterling option-income ticker on the London Stock Exchange shares its four letters with a $10 billion US fund on the same index. The same thing has happened again. In the United States, GBTC is Grayscale's Bitcoin Trust, one of the best-known bitcoin products ever listed. Same four letters, same asset, different continent, different issuer, different structure. Match on ticker alone and you will eventually settle the wrong bitcoin.
Harvest Enhanced High Income Shares ETFs (BRKE, ASME, INTE and MUHE, Toronto Stock Exchange)
Harvest's formula is simple. Hold one stock, apply “modest leverage” of around 25%, write covered calls on up to half the position, and pay a variable distribution every month. The management fee is 0.40%. The new additions cover Berkshire Hathaway, ASML, Intel and Micron, alongside an All-In-One fund (HONE).
Berkshire deserves a second look. It is the best-known example of a large company that does not pay a dividend, on the principle that its management can use the cash better than its shareholders can. Harvest has wrapped it in a fund whose whole purpose is monthly income. I recently wrote about an income target funded by stocks that pay no dividends. This is a smaller version of the same idea: the money comes from selling options and borrowing, and not at all from the company.
The housekeeping here is unusually rich. ASML, a Dutch company, is filed on Harvest's product page under “US Single Stocks”. The ASME page describes the fund as “(TSX: ASLE)” in one paragraph and shows ASME as the ticker in the table. Its risk rating is High, while the Berkshire fund with the same leverage is rated Medium to High. The fund pages still said 'trading soon', though the funds appear to have listed.
Franklin Templeton UCITS ETFs (USTCH, USFIN, USCOM, USIDS and others, SIX Swiss Exchange)
And finally, around a dozen Franklin UCITS lines arrived in Zurich. There are S&P 500 sector funds for technology, financials, communication services and consumer discretionary, plus euro corporates, emerging markets, US dividends and a euro-hedged share class of a US mega-cap fund. The sector funds have been trading in Frankfurt, Milan and London for some time. Switzerland has simply been added to the list.
No target date, no leverage, no leaderboard, no borrowed ticker. Just existing funds, cross-listed so that a Swiss private bank can buy them without a phone call. They will never generate a prospectus heading in capitals, and they are the only funds in this batch that do exactly what their names say.
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