There have been recent quarters in which the number of new sustainable funds launched in the United States was exactly zero, which is a striking figure for an industry that will happily launch a fund on almost anything.
Europe did not get that memo, and the most carefully built product in this batch is the proof.
A German environmental bank has listed a fund that buys euro-denominated investment grade green, social and sustainable government and government-related bonds, screened against country-level sustainability criteria, then weighted by an optimisation process with caps at both the bond and the country level.
That is a real piece of index engineering rather than a badge stuck on a sovereign tracker. Screening sovereigns is much harder than screening companies, because a country cannot be excluded for one bad division and kept for the rest of it. Somebody had to sit down and decide, explicitly and in writing, which governments qualify. It costs more than the plain version, and it will be bought by people who know precisely why.
The interesting part is where it landed. European sustainable funds have swung back to solid net inflows while their American counterparts keep bleeding quarter after quarter. Same screens, same acronym, two entirely different commercial realities depending on which side of the Atlantic the shareholder register sits on. This is a product that could not plausibly be launched into the US market right now, listing in the one market where the demand still exists.
Amundi made the same point more quietly in the same batch with screened S&P World Financials and Information Technology funds (WEL7 and MWOB, Xetra). Note the shape of those: not a whole portfolio with a conscience, but single-sector building blocks with a screen applied. European ESG is going back to being a component rather than a product. Which is, if anyone is keeping score, exactly where it started.
Elsewhere, restraint was not the theme.
When Western Digital split itself in two, the memory business was widely treated as the half you tolerated rather than the half you wanted. Nobody drafts a thesis around NAND flash. It is a commodity with a fabrication plant attached, famous chiefly for cycles that end badly.
That business is now up more than 700% in a year, and something north of 3,400% since it began trading on its own, because AI data centres discovered they needed enormous quantities of fast storage and the supply of it did not exist. Management has authorised a buyback measured in the tens of billions, which is one way of saying they also cannot quite believe it.
So naturally there is now a 3x daily leveraged ETP on it. A stock that has already delivered a 3,400% move without assistance, wearing a triple multiplier. The underlying was doing a perfectly convincing impression of a leveraged product on its own merits. Now it has help.
Silver has been setting records, driven by a market that has run a structural deficit for years and a supply base that cannot respond because most silver comes out of the ground as a byproduct of mining something else entirely. You cannot open a silver mine in response to the silver price. This is a genuinely unusual commodity setup and it has produced genuinely unusual moves.
WisdomTree already offered a 2x daily leveraged silver product. It is in this very batch, cross-listing away quite happily. Someone looked at the existing 2x, considered the volatility of an asset that has posted triple-digit annual gains, and concluded that the gap in the range was at the top.
I understand the commercial logic completely. I would still like to read the risk committee minutes.