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Berkshire Hathaway has paid exactly one dividend in its entire life under Warren Buffett, and the company line is that he was out of the room when the board voted for it. The refusal to distribute cash is not an oversight. It is the whole thesis, defended in shareholder letters for decades with the patience of a man explaining gravity to a toddler.
Someone has now securitised a workaround.
IncomeShares Berkshire Hathaway BRK-B Options ETP (BRKY, London Stock Exchange)
The product does what the range does: it moves dynamically between holding the underlying shares and selling put options on them, harvesting the premium and paying it out monthly. Applied to Berkshire, this is an income solution to a problem Berkshire does not consider a problem.
There is an additional layer here that I find genuinely delightful. Buffett called derivatives financial weapons of mass destruction and has spent years warning about what sits on bank balance sheets. He also wrote enormous index put options when the pricing suited him, which is the sort of consistency that only looks like inconsistency to people who have not read the footnotes.
So, the philosophical position is settled. If Berkshire will not hand you the cash from its mountain of Treasury bills, close to four hundred billion dollars of it earning interest that also stays exactly where it is, you can now write options against the shares and pay yourself. The house rules have not changed. Somebody has simply built a side door.
IncomeShares Uranium+ Yield ETP (URNY, London Stock Exchange)
The same machinery, pointed at a rock.
Uranium has no cash flow. It does not report earnings, it does not raise a payout, and it has never once considered your monthly income requirements. What it has done is go up a great deal, on a thesis that reads like a utility procurement memo: reactor demand outrunning mine supply, utilities contracting below replacement levels, and a wave of data-centre electricity demand that has to come from somewhere with a capacity factor above a cloudy Tuesday.
That thesis plays out over the next decade. The distribution schedule is monthly. Selling puts on an asset in a structural bull market is a defensible way to generate income and a slightly awkward way to own the thing you came for, because the premium is paid to you precisely for agreeing to be less excited than you actually are.
Still. Uranium with a yield. Somebody had to.
Defense Focus Japan Equity Net Return ETN (644A, Tokyo Stock Exchange)
Mitsubishi UFJ Securities Holdings has brought a Japanese defence ETN to the Tokyo Stock Exchange, tracking an iSTOXX MUTB index of the country's defence names. Note the wrapper. This is a note, not a fund, which means the credit of the issuer is part of the deal, a distinction that matters roughly never until the day it matters enormously.
The interesting part is that this product exists at all. Japan is several years into a programme to double annual defence spending toward two percent of GDP, with consecutive record budgets, a sixth-generation fighter being co-developed with the UK and Italy, and new frigates and submarines in the water. A listed, retail-accessible Japanese defence theme would have been close to unthinkable in the country's postwar market. It is now a ticker.
It arrived alongside a sibling note on Japanese data centre infrastructure, which means one product team shipped, in a single batch, the two subjects every macro desk on earth currently has a view on. In the data they land as "MU DC" and "MU DN", two letters carrying the entire investment case. Commendably terse. Also completely impenetrable to anyone who has not been briefed.
The quiet one (HQDG, NYSE)
The Raub Brock Dividend Growth ETF has landed on the NYSE. It is active, it holds large-cap companies the manager judges to be high quality with room to keep raising their payouts, and it charges fifty basis points. It does not write options. It does not manufacture anything. It buys companies that hand you money and then, with any luck, hand you more of it next year.
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