This batch of new ETP listings contains a Bitcoin fund designed for environmental investors. It also contains, further down the list, two environmental funds that have been wound down. The market, as ever, is sending a message.
BTCK: The Spot Bitcoin and Carbon Credit Futures ETF
There is an 80/20 portfolio thesis buried in this product, and it goes roughly as follows: Bitcoin is the future of money, carbon futures are the future of the planet, and combining them in a single ETF at an 80/20 ratio is the future of something. The 7RCC Spot Bitcoin and Carbon Credit Futures ETF (BTCK), sponsored by Teucrium, holds spot Bitcoin alongside futures tied to three major carbon markets: the EU Emissions Trading System, California's cap-and-trade scheme, and the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
The idea is that the carbon leg provides an ESG offset to the Bitcoin leg, making the product palatable to environmentally conscious investors.
This is, to be entirely fair, a genuine attempt to solve a genuine problem. Bitcoin mining consumes roughly the electricity of a medium-sized country. Carbon offsets are a mechanism designed to address exactly this kind of thing. Whether a 20% allocation to carbon credit futures meaningfully neutralises the environmental footprint of the other 80% is a question better directed at the product's legal team than its marketing department.
But one has to admire the ambition. This is not just a Bitcoin ETF. It is a Bitcoin ETF with a conscience. A very small, futures-based conscience, weighted at 20%.
PIKA: VanEck Electrification UCITS ETF
The VanEck Electrification UCITS ETF has listed on the London Stock Exchange under the ticker PIKA.
For those who did not grow up watching Saturday morning cartoons (and I assume everybody is of the same age as me): Pikachu is an electric mouse and the mascot of Pokémon. Its name is derived from the Japanese words for sparkle and mouse. The connection to electrification as a thematic investment strategy is a very knowing nod from the VanEck product team.
Either way, it is the best ticker on this list, and quite possibly the best ticker of the year.
The product itself covers sensible electrification themes: grid infrastructure, EV charging, renewables integration. Reasonable construction, coherent thesis. But it will forever be the Pikachu ETF to those of us who read listing files for a living.
CORGI: Five Bond ETFs Named After a Dog
Corgi Funds recently made industry history by launching a record number of ETFs in a single day, raising nine figures in the process. The firm describes itself as an AI financial infrastructure company. The brand is named after a small, short-legged herding dog historically associated with the British royal family.
This latest batch of listings from Corgi includes five fixed income products: two T-bill strategies, a short-duration investment grade bond ETF, a 1-3 year treasury bond ETF, and a short-duration high yield fund. The tickers are CBIL, CGOV, CIVG, CUST, and CHYG.
Each one is a tidy, institutional-grade, quietly sensible fixed income product. Each one is brought to you by a company called Corgi! This team seems to be generating new ETF products on a daily basis. They must be the most caffeinated on the street.
WYFL: 2X Long WhiteFiber Daily ETF
WhiteFiber carries the ticker WYFI, which looks exactly like what you think it looks like but is in fact an AI data centre company, not a wireless networking provider. The firm runs GPU infrastructure for high-performance computing. It is loss-making, growing quickly, and has recently secured a meaningful government defence contract.
Defiance has now filed a 2X daily leveraged product on the stock (WYFL), offering twice the daily return of an already volatile small-cap AI infrastructure company. Revenue growth is strong. Net income is negative. Gross margins are respectable. This is the archetypal AI infrastructure company in its current form: plausible, exciting, not yet profitable, and now available at double the daily move.
Meanwhile, quietly, two ESG funds left the building
At the other end of this listing file: two delistings.
The AXA IM ACT Climate Equity ETF (ACLU) has been removed from the Swiss exchange.
The BNPP Easy II Biodiversity USD ETF (ABIU) has followed it out the door.
Both were genuine attempts to provide equity exposure to climate and biodiversity themes. Both launched during an era when ESG was a growth category. Both have now been wound down.
In the same batch of new listings that contains a product designed to make Bitcoin acceptable to ESG investors, two actual ESG funds have quietly given up and gone home.
I am not making any commentary on the ethical / moral complexity of the financial markets, do we merely reflect society.
Comments