Most issuers launch a product, hold their breath, see how it trades, and then think about the next one. Corgi launched thirty-five ETFs in a single day, at one point accounted for nearly a third of all new ETFs coming to market in a given month, and is reportedly aiming to reach three hundred products in under a year. For perspective, it took the largest asset manager on earth more than a decade to get to its first three hundred. Corgi would like to do it before the summer holidays.
This is not a product strategy. It is a printing press with a logo. And the latest run off the press is another fifteen leveraged single-stock funds, this time wrapping AMD, Amazon, AppLovin, AST SpaceMobile, Coinbase, Alphabet, Meta, Strategy, Micron, Nvidia, Palantir, SanDisk, Tesla, Taiwan Semiconductor and Ultra Clean Holdings.
I want to stress how genuinely unprecedented the cadence is. Nobody has launched this many products this quickly. The interesting question is no longer "what did Corgi list," because the answer is "yes." The interesting question is whether the rest of the industry's product machinery can even file paperwork at the speed Corgi is shipping finished funds. Some of these underlyings, SanDisk having gone vertical and then dropping double digits in a single session, AST SpaceMobile having traded everywhere between the price of a sandwich and a small motorbike, are volatile enough on their own. Corgi has simply decided that volume and velocity are the strategy, and the individual names are details. These guys do seem to be impressive. They are doing something genuinely unprecedented. I will be reaching out to them.
Lest you think only Corgi is in the business of audacity, here is two-times daily exposure to Aehr Test Systems, which makes burn-in and reliability test equipment for semiconductors. Useful kit. Also a business whose revenue recently fell by close to half year over year as electric-vehicle demand softened, with margins compressing alongside it.
So the pitch is: take a niche small-cap with a shrinking top line, then double your daily exposure to it. Most people who like a stock buy the stock. This is for the investor who likes a stock and also enjoys being awake at three in the morning.
I had to read this name three times. It tracks an index of large US tech companies judged to possess an "AI moat," meaning proprietary data, superior models, or AI capabilities so deeply embedded that rivals cannot dislodge them. The thesis is reasonable. The naming is a small marvel: "Tech," "AI" and "Moat" all in one breath, the financial equivalent of ordering everything on the menu and calling it a tasting menu.
To be fair, an economic moat is a real and venerable idea. Wrapping it in the language of the current cycle does not make it wrong. It just makes it very of its moment, which is the one thing a moat is supposed not to be.
Three products listed in Amsterdam from the BlueSphere range: the BlueSphere European Equity ETF, the BlueSphere US Equity ETF, and the BlueSphere US Tech UCITS ETF. Plain-vanilla equity trackers covering European large-cap, US large-cap, and US technology. No leverage multipliers, no buzzword stacking, no single-stock daredevilry.
I almost passed over them, which is rather the point. In a batch built around amplified exposure and relentless issuance, a trio of straightforward, accumulating equity trackers is the quiet adult in the room. Sometimes the most radical thing a product can do is simply track the market and say nothing clever about it.
Among the leverage and the buzzwords and the relentless Corgi output sits this. "SWAN," for the uninitiated, stands for Sleep Well At Night. It is a laddered, defined-outcome strategy built to cushion downside and temper the swings, the sort of thing designed for an investor whose blood pressure is a consideration.