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New Listings – Quantum Computing Went Public a Few Months Ago. Naturally, Someone Has Already Built a 2x Leveraged ETF on It.

The ETP industry's relationship with patience is, to put it charitably, complicated.

The Defiance Daily Target 2X Long INFQ ETF (INFH)

Infleqtion is a quantum computing company. It went public recently via a SPAC combination. In its most recent quarter, it posted roughly $9 million in revenue and a net loss of around $30 million. It has a substantial cash pile from the SPAC transaction, and the US government has signalled serious interest in backing quantum computing as a strategic technology. The stock has spiked dramatically on funding news, been included in the Russell 3000, and opened a quantum innovation centre in Oxford. It is, by most reasonable accounts, a fascinating and genuinely early-stage technology business.

It has been public for approximately four months.

Defiance, undeterred by such trifles as operating history, has responded by launching a 2x daily leveraged ETF on Infleqtion's stock. INFH tracks twice the daily return of a company whose revenue would not cover a mid-sized office fit-out, but whose government funding pipeline has Wall Street very excited indeed. Whether a technology that requires cooling to near absolute zero to function needs additional volatility engineering on top is, perhaps, a question the product development team did not find time to address.

This is not a criticism of Infleqtion. Quantum computing may be the most genuinely important technology of the coming decades. The company has serious scientists, government backing, and real infrastructure. But there is something almost philosophically interesting about applying leverage to a business that is still, by its own accounting, burning through capital at pace while building something that does not yet exist at commercial scale. The 2x daily reset means that even if Infleqtion eventually delivers on every promise, the path there will need to be a very straight line for this product to keep up.

Straight lines are rare in quantum computing. Or, for that matter, anywhere.

The WisdomTree Space Economy UCITS ETF (WSPC)

Timing is everything, and WisdomTree has chosen a genuinely loaded moment to launch a space ETF in Europe.

SpaceX is on the verge of its public debut, one of the most anticipated market events in years. Retail investors have piled into space-themed ETFs with extraordinary enthusiasm: one competitor product crossed $2.6 billion in assets in under two months, fuelled almost entirely by the SpaceX frenzy. The logic is straightforward: if you cannot hold SpaceX directly yet, hold the next best thing.

Here is the small irony in WSPC's position. A newly launched UCITS ETF tracking a space economy index almost certainly cannot hold SpaceX on day one. SpaceX is not yet listed. Index inclusion takes time. So WisdomTree has launched a fund explicitly designed to capture the space economy at the precise moment when the single most exciting space economy company on the planet is not yet in the index.

This is not a fatal problem. SpaceX will presumably list, the index will presumably update, and European investors will presumably find their way into exposure eventually. But there is something distinctly poignant about a space ETF launching during peak SpaceX fever while being structurally unable to hold the rocket company everyone actually wants. It is the definition of arriving at the party just as the guest of honour is walking out.

Still: the broader space economy is genuinely compelling beyond any single name. Satellite communications, launch services, earth observation, defence. WisdomTree is making a reasonable long-term bet. It is simply also making it in the shadow of an IPO so loud that everything else in the sector is temporarily drowned out.

The Porter & Company Porter Portfolio Index ETF (PCPP)

And then there is this one.

Sitting quietly in the same batch as a 2x quantum leverage product and a SpaceX-adjacency play is an ETF built around Porter & Company's Permanent Portfolio strategy. Low beta. Substantial cash allocation. Gold. Bonds. A Sharpe ratio that would make a risk manager's eyes water (approvingly, for once). The kind of product that does not spike 35% on a government announcement and does not need an Oxford quantum hub to justify its existence.

Porter & Company is an investment research publisher that has, apparently, decided its model portfolio deserved a ticker. This is a growing genre: the newsletter-to-ETF pipeline, in which research firms with loyal subscriber bases convert their published views into listed products. Whether PCPP's investors are motivated by genuine belief in the strategy or simply want a way to automate their subscription is unclear. Probably both.


Bernie Thurston

Bernie loves data. Fortunately for him, London’s finance industry has been indulgent, providing him lots of benchmark data to play with and enjoy. Bernie’s journey began at Sky, where he designed the first interactive television and helped build a technical-based charity (ctt.org). He then hopped over to finance, and soon found himself at a start-up working on dividends and derivatives. Then, by nature of the fact that finance and technology have rapidly conjoined, he found himself working with Credit Suisse to build an index aggregation and distribution platform. Markit then acquired the start-up and Bernie battled his way up the greasy pole becoming the Managing Director of Markit’s equities division, with responsibility for index, ETF and Dividends. But the siren song of startups called once more. And Bernie was headhunted to rescue a failing index business. Over five years, he helped reverse the fortunes of DeltaOne Solutions, turning into a fighting force. So successful was the turn around that Markit came along and acquired this company as well. But Bernie still loved start-ups. To that end, he founded Ultumus, an ETF and benchmark data company. Ultumus aims to provide the best data in the most timely and consumable manner possible. With clients on both buy and sell side, when something happens in the index or ETF industry, Ultumus is the first to know.

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