New Listings: Someone Has Built a 3x Short ETP on a Rocket Company, and Also a 3x Long One, Just to Be Safe

The product development teams of the ETP world have decided that the laws of physics are negotiable and the laws of risk management never applied in the first place.

GraniteShares 3X Long SpaceX Daily ETP (SPCH, London Stock Exchange)

Let us begin with the most cheerfully unhinged pair of products I have seen in some time. Here is a fund offering three times the daily move of SpaceX, a company that until very recently was the most valuable private business on earth and is now, after one of the largest public offerings ever staged, a stock that trades like a firework with opinions.

To be clear, GraniteShares is not breaking new ground here. A 3x long SpaceX ETP already exists: Leverage Shares planted its flag on the launchpad on the day the shares began trading, with a product trading as ELON in dollars (and MUSK in sterling) on the same exchange. Leverage Shares stole a march on both counts at once. It got there first on timing, and it got there first on tickers, walking off with ELON and MUSK while everyone else was left rummaging for the alphabet soup that remained. GraniteShares, arriving later, ended up with SPCH and SNK3, which is what happens when the good names are already taken. So this is less a bold first move than a second issuer turning up to a fight already in progress, bringing extra ammunition and a noticeably worse ticker.

There is a further wrinkle. The underlying has spent its brief public life doing a very literal impression of its own product line: a spectacular ascent followed by an equally spectacular return to earth, having handed back a large slice of its debut gains in short order. Launching triple-leverage products into that, in both directions, is a particular kind of confidence. The most volatile name on the tape, amplified threefold, just as gravity reasserts itself.

GraniteShares 3X Short SpaceX Daily ETP (SNK3, London Stock Exchange)

And then, listed in the very same wave, its evil twin. Three times short the same rocket company. So you can now bet, with leverage, that the most hyped listing of the era goes down, while the person next to you bets, with the same leverage, that it goes up. Both of you will probably be wrong by Thursday, because that is how daily compounding works on a volatile underlying.

I admire the even-handedness. The issuer has taken no view whatsoever on direction and has instead monetised the certainty that SpaceX will move violently in one of the two available directions. That is not a forecast. It is a toll booth on a motorway where everyone is speeding. And given that the shares have lately been pointed firmly back toward the ground, the short side may yet feel like the more topical half of the pair.

Skylar Electricity Futures ETF (MWHS, NYSE Arca)

For something genuinely novel, here is an actively managed fund that buys US electricity futures. Not utility stocks. Not an energy index. Electricity itself, the most aggressively non-storable commodity in existence, wrapped in a fund and given monthly liquidity.

Power prices can go from placid to vertical because a heatwave arrived or the wind stopped blowing, and electricity has the unusual habit of occasionally trading at negative prices when there is too much of it. Putting that in an ETF wrapper is either a clever piece of access engineering or a way to discover what a sub-adviser's risk model does when the grid has a bad afternoon. This could be interesting.