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There is now a fund whose entire investment process is “do what Wall Street's analysts tell you," and I cannot decide whether that is brilliant or the most honest admission of defeat I have ever seen on a fact sheet.
Defiance KSM TipRanks Analyst ETF (RANK)
The Defiance KSM TipRanks Analyst ETF, listed on the NYSE under the ticker RANK, is built to hold the US stocks that the analyst community is most enthusiastic about. It tracks an index derived from TipRanks data, the same lineage as the Smart Score system that blends analyst ratings, price-target momentum, insider activity and sentiment into a single ranking. The fund simply owns the names that score highest and refreshes as the scores move. The objective is to systematically capture “analyst momentum," the idea that stocks the sell side is busy upgrading tend to keep working.
It is a genuinely clever piece of packaging, and I say that with only a trace of a raised eyebrow. The quiet comedy is twofold. First, this is an ETF whose thesis is the wisdom of the analyst crowd, sold to people who would rather not have to follow analysts themselves. Second, like every index of this kind, it arrives wearing a backtest with the sort of returns that backtests always seem to produce. Consensus, securitised, with receipts from a past that never had to be traded. I am not knocking it. I am simply noting that “buy what the experts like" has been an investment strategy roughly as long as there have been experts and things to like.
Tema Memory ETF (DISK)
Also on the NYSE, the Tema Memory ETF (DISK) is an actively managed bet on the memory-chip supercycle, the DRAM, NAND, and high-bandwidth memory that the entire AI buildout quietly runs on. Rather than track an index, it puts a manager in charge of holding the bulk of its assets in companies it judges to be genuine memory businesses, which is a more considered approach than buying a ticker and hoping.
I have written before about how we now have two different funds called DRAM, one leveraged on the other, and how the memory theme went from unloved to overcrowded in what felt like a fortnight. DISK arrives into exactly that scrum, where a rival product had already vacuumed up billions before most people had finished reading the prospectus. The theme is real. The competition for it has become a small war.
Tema Photonics and Optical ETF (LAZR)
Its sibling, the Tema Photonics and Optical ETF (LAZR) on the NYSE, takes the same actively managed approach to the companies that move data around as light rather than electrons: optical transceivers, silicon photonics, the lasers and components that stop AI data centres from choking on their own cabling. The ticker is a nice touch, given the underlying theme is largely about light.
This is one of the more defensible thematic ideas going. Compute gets the headlines, but it is increasingly bottlenecked by how fast you can shuttle data between chips, and photonics is the part of the supply chain solving that. A human manager picking those names is, refreshingly, a fund that requires someone to actually understand the businesses.
Corgi, again
I have written about Corgi more than once by now, and in the last instalment I admitted that the relentlessness had won me over and that I intended to reach out to them. I stand by that. So consider this less a fresh story than a status update: here is the next litter, another dozen 2X daily single-stock ETFs on the NYSE, wrapping the usual cast of AAPL, ARM, ASML, AVGO, ORCL and the more excitable names.
A couple are worth a glance for old times' sake. There is a 2X Quantum Computing fund (XQTM), buzzword futures in their purest form. And there is a 2X IonQ fund (IONC), which deserves a respectful pause, because a previous leveraged IonQ product run by a different issuer was redeemed at zero after the stock fell far enough in a single session to end the wrapper entirely. The industry's lesson from that episode was apparently not “perhaps not" but “do it again, geared at 2X this time, which counts as restraint." With Corgi the individual names have stopped being the point. The pace is the point, and the pace has not slowed.
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