Two Elon Musk companies, one wrapper, roughly full daily exposure to each, tracked independently rather than blended into some tidy composite. SpaceX priced its stock market debut at a jaw-dropping valuation that made it, overnight, one of the largest companies on the planet. Tesla, for its part, has spent years providing the kind of daily volatility that makes risk officers age in dog years.
Somebody looked at those two names and decided the correct response was not diversification but concentration, squared. If you have ever wanted your portfolio's fortunes tied entirely to the mood of one man's two companies, on the same day, without the calming influence of literally anything else, ELOL has arrived to serve you. The fund helpfully notes that returns over anything longer than a single trading day will diverge from what you'd expect, on account of daily compounding. Reader, they mean it as a warning. Treat it as one.
The ticker practically spells "lunar," which feels appropriate, because the space ETF category is now dense enough to have its own gravitational field. There is already a space technology ETF from the same issuer trading in North America. There is a space economy fund from another large European issuer. There is a space technology product from the world's biggest asset manager. And now there is this one, arriving in London to complete the set.
The pool of genuinely investable, publicly listed space companies remains, charitably, modest. That has not slowed the rate of new product launches chasing it. At some point the number of space ETFs will exceed the number of companies capable of building a rocket that doesn't explode on the pad, and nobody will blink.
South Korea's asset managers have spent recent months in a full-blown covered call arms race, one dividend-yielding product after another stacked on top of the same handful of Korean blue chips, as the local market's habit of lurching sharply and then sitting still made income overlays irresistible to a yield-starved retail base. Kiwoom did one. Samsung Asset Management did one. Korea Investment Management did one. KB Asset Management did one.
CSOP, a Hong Kong asset manager that already runs a plain-vanilla KOSPI 200 tracker, has now looked at the queue for this trade and decided there was room for a Hong Kong-listed entrant too. The strategy sells call options against a basket of Korean equities to generate income and cap some of the upside. It is, structurally, a sensible way to monetise a choppy market. It is also, at this point, less a product launch than an industry consensus.
Three actively managed equity ETFs, launched together, each with "Smart" in the name, covering Europe, the world, and America respectively. I have no argument with the strategy itself: disciplined, systematic active stock selection wrapped in an ETF is a perfectly reasonable idea, and plenty of firms do it well. What I cannot get past is the branding decision. Calling your fund "Smart" is a bold way to imply something about every other fund on the shelf, including, presumably, the passive index trackers this same house has been selling for years.
Nobody at the product naming meeting apparently raised a hand to ask the obvious question.