I spend a lot of time looking at new ETP listings. It's not a glamorous job, but someone has to do it. And this week, staring at the fresh batch of products launched today, I found myself oscillating between professional admiration and the kind of existential awe you feel when you watch someone attempt to juggle chainsaws.
Let me walk you through the highlights.
I want to meet the person who named this product. I want to shake their hand, look them in the eye, and ask whether they wrote the name by walking into a fintech conference, closing their eyes, and throwing darts at a buzzword wall. “AI” tick. “Quantum” tick. “Frontier” tick. “Tech” tick. The only thing missing is “Blockchain,” “Metaverse,” and a disclaimer that reads: past performance is no guarantee of future relevance. This product, listed on the London Stock Exchange, is either genuinely visionary or the most expensive piece of FOMO ever securitised. Possibly both. I genuinely cannot tell, and I think that's the point.
Gold is already at all-time highs. Regular, boring, non-leveraged gold has been one of the best performing assets of the past several years. And yet, somewhere in a product development meeting, someone looked at this and thought: “Not enough.” Five times daily leveraged exposure to an asset that moves, on average, less than 1% per day. The math works out beautifully on a straight-line move. Of course, markets do not move in straight lines. But hey, who needs sleep?
Applied Optoelectronics makes optical transceivers for AI data centres. Their stock is up 722% in a year. They just landed a $200 million order. They are projecting $1 billion in revenue. By all accounts, this is a genuine, operational, profitable-adjacent business riding the AI supercycle. And yet, apparently, up 722% in twelve months is insufficiently exciting. So Tradr has kindly created a product that gives you two times the daily move. Because if the underlying stock can take your money away from you with brutal efficiency, why not give it a running start?
Context matters here. Leverage Shares previously had a 3X Long IonQ ETP. It was wound down after IonQ fell more than 16.7% in a single session, triggering an intraday rebalance that ended the product's life. The company learned a valuable lesson from this experience. That lesson, apparently, was: “Let's do it again.” The new 3X Long IonQ ETP is now listed and ready to go. I respect the audacity enormously. This is the financial equivalent of getting back on the horse immediately after it has thrown you, bitten you, and then reversed over you with a tractor.
Circle (CRCL) went public in mid-2025, rocketed 750% from its IPO price, then fell roughly 70% from its peak. CoreWeave (CRWV) priced at $40, shot up 300%, then fell 51% from its highs. Both companies are genuinely interesting businesses. Both stocks behave like caffeinated squirrels in a thunderstorm. And now there are options-based ETPs wrapping them for European investors who, it seems, felt they were not getting quite enough drama from owning the underlying shares directly.
The ETP industry, bless it, is fundamentally in the business of giving people exactly what they want. And what people want, it turns out, is: more. More leverage, more themes, more edge, more AI, more quantum, more gold, more everything. The market is not confused about risk. It is entirely aware of it. It has simply decided that risk is a feature rather than a bug.
The one product I keep coming back to, though, is the IS 60/30/10 Multi-Asset Balanced ETP, also listed this week. Sixty percent equities, thirty percent bonds, ten percent alternatives. A sensible, diversified, institutional-grade portfolio in a neat little wrapper. Listed in the same batch as a 5X Gold ETC and a product with "Quantum Frontier" in the name.
I found it oddly moving. Like finding a single calm person in the middle of a mosh pit, standing there with a cup of tea, entirely unbothered.
Somewhere, a risk manager is having a very good week.