Somewhere in a product development meeting, two teams looked at the same artificial intelligence boom, reached perfectly opposite conclusions about how to package it, and shipped both on the same morning.
One team decided the answer was to take individual semiconductor names and double them. The other decided the answer was to buy everything orbiting a single chip company except the chip company itself. Neither team appears to have spoken to the other, as seems to be the normal occurrence in the ETF industry.
The Leverage Shares 2X single-stock suite has moved down the food chain
For a while, single-stock leverage was reserved for the obvious giants. The household names. The stocks your barber mentions, I believe that this is the way it works, being bald is, I suspect this why I am not able to trade successfully. That phase is apparently over, because this batch brings 2X daily long products on Cadence Design Systems (CDNG, NYSE), Entegris (ENTL, NYSE), and FormFactor (FOMG, NYSE), three names that are genuinely important to how chips get designed and made, and genuinely unknown to roughly everyone who is about to trade them at twice the daily move.
These are not sleepy businesses. FormFactor has climbed sharply and trades near its highs. Cadence is guiding to record revenue on the strength of AI design demand. Entegris keeps appearing on the “stocks soaring today" lists that exist precisely to encourage this kind of product. The underlyings already move with conviction. The thoughtful response to a stock that moves with conviction is, of course, to make it move twice as hard.
And then there is the 2X Long AST SpaceMobile (ASTG, NYSE), which deserves a quiet sit-down
AST SpaceMobile is trying to beam broadband directly to ordinary mobile phones from satellites, which is either the future of connectivity or a very expensive way to learn about orbital mechanics. The stock has run from under two dollars to north of a hundred and back down by double-digit percentages in single sessions. Its annualised volatility has been comfortably above 100%, which is a number you usually associate with crypto.
So naturally there is now a product offering two times the daily move. A stock that can already lose you 40% on its own initiative has been handed a running start. I admire the audacity.
The PurePlay Nvidia Ecosystem Picks and Shovels ETF (NVPS, NYSE) buys the gold rush, not the prospector
This one is the philosophical inverse of everything above, and it arrived in the same batch. Rather than concentrate on one stock and lever it, this fund spreads across the entire value chain feeding the most important chip company on earth: the raw materials, the tools, the fabrication, the packaging, the connectivity, the power. Everything Nvidia depends on. Everything except Nvidia.
It is, structurally, a sensible idea. The picks-and-shovels logic is as old as the California gold rush, and the methodology here is reasonably disciplined, screening for companies that actually earn a meaningful slice of revenue from the ecosystem rather than just claiming proximity to it. The name still reads like four marketing slides fused together under heat. “PurePlay," “Nvidia," “Ecosystem," “Picks and Shovels." That is a lot of words to say “the companies near the big one."
What strikes me is the symmetry. In a single morning, the industry offered you both the most concentrated possible expression of the AI semiconductor trade and the most diffuse one. You can lever a single supplier to the eyeballs, or you can own a careful basket of all of them. The market contains multitudes, and apparently it would like to sell each of them to you separately at the same time.
The HSBC Global Sukuk UCITS ETF (HBKS, Euronext Paris) is the adult in the room
Amid the leverage and the buzzwords, here is a Sharia-compliant Sukuk product, and it is the most principled thing in the batch by some distance. Sukuk are often called Islamic bonds, but the structure is genuinely different. Because Islamic finance prohibits interest, holders are entitled to a share of ownership and the income from real underlying assets rather than a contractual interest payment. The fund tracks an investment-grade index built against a large body of Sharia standards with scholarly oversight.
No leverage multiplier. No daily reset. No reference to any ecosystem. A bond-like product that is structurally forbidden from doing the very thing that makes the rest of this list dangerous.
The quiet corner: Invesco Physical Gold II (GOLX, London Stock Exchange) and a row of bond funds
Gold has been printing record highs for a while now, which is exactly the moment the industry reaches for it. So we get an Invesco Physical Gold II ETC (GOLX, London Stock Exchange), a second physical gold vehicle, because the first one was presumably working too well to leave alone. It just sits in a vault being expensive. I am going to have to investigate the difference between the two versions, who is willing to bet it is TER?
And then, almost apologetically, a Fidelity Short Term Bond ETF (FSTB, NYSE). Plus a Fidelity Intermediate Municipal fund (FIMU, NYSE), an IVZ Global Government Bond product (GGBD, SIX Swiss Exchange), and a Dimensional US Large Cap Core equity market fund (DFAL, NYSE).
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