New Listings: The Metaverse Funds Are Being Escorted Out, and Silicon Carbide Has Taken Their Parking Space

There is no sadder string in a data file than a fund name that still contains the word “metaverse".

The latest batch of listings and exits is, on the surface, unremarkable. Underneath, it is a small act of housekeeping in which one theme is quietly wheeled out the back and a considerably less glamorous one is shown to the front of the shop. Here are the parts worth reading.

iShares Future Metaverse Tech and Communications ETF (IVRS, NYSE)

The board has voted, trading has been suspended, and liquidation proceeds are on their way to shareholders. The fund arrived when the metaverse was a corporate strategy rather than a punchline, and it leaves in a batch of routine notifications, with no service, no eulogy, and no headset.

For company, the L&G Metaverse UCITS ETF (MTVG) turns up in the same set of exits. Two funds, two jurisdictions, one theme going dark at roughly the same moment.

The interesting part is that most of the holdings are fine. The chipmakers, the platform companies, the graphics businesses: they all still exist and several of them are doing rather well. What died was not the portfolio. It was the word. The same companies have simply been repackaged into products with "AI" on the tin, which is what happens when a thesis is sound and its branding is not.

Tema Power Semiconductor ETF (SIC, NYSE)

The ticker is the joke, and it is a good one. SIC is silicon carbide, the actual chemical shorthand, which means someone at Tema sat down and decided the fund should be named after a compound rather than a concept. After years of tickers assembled from aspiration, this feels almost like a rebuke.

Power semiconductors are the least photogenic part of the AI and electrification trade. They switch and convert electricity in chargers, inverters, drivetrains, and the enormous power trains sitting underneath data centre racks. Nobody has ever pitched one at a conference with a slide of a glowing brain. They are, however, load-bearing in a way that most thematic holdings are not.

Tema launched it as part of a research partnership aimed squarely at the semiconductor value chain, and it landed across effectively the entire American venue sprawl in one go. It also arrives with a competitor already in the field, since Roundhill runs a power semiconductor fund of its own. The unglamorous corner of the chip trade now has a two-horse product race, which is how you know a theme has genuinely arrived.

proud@work UCITS ETF (STLZ, Xetra)

Meanwhile, the entire iShares ESG Aware Allocation family heads for the exit in the same batch: the aggressive, the balanced, the moderate, and the conservative sleeves, all four, gone together. That is not one fund closing. That is a shelf being cleared.

Picking up trading lines in the same batch is a fund built on the proposition that companies with genuinely good internal cultures outperform. It screens on workplace culture rankings first and applies fundamental analysis second; it is actively managed.