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Somebody in a product meeting looked at seven of the largest oil companies on earth and concluded that the missing ingredient was a pun.
Munificent Seven ETF (BBLS, NYSE)
Harbor has built a fund around ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell, TotalEnergies, BP and Equinor. Seven companies chosen for their central role in global energy markets, which is a defensible thesis by any standard. The oil majors have had a genuinely strong run, crude has been trading at levels that make the whole complex look cheap on cash flow, and the “old economy takes its revenge” rotation has been a real conversation among serious people.
But let us not pretend about what happened here. The name came first. Someone realised that “munificent” is two letters away from “magnificent” and means generous, which is what you call a company that hands you a dividend. Then they got the ticker BBLS, as in barrels, and at that point the fund had to exist. You cannot leave a ticker like that on the table.
I have seen a great many products named by committee, by consultant and by focus group. This one was named by a person having a good day. The thesis is sound and the joke is better, and I would like to believe those two facts are unrelated.
MicroSectors 3x Long and -3x Short Brazil, Japan and Taiwan ETNs (BRZL, BRZD, JPNU, JPND, TAWN, TPEI, NYSE)
Six notes, three countries, both directions, all at once. Brazil long and Brazil short. Japan long and Japan short. Taiwan long and Taiwan short. Whatever you believe about any of these economies, there is now a note that will triple it for you daily, and a matching note that will triple the opposite view with equal enthusiasm.
The leveraged note machine has been working through the available universe with real method. Sectors, then themes, then credit, and now sovereign geography. The atlas is a finite document, which raises the interesting question of what happens when they finish it.
What I find quietly admirable is the symmetry. There is no house view here, no editorial position, no implied opinion about Brazilian rates or the yen or the Taiwan Strait. There is only a shelf, stocked in matched pairs, waiting for you to bring your own conviction. It is the purest expression of the business model I have seen in a while: the issuer takes no risk on direction, only on volume.
xETFS Korea AI Semiconductor ETF (KSMH, NYSE)
A US-listed fund offering exposure to Korean AI semiconductor companies. Unleveraged. One times the daily move. Ordinary shares in ordinary companies that make the memory chips the AI buildout cannot function without.
The context is what makes this interesting. Korea permitted single-stock leveraged ETFs on its two great chipmakers, retail investors piled in with genuine ferocity, and then the chip complex sold off and those leveraged products lost the overwhelming majority of their value from peak. There were apologies from public officials. There were investors on television asking for their money back. It was, by any measure, a bad time to have been given two times daily exposure to anything.
And now, into that aftermath, arrives the boring version. Same companies, same thesis, none of the machinery that turns a drawdown into a catastrophe. There is something almost gentle about it, like a fund that has been sent to help with the clean-up.
ETRACS 2x Leveraged Factor ETNs (IWDL, IWFL, SCDL, USML, MTUL and IWML, NYSE)
Six leveraged factor notes came off the board in this batch. Value, growth, dividend, momentum, minimum volatility and size, the whole academic pantheon, each of them doubled and wrapped in a note, and each of them now retired.
The idea was not stupid. Factor investing has decades of published research behind it, the premia are real over long horizons, and if you believe in a premium then leveraging it is at least internally consistent. The problem is that factor premia are slow and leverage is fast, and a product that needs a decade to be right cannot easily survive the years in which it is wrong.
I note without further comment that a suite of leveraged notes built on peer-reviewed academic research left the exchange on the same day that six leveraged notes built on national borders arrived at it. Somewhere there is a lesson about which of those two ideas the market actually wants to buy, and I do not think the lesson flatters anybody.
Evolve Global Defense and Aerospace Index ETF (CAMO, TSX)
Defence and aerospace exposure for Canadian investors, listed in two share classes. The construction is unremarkable, which in this batch counts as praise.
The ticker is CAMO. Camouflage. For a defence fund. I have spent a career watching issuers waste four perfectly good letters on abbreviations that mean nothing to anyone outside the firm, so I want to acknowledge when somebody uses theirs properly. Two products in one batch with tickers that actually do something. It has been a good week for the people who name things.
And then, quietly, the sensible ones
Guggenheim listed the Guggenheim Investment Grade CLO ETF (GCLO, NYSE) and the Guggenheim Enhanced Equity Income ETF (GEEQ, NYSE), extending an income range they have been steadily building out since returning to the ETF market.
Investment-grade CLO tranches are not glamorous. They are senior, they are floating rate, they are structurally protected, and the entire pitch is that you receive your coupon and nothing interesting happens to you. There is no pun in the name. There is no multiplier. There is no country whose fortunes you are tripling in either direction before lunch.
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