New Listings: There Is Now an ETF for Capacitors, Which Means the AI Theme Has Run Out of Nouns

Not chips. Not data centres. Not the power grid. Capacitors, the small components that sit on a circuit board and hold a modest amount of electricity until something else needs it.

Defiance AI Capacitors Leaders ETF (CAPA, NYSE)

The fund tracks an index of companies that design, manufacture and supply advanced capacitors and passive electronic components used in AI infrastructure. Power conditioning. Voltage regulation. Signal filtering. Noise suppression. If you have ever wanted concentrated equity exposure to noise suppression, your moment has arrived.

I want to be fair here, because the underlying logic is not stupid. Every one of those enormous AI accelerators needs clean, stable power delivered with brutal precision, and somebody has to make the parts that do it. The passive component makers are a real bottleneck, and a genuinely under-owned one.

It is simply that the AI theme has now been sliced so finely that we have arrived at the components with no moving parts and no marketing department. There is nowhere left to go after this except solder.

Defiance Korea AI ETF (AIK, NYSE)

Some products arrive with impeccable timing. This one arrives with the other kind.

Korean retail investors have just been through something genuinely brutal. Domestic leveraged single-stock products on the country's two memory giants attracted enormous flows on the way up, then handed back the great majority of their value on the way down. Assets in Korea's leveraged ETF complex had roughly doubled as a share of the market before the reversal. A government minister ended up apologising in public. Retirees, students and first-time investors were among the people counting the damage.

So naturally an American issuer has now listed a Korea AI fund on the NYSE.

MicroBit Bitcoin and Gold ETF (3002, HKEX)

Bitcoin and gold, in one fund, in Hong Kong. Two assets bought by people who share a general suspicion about the durability of paper money, and who otherwise agree on almost nothing.

The gold crowd think bitcoin is a screen with a number on it. The bitcoin crowd think gold is a rock for people who are frightened of software. Someone has now put them in the same vehicle and asked them to sit still.

As a debasement trade it is, honestly, quite coherent. Two hedges against the same fear, with almost nothing else in common, so the diversification is real. As a marketing exercise it requires selling one product to two audiences who each believe the other half of the portfolio is a category error.