<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none;" alt="" src="https://px.ads.linkedin.com/collect/?pid=4496002&amp;fmt=gif">

Someone Made a -2X Daily Reset ETF for a Pre-Revenue Nuclear Startup

In November's ETP listings, I found something that perfectly captures where we are as a civilisation: Defiance Daily Target 2X Short Oklo ETF (OKLS).

Let me walk you through the layers of absurdity here.

Oklo is a small modular reactor company. Emphasis on is and company, because it definitely isn't revenue-generating entity. First reactors won't deploy until late 2027 or early 2028. Current financials: $0 in sales, -$73M EBITDA, $683M in cash to burn through.

Market cap? $10+ billion.

The stock is up 566% in six months, driven by AI data centre power demand narratives and the fact that Sam Altman (yes, that one) was the chairman until stepping down in April 2025. OpenAI needs power. Oklo promises power. Therefore: moon.

And now, Defiance, clearly living up to their name, has created a daily reset 2x inverse ETF on this glorious speculation.

Think about the journey required to create this product:
1.    Nuclear energy experiences renaissance due to AI boom
2.    Small modular reactor startups go public via SPAC
3.    Retail investors pile into pre-revenue nuclear companies
4.    Stocks rally 500%+ on PowerPoint presentations
5.    Someone at Defiance thinks: “You know what this needs? A way to bet against it. Twice as hard. Every single day.”

This is shorting a company that's shorting the laws of thermodynamics while trying to commercialise technology that requires NRC approval, which historically moves at approximately the speed of continental drift.

The daily reset means this thing will decay faster than uranium-238 in any choppy market. OKLO could go nowhere for a month and OKLS holders would still bleed value from volatility drag.

My favorite part? Oklo's investor pitch is essentially “we're going to revolutionise energy by building next-generation nuclear reactors using recycled fuel in vertically integrated facilities.” And someone's response was: “Cool story. Anyway, here's how to short it with 2x leverage every 24 hours.”

Peak 2025 energy: Pre-revenue nuclear speculation meets inverse leveraged products meets retail FOMO meets professional scepticism, all wrapped in a daily-reset bow.

In other news from November's listings, Hong Kong launched three new tokenised money market fund ETFs (USD, HKD, and RMB versions), because apparently someone in the world is still interested in boring, stable, cash-equivalent investments, just tokenised. Weird.

 

Bernie Thurston

Bernie Thurston is the founder and CEO of Ultumus, a leading provider of ETF and index data, calculation, and workflow solutions. With over 20 years of experience in financial technology, Bernie has been at the forefront of index and ETF innovation since 2003. His finance career began at Markit, where as Managing Director for Equities he designed and developed products for index and ETF composition and dividend forecasting from 2003 to 2011. He then founded and led DeltaOne Solutions as Managing Director, building it into a global provider of index and ETF trading data and technology services. The company managed over 100,000 multi-asset class products before being acquired by Markit in 2015. Following the acquisition, while working for an ETF issuer, Bernie identified fundamental issues in how index and ETF data was represented across the industry. This led him to found Ultumus in 2016, building solutions for ETF primary market operations. Under his leadership, Ultumus has grown into a market leader serving major financial institutions globally, with its ETF Order Management System (OMS) supporting create and redeem workflows worldwide and its PCF platform calculating and distributing portfolio composition files for ETF issuers across every major market. Bernie sold Ultumus to SIX Group in 2021, where it continues to expand across Europe, North America, and Asia-Pacific. Known for building lasting teams and leveraging cutting-edge technology, Bernie is focused on establishing Ultumus as the backbone of the global index and ETF industry through standardisation and automation.

Comments

Related posts

Search Ultumus and ipushpull Partner to Deliver ETF & Index Data Directly into Microsoft Excel
Wall Street's Latest Creation: A 2x Leveraged Bet on Chinese Robotaxis Called “PONX” Search