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Gold has been hitting all-time high after all-time high, and someone in a product meeting looked at that and thought the one thing it was missing was a ceiling.
HPYG on the Toronto Stock Exchange
The Harvest Premium Yield Gold ETF holds the world's premier gold companies and then, crucially, writes covered calls and puts on top of them to manufacture a fat monthly distribution. Read that again slowly. Gold miners have been having the run of a generation, and the strategy here is to sell away the upside in exchange for income today.
There is a certain honesty to it. The product knows exactly what most investors actually want, which is not to be rich in ten years but to be paid this month. So it takes one of the great momentum trades around and quietly clips its wings for a yield. It is the financial equivalent of buying a racehorse and renting it out for children's birthday parties. Reliable income. Slightly heartbreaking to watch.
MAXJ and TENJ on the London Stock Exchange
Here is where it gets philosophical. iShares has brought its defined-outcome buffer range into a UCITS wrapper, and it has brought two flavours in the same June series. MAXJ is the Max Buffer version, which aims to protect against essentially all of the downside. TENJ is the ten percent buffer version, which protects rather less.
The distinction sounds technical until you sit with it. MAXJ says: I will shield you from almost everything, and in return your upside is capped somewhere unexciting. TENJ says: I will shield you from a modest slice, and let you keep a bit more of the good times. These are not two products. They are two personalities. One is the friend who triple-checks the door is locked. The other is the friend who says it will probably be fine. The genuinely clever bit is that a European investor can now pick a temperament off the shelf and hold it in a fund. Structured-product anxiety, democratised.
And then, HEMV on the SIX Swiss Exchange
After all that, the HSBC MSCI EM Value ESG UCITS ETF arrives like an adult entering a room full of sugar-high children. Emerging markets, tilted to value, screened for ESG. No options overlay, no buffer, no capped ceiling, no manufactured monthly cheque. Just a broad, cheap, rules-based basket doing the deeply unfashionable work of buying reasonably priced companies and waiting.
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