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A product built around the economics of people living longer has left the Swiss exchange after about two and a half years. It did not leave alone.
The Leonteq departures (VITAC, VITAD, XBTO and H2TEC, SIX Swiss Exchange)
The Longevity ETP, in its franc and dollar lines, tracked the Solactive Longevity Index: 30 companies chosen by an algorithm from genomics, robotic surgery, telemedicine, medical imaging and a category the index provider calls “Senior Diseases”. The launch material cited projections running to the middle of the century. The product managed rather less.
Leaving with it is a bitcoin product that most people would not recognise as one. The Risk-Adjusted Bitcoin & USD Overnight Interest Index holds bitcoin and dollar cash, sized by a mechanism designed to control the maximum drawdown. Its most recently published composition is 15.6% bitcoin and 84.4% in an Xtrackers overnight rate swap ETF. I recently wrote about a new Swiss bitcoin strategy whose AI committee had put 100% in bitcoin. The departing one, with a far simpler rulebook, is mostly a money market fund with a crypto habit, at 0.95% a year.
The third departure is the youngest. The H2 Technologie ETP tracked a “dynamic, actively managed index” of hydrogen equities, run by a German wealth manager acting as both index sponsor and “index allocator”. The universe excludes any company incorporated in the United States. The fee was 0.85% a year, with distribution fees of up to 0.45% on top.
It lasted about nine months. Its termsheet gave investors an annual right to redeem, and the product left before the first of those dates arrived.
Leonteq has not published a reason for any of the four exits. The termsheets do not need one. Each gives the issuer “the unconditional right to call all Products” on five business days' notice, and states that there is no obligation “to maintain a listing”. These are certificates, not funds, and they end when the issuer decides they end.
iShares A.I. Innovation and Tech ETF (XBAI, Toronto Stock Exchange)
BlackRock's American AI fund, BAI, is an actively managed portfolio of global AI and technology stocks run by its Fundamental Equities Technology Group, at 0.55%. A Canadian namesake has now appeared in Toronto. Our listing data and OpenFIGI both carry the name without the word “Active”, which the American fund puts in its title.
BlackRock Canada's product list and press releases had not yet caught up with the listing when I looked, so the fee and the structure of the Canadian fund remain the issuer's to confirm. The previous pair of Canadian iShares launches arrived with a press release. This one arrived with a ticker.
Janus Henderson US Large Cap Equity Core UCITS ETF (J501, London Stock Exchange)
Janus Henderson has spent much of its European ETF effort on active funds. This one is the opposite. It tracks the Solactive GBS United States 500 Index, holds a basket of global developed market equities, and exchanges their return for the index return through total return swaps. The fund page's own summary is “Highly efficient passive exposure for core allocations”.
The TER is 0.03%. Beneath that, the fee section lists a swap fee of 0.145% and notes that the swap counterparties contribute 0.08% a year towards the fund's running costs. The asset class on the fund page is “Alternatives”, which is an unusual classification for what is essentially the American stock market at three basis points.
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