New Listings: A Staking ETP Takes Two Fees From One Reward, and Leaves Investors the Change

The Bitwise Hyperliquid Staking ETP targets a net staking reward of 1.00% a year and charges a TER of 0.85%. The difference between those two numbers is what the staking is for.

Bitwise Hyperliquid Staking ETP (BHYP, Euronext Paris)

The pitch for a staking ETP is simple: hold the token, put it to work securing the network, and pass the reward to investors. This one has a more layered arrangement, and to its credit the issuer sets out every layer.

First, “the issuer retains 33% of the total staking rewards generated as a Staking Service Fee.” What survives is a target net staking reward of 1.00% a year, measured after that service fee but before the TER. Then the TER of 0.85% arrives Deduct the TER from the net reward and the holder’s target share of the staking programme is roughly 0.15% a year.

For context, the product page quotes its own comparison figure: a HYPE staking market rate of 2.26% before fees. Divide it out and the investor's target is about one fifteenth of what the network pays. Bitwise is not hiding any of this. It has printed every number needed to do the subtraction, which is more than most fee structures manage.

HYPE is the native token of Hyperliquid, an on-chain exchange for perpetual futures. The ETP holds it in cold storage with BitGo and reinvests rewards daily, so each unit's entitlement to HYPE edges upwards. That entitlement is quoted to eight decimal places, which is about the right precision for watching 0.15% accumulate.

Competition sharpens the arithmetic. CoinShares already offers a Hyperliquid ETP in Europe with no management fee and a stated yield of 0.5%. On those figures, the product with the smaller headline yield leaves its holder more than three times as much.


THOR Conservative Risk Dynamic ETF (THCR, NYSE)

The word “conservative” appears in this fund's name and is not defined anywhere in its prospectus. What the prospectus does define is the toolkit.

The fund targets a 5% standard deviation, a figure most people would associate with a bond-heavy portfolio. To get there, the sub-adviser, Ai Alpha, allocates across strategies using a tool called Darwin, and may hold stocks, ETFs and leveraged ETFs across equities, fixed income, commodities including gold, and alternatives including bitcoin and Ethereum through exchange-traded products. It may also move entirely into short-term debt and money market instruments when it wants to shelter.

So the conservatism lives in the target, not the ingredients. A leveraged ETF and a crypto ETP can both sit inside a 5% volatility portfolio, in the same way that a chilli can sit inside a mild curry, provided somebody is measuring very carefully.

The management fee is 0.85%, with acquired fund fees estimated at 0.25%, for a total of 1.10%. THOR already runs a Managed Risk Dynamic ETF on the same risk-first philosophy. This is the one with the reassuring adjective in front.


YieldMax SKHY Option Income Strategy ETF (YSKH, NYSE Arca)

For years SK Hynix was a Korean stock that American investors had to travel abroad to buy. Since its American depositary receipts arrived on Nasdaq, it has been given the full American welcome: leveraged fund filings, and now an income fund.

YieldMax sells call spreads on SKHY, aiming to collect option premium while keeping some participation in any rise in the shares, and intends to pay distributions weekly. The fee is 1.01%. The fund's own page is clear that it “does not invest directly in or provide direct exposure to the underlying security”, and that SK Hynix has neither sponsored nor endorsed it.

The chain of ownership is therefore worth writing down. Each ADR represents one tenth of a Korean share. The fund owns neither the ADR nor the share. It pays weekly income from options on the receipt for a fraction of a memory chip maker, in an industry not famous for smooth earnings.

I recently described a single-stock fund whose own issuer's website had not heard of it. YieldMax has at least built the page. The distribution rate field is blank, which for a new income fund is the most honest figure it will ever publish.
KraneShares, meanwhile, is closing its 2x daily funds on Alibaba, Baidu, JD.com, MercadoLibre and PDD. Single-stock products on foreign champions now arrive and depart at roughly the same rate, which at least keeps the total stable.


Delisted: LionShares U.S. Equity Total Return ETF (TOT, NYSE Arca)

The pitch for this fund was “stop losing returns to taxes”. It used ETFs, index futures and options to capture the total return of US equities while keeping taxable distributions to a minimum, at a net expense ratio of 0.0749% after a fee waiver, against a gross figure of 0.25%.

The board has approved its liquidation on the adviser's recommendation, about a year after launch and shortly after the waiver's contractual end date passed. The supplement gives no reason, and nothing in it connects the two.
It does contain one line worth framing: liquidation distributions are taxable. A fund built to spare its holders taxable distributions will end by making one.


M&G European AAA CLO Active UCITS ETF (MGAG and MGAU, London Stock Exchange)

M&G's CLO fund has added sterling-hedged and dollar-hedged share classes, which is the sort of news that usually passes without comment. The rating rules deserve a little.

A fund named for the top rating must hold at least 80% in triple-A CLOs, and may put the rest in CLOs rated AA or higher. A fifth of the portfolio may therefore sit one notch below the name on the door, which in hotel terms is a five-star property with a four-star annexe. It is a sensible rule, and a wider one than the name suggests.
The euro class charges a TER of 0.25% and the dollar-hedged class 0.28%.


State Street Global High Yield Bond Screened Index Fund UCITS ETF (SGHY, SIX Swiss Exchange)

After a staking product with two fees, a conservative fund with leveraged ETFs and an income fund that owns none of its underlying, here is a fund that does exactly what its name says.

It tracks the ICE BofA Global High Yield Constrained Index across some 2,500 bonds, caps any single issuer at 2%, uses stratified sampling, and charges a maximum TER of 0.25%. Bonds must be rated below investment grade, have at least 18 months to maturity at issue and pay a fixed coupon. That is the whole idea.

Not long ago I noted a fund that had stopped saying Elon Musk's name. This one has stopped saying ESG: its own page records that it was previously called the State Street Global High Yield Bond ESG Screened Index Fund, while it remains an Article 8 fund that excludes some companies on sustainability criteria. As rebrands go, it is the quietest kind.

It will pay a high yield to people who want high yield, charge a quarter of a percent for the privilege, and never need explaining. Of everything here, it is the one I would be least surprised to find still trading in ten years.

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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.

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