Two commodity funds now answer to the ticker ICOM. One of them pays income and owns no commodities, and the other owns commodities and pays no income.
Between them, the two funds have divided the label neatly. One took the “commodity” and the other took the “income”, and neither seems to have consulted the other about the ticker.
Tema’s fund gets its commodity exposure through companies. Its opening portfolio is 34 stocks, about 55% energy and 42% materials, led by Alliance Resource Partners, Energy Transfer, Suncor and Nutrien. The income comes from their dividends and distributions, which is why so many of the top names are partnerships and producers rather than futures contracts.
It charges 0.75% and, as its launch material points out, issues a Form 1099 rather than a K-1. That is a genuine convenience, and it is available precisely because the fund holds shares instead of the things the shares dig up. “Commodities remain underrepresented in most portfolios,” says Tema, which is true, and will remain true for holders of this fund.
The iShares fund is the other half of the story. It has added Euronext Paris to a set of venues that already included London, where it has traded as ICOM since launch. It tracks the Bloomberg Commodity Index Total Return through a swap for 0.19%, and it accumulates, which means it pays no income at all.
I recently wrote about the ticker DRAM being claimed twice, on two continents, for the same trade. ICOM has now been claimed twice for opposite ones.
Rareview has named its new fund after an index and given it the index’s ticker as well. Anyone who has typed BCOM Index into a Bloomberg terminal knows it as the Bloomberg Commodity Index. There is now an ETF that answers to the same four letters.
The fund tracks the total return version through futures held in a Cayman Islands subsidiary, and keeps at least 75% of its assets in short-term fixed income and cash. The prospectus describes it plainly: “The Fund operates as an index fund and is not actively managed.” It adds, with equal plainness, that the index “is sponsored by Bloomberg, which is unaffiliated with the Fund and the Adviser.”
The net fee is 0.49%, after a waiver on a gross figure of 1.45%. The iShares ICOM above tracks the same index for 0.19%, albeit for a different set of investors. The fund called BCOM therefore charges more than two and a half times as much to track BCOM as the fund called ICOM.
MANGOS has now been adopted by enough issuers to count as a category. Corgi’s version keeps the same six letters (Meta, Anthropic, NVIDIA, Google, OpenAI and SpaceX) and charges a unitary 0.20%, under which the adviser bears “substantially all of the Fund’s ordinary operating expenses”.
I recently described how Leverage Shares reaches Anthropic and OpenAI through swaps priced from perpetual futures. Corgi uses the same pricing source for its own private-company swaps, and adds a second route: passive interests in special purpose vehicles, provided they “charge no ongoing management fee”.
Two of the six letters are private, which would be a third of an equally weighted acronym. The prospectus caps them at 15% combined. The A and the O, arguably the reason the acronym exists, are held to less than half the weight their share of the letters would suggest.
The Swiss Market Index holds 20 companies, and three of them, Nestlé, Novartis and Roche, account for close to half of it. UBS is the first issuer to pick the equal-weighted version, which gives all 20 the same 5% at each quarterly rebalance and leaves the big three with 15% between them.
UBS describes the aim as “reducing single stock and sector concentration”. There are no options, no subsidiaries, no acronym and no borrowed ticker. In a batch where commodities arrive as equities and an index turns up as a fund, the one that simply holds twenty Swiss companies in equal measure is quietly the most sensible fund on the list. It will need no further explanation, which is the highest compliment this column knows how to pay.