Bitcoin’s year-to-date surge following 2022’s bruising 64 per cent plunge has renewed interest from ETF issuers. At least three firms in the US filed applications to launch leveraged bitcoin futures ETFs over the past several weeks – a product structure that doesn’t exist yet in US markets.
However, bitcoin’s recent rally hasn’t been met with meaningful inflows across the board. For instance, the $US10 million Valkyrie bitcoin miners ETF, this year’s best-performing non-leveraged fund with a 127 per cent gain, has raked in just $US5.7 million so far this year.
Shorting bitcoin
Meanwhile, recent buzz around the second-biggest cryptocurrency, ether, could help explain why investors are leaning into the short bitcoin strategy ETF. Though both bitcoin and ether have surged this year, the latter has lagged the original cryptocurrency by roughly 10 percentage points.
Yet, some investors now see it as playing catch-up with bitcoin, especially after ethereum’s highly anticipated Shanghai upgrade, which they had feared would lead to the ether token selling off. But such a…