Fee War Kicks Off for One of Wall Street’s Hottest ETF Trades #NewsETFs

(Bloomberg) — Single-stock ETFs have been one of Wall Street’s hottest trades this year thanks to eye-popping returns and billions of dollars in inflows. Now, one issuer is kicking off a fee war in a bid to stand out and attract new cash.

Leverage Shares, which on Friday launched two funds offering juiced up returns on either Nvidia Corp. or Tesla Inc., in a press release touted its 0.75% charge on the two products, which are trading under the tickers NVDG and TSLG. That fee makes the pair the lowest-charging among the more than 90 such funds, according to data compiled by Todd Sohn, an ETF strategist at Strategas. Most ask for more than 1%, the data show, with an average cost of roughly 1.1%.

These types of ETFs — which use derivatives to offer enhanced or inverse returns on single companies — have been all the rage this year, with a record 45 new funds launching in 2024, compared with 32 last year and 19 the year prior, when they were first allowed to trade by regulators, the Strategas data show.

Though fee wars are one constant in the ever-evolving ETF space, they hadn’t yet hit the single-stocks corner of the market, where issuers charge more than average — thanks, in part, to their inherently more complex nature. The average fee among the more than 3,800 US-listed ETFs is 0.5%, Bloomberg data show.

There are already nine Nvidia-based single-stock ETFs and 11 Tesla-based ones. That means the new cheaper funds will have a lot of competition to contend with, Sohn says.

“History always has a rhyme to it and now we are seeing an early attempt to bring fee compression to what is an important growth area for growing issuers: the leverage space,” he said. “The question is: do investors pay attention or would they rather stick with the established players.”

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