Defiance ETF pairs Tesla and Ford, more match-ups to come #CanadaFinance

By Suzanne McGee

(Reuters) – Defiance ETFs launched an exchange-traded fund (ETF), the Battleshares TSLA vs F ETF, on Thursday, the first of a group pairing bullish bets on innovative companies with bearish ones on their traditional industry counterparts.

The new ETF pairs a leveraged long holding in electric car manufacturer Tesla, offering investors 200% of the stock’s upside, with a position that will pay investors 100% of any decline in the shares of Ford.

Investors already can use leveraged single-stock ETFs to bet on where they think shares of individual companies such as Nvidia and Tesla are going. This is the first attempt to combine two different stocks and two different directional bets in a single product.

“Pairs trades, as these are called, exist out there for professional traders and institutions but just are not accessible in an ETF,” said Sylvia Jablonski, CEO of Defiance, a firm that already has a series of leveraged single-stock ETFs on the market.

Each of the lineup of Battleshares ETFs that Jablonski hopes to launch will match a bullish leveraged bet on a “new leader” such as Tesla, with a bearish one on the legacy company, such as ETFs twinning Nvidia with Intel, Coinbase with Wells Fargo & Co and Amazon with Macy’s.

The next ETF launch might come as early as next week, Jablonski said, if investors demonstrate interest in the Tesla versus Ford match up.

“Tesla is in the news a lot right now, and so is Elon Musk, so we thought this was a logical product to test out the concept of investors being able to invest in the battle of an incumbent against an innovator.”

The ETF carries a hefty 1.29% fee, well above the average 0.45% calculated by Morningstar.

(Reporting by Suzanne McGee; Editing by Jacqueline Wong)