The ETF industry’s newest asset class is absurdity: Chart of the Day

Wall Street will turn almost anything into an ETF these days. Your hockey team could be next.

CME announced plans last week for the first futures tied to the on-ice performance of individual NHL teams. Three days later, Volatility Shares filed for 32 ETFs designed to trade them — one for every team in the league. The underlying futures aren’t even scheduled to start trading until Sept. 28, pending regulatory review.

And hockey is hardly alone.

More than 900 ETFs have already launched this year through Aug. 5, according to Baird Strategas, putting 2026 within striking distance of last year’s record with nearly five months to go.

*2026 is on pace to exceed the record total of 2025.* · Baird Strategas/Todd Sohn

“This is getting difficult to keep up with,” Baird Strategas ETF strategist Todd Sohn wrote in an Aug. 11 note.

Then came last week’s filings.

What Wall Street wants to turn into ETFs

These are registrations, not guarantees that any of the funds will ultimately launch. Sohn wrote that Baird “highly doubt[s]” the hockey ETFs will arrive anytime soon.

But ridiculous names don’t necessarily mean ridiculous ideas.

“AI Secret Ingredients” is basically a picks-and-shovels approach to the AI boom. Human enhancement packages several real healthcare technologies. ETFs can also use derivatives to solve genuine portfolio problems, as with the capital-efficient funds that can squeeze 90/60 exposure into the same dollar.

The ETF has become a universal front-end for financial exposure. If Wall Street can define a trade, increasingly it can package it.

The Jensen fund pushes that idea in a genuinely new direction. Its proposed strategy would review a rolling 30-day body of Huang’s public remarks and use them to identify investment themes for a portfolio of roughly 15 to 40 stocks. The filing even flags the possibility that Huang might speak less frequently as a risk to the strategy.

Oscar Wilde wrote that “literature always anticipates life.” On Wall Street, the meme increasingly anticipates the financial product.

Consider the “Magnificent Seven.” Wall Street already turned that nickname into the Roundhill Magnificent Seven ETF (MAGS). Now, after Tesla (TSLA) badly lagged the rest of the group over the past year, Global X has filed for a Magnificent Six ETF that simply leaves Tesla out.

TSLA has badly lagged MAGS since mid-May 2025. Now an ETF filing proposes simply leaving it out. — *TSLA has lagged MAGS since mid-May 2025. Now an ETF filing proposes simply leaving it out.* · Yahoo Finance AlphaSpace

The same proliferation has already hit thematic ETFs, where several funds can wind up chasing essentially the same narrow idea.

That brings the story back to hockey.

CME says its team-performance futures could give sponsors, broadcasters, arena operators, retailers, and other businesses a way to hedge economic exposure to how a team performs. But putting those futures inside an ETF doesn’t guarantee somebody will always want the other side of the trade.

Sohn raises basic questions about how market makers would hedge the funds, how closely ETF prices would track their underlying value, and what happens during the offseason when there are no games.

Baird raises basic questions about how market makers would hedge the hockey funds, how closely ETF prices would track their underlying value, and what happens during the offseason when there are no games.

“Launching an ETF is easier than ever. But the question someone has to ask themselves is a) what are they trying to solve for? And b) what is their distribution plan?” Sohn told Yahoo Finance.

“Attracting assets in a super competitive, perhaps saturated market is extremely challenging without firm plans for both of those.”

Making a ticker is easier than making a market.

Jared Blikre is the global markets and data editor for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X at @SPYJared or email him at jaredblikre@yahooinc.com.

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