If the recent launches in the ETF space confuse you (what with multiple flavors of single-stock leveraged and inverse ETFs now dominating the daily blotter), then you’re not alone. Over the past few weeks, we’ve had a phase shift in how folks should think about ETFs. It used to be that I could get away with shorthanding the entire ETF industry with a somewhat thoughtless comment like, “ETFs are just portfolios of securities you can trade like a stock! Just like a mutual fund portfolio, but with a special sauce that makes it tax-efficient, transparent, and tradable!” Ah, the good old days. While it’s been the case for quite some time that you could own a single asset in an ETF, those use cases have been in difficult bridge markets, like gold or front-month oil futures. Owning either as a portfolio asset was actually very difficult and very inefficient before we had the SPDR Gold Shares Fund (GLD A-) and the United States Oil Fund LP (USO B) to turn to. The use case was clear and applied frankly to any kind of investor; everyone from hedge funds to my mom likes to have a little slug of gold around. The recent launches of single-stock ETFs expanded that playbook quite dramatically, even if the first products seemed relatively unassuming. (Inverse TSLA? Sure. 2X Nike? Sure.) I referred to them when they launched as “extremely sharp tools,” and I stand by that — they are tools, and they’ll do exactly what they say they’re supposed to do. They’re just a bit expensive and come with caveats around being day trading tools, but the use case is, again, quite clear. These new products from ETF newcomer F/m Investments are even simpler products but with less clear use cases. All these products do is own the currently trading bond of each tenor. For example, here’s the opening portfolio of UTEN: