First Trust listed six income ETFs at 0.85%, and the new fund flagged its own conflict

Most of what listed this week was a fund the industry already sells, priced like the funds already on the shelf.

First Trust's six each hold one company and a set of options, and they seek cash payouts, with any gain as a secondary aim. The companies are Advanced Micro Devices, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Palantir, in —XVAD, XVAZ, XVGL, —XVMS, —XVMT and —XVPT. All six charge 0.85%. The AMD, Microsoft, Meta and Palantir funds held about $6.05 million combined as of Thursday, September 24. Four funds in the same line, listed in August on Apple, Nvidia, Tesla and SpaceX, held $8.16 million combined as of Wednesday.

First Trust's two Nasdaq-100 buffer funds, —QQBF and —DQSE, which use options to cover a set loss and give up some of the gain, charge 0.90%. VistaShares priced two monthly protection funds at 0.79%, VOOB on the S&P 500 and QQQB on the Nasdaq-100. The firm said that, under current market conditions, the funds seek to offset the first 8% of losses in a month, and that the holder still bears about half of any further loss. In late August, Innovator's July S&P 500 buffer still charged 0.79%, and VanEck had just listed its first buffer fund at 0.50%.

State Street added three funds that hold bonds maturing in a single calendar year, MYCP, MYHF and MYML, to a ladder it said had topped $1 billion. Northern Trust priced a New York tax-exempt fund, TXNY, at 0.09%.

Cboe's notice on Thursday said the T-Strive Digital Credit Preferred Income ETF would begin trading as DCAP. Tuttle Capital Management and Strive Asset Management, the firm hired to help run it, called it the first US digital credit ETF. It is meant to hold preferred shares of companies that keep bitcoin on the balance sheet, the kind that pay a set dividend and stand ahead of ordinary shares if the company is in trouble. At the start the fund expected two of those shares, Strategy's STRC and Strive's SATA, in roughly equal size. Strive Inc., which issues SATA, is an affiliate of Strive Asset Management, a related company. The announcement says that if the fund holds SATA, Strive Asset Management and Strive Inc. may benefit. It also says Strive Asset Management may only research investments other than SATA, and has no authority to decide what the fund buys. Annual expenses are 1.05% before a waiver, and 0.95% after a waiver through September 30, 2027. Matthew Tuttle, chief executive of Tuttle Capital Management, said these companies "have built an entirely new preferred stock market to fund their strategies, and most investors don't have an easy way to access it."

iShares opened —AIBF at 0.40%, a fund of US companies that may benefit from artificial intelligence, mainly by cutting costs. It held about $5.0 million.

xETFs opened NECK at 0.75%, aimed at the scarce parts of that industry, including memory, optics and power. REX added CHIP, which the firm said holds the machines that make and package chips, not the designers that buy them.

Calamos converted its Timpani small- and mid-cap growth mutual fund into CTAG. Hotchkis & Wiley listed —HWMV as an exchange-traded class of a mid-cap value fund that dates to January 2, 1997 and held $448 million on August 31. The new class charges 0.94% and held about $497,000. Main Management's fund, —SECA, owns sector funds and individual stocks, charges 0.69%, and held $446 million by Friday, September 25. The firm launched it as a Section 351 exchange, which lets investors move an existing portfolio in without an immediate tax bill. The firm dates the strategy to September 2002.

VegaShares listed —VAIC, a US equity income fund, at 0.74%, the same fee Calamos charges on its Nasdaq-100 fund, CCAIQ. As of Wednesday, three Nasdaq-100 autocallable income funds held about $409 million among them, and CCAIQ held about $372 million of that. —VAIC's prospectus leaves the fees paid to the swap counterparty out of the 0.74%. Those fees come out of the swap's return.

Still on paper

Issuers filed 34 amendments to fund registrations. Four issuers asked for a fund on every Major League Baseball club, among them Volatility Shares, REX and Roundhill. REX also filed hockey funds, both plain and in a version that seeks twice the daily move. Direxion asked for four funds that would hold contracts on reported results at SpaceX, Tesla, Anthropic and OpenAI, not on the companies' shares. Themes and GraniteShares filed funds that seek twice the daily move in companies, and in funds, that are not listed yet.

WisdomTree filed US funds from the Atlantic House business it bought on May 1. ProShares filed for a fund of bonds from Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Alphabet and Oracle. Exchange Traded Concepts said Friday that its music-industry fund, FMUSQ, is expected to liquidate on or about October 23, and three Themes funds were due to pay remaining holders cash the same day.

Roundhill filed for a fund of CPU makers. Its memory-chip fund, CDRAM, held $27.1 billion on Wednesday, against about $6.05 million in four of the new First Trust income funds.