Dumb ETFs Are Exploding — And Investors Keep Buying
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Dumb Ways to Lose Money. I saw this story, and I’ve been following some of these investments, investments, air quotes, and it popped into my head today. There was a song that came out 2012. It was by this band. It was called Tangerine Kitty. And they wrote it actually for the Australian train metro thing. And the song was called Dumb Ways.
To die. And it was it had a like a little cartoon video. I remember showing it to the kids, and the kids thought it was funny. I say I looked it up and grabbed some of the lyrics. Okay. Set fire to your hair, poke a stick at a grizzly bear, eat medicines out of date, use your private parts as piranha bait. Then it went dumb ways to die high. So many dumb ways to die. But anyway, so many dumb ways to lose money in the markets.
ETFs Exchange Traded Funds. man, there it’s amazing how they can they can take something and they can turn it into an absolute shit show for investors. a lot of these new ETFs that are coming out are the garbage. Garbage this year.
Think about this, 466 ETFs have been launched. This is mid-May. Four hundred and sixty-six ETFs, sixty-two point three billion dollars in assets. Now, their annual expenses, what they’re charging investors, average average.
Nine percent. yeah, the the ETFs that well they’re charging twenty times. Twenty times anything that we utilize for our clients, traditional index funds. six out of every ten new ETFs carry annual expenses of at least point five. A fifth charge at least.
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1% annually. Jason Zweig, Wall Street Journal is a columnist there. personal finance took over for Jonathan Clements, who’s a big fan of years ago. The column he does there, the intelligent investor did a really great piece on this. Only 16% of the newest ETFs are index funds. More than a quarter of this year’s launches results depend on.
The performance of a single stock.
Single stock, commodity, or some other asset using air quotes. When you think of ETFs, people think of diversification. This is the opposite of that. Dozens of these ETFs specialize in cryptocurrencies. Yeah, we’re gonna double. We’re gonna double the daily return of the digital assets. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Here’s one for you.
I didn’t even know about this one. This is why I pointed this one out. I’m not making this up.
This actually got approved. The Tuttle Capital UFO Disclosure ETF. Dumb ways to lose money. Dumb ways to lose money. the fund seeks to buy stocks that could benefit from government disclosure, confirmation, or exploitation of advanced technologies related to non human.
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Intelligence.
Wasn’t that like one of the the the Spider-Man movies where was it Michael Keaton there? he took over all the weapons from the bad guy. I don’t know, whatever it may be. you know what the management fee is? Point nine nine percent a year.
The portfolio manager says he was inspired to create the fund by videos that purport to show alien spacecra spacecraft moving across the skies in anomalous ways. Yeah, I thought about this for a second. I want to go back to the 1990s. There was a hedge fund manager that ran his his portfolio based upon astrology. I there’s
Dumb ways to lose money. Dumb ways to lose money. yes, if this technology exists and becomes public, it’s a game changer more than the internet or AI. I don’t need aliens to be real for my thesis to work, but it’s a lot more fun if they work.
Okay, here’s another one for you. It’s the Nicholas Bitcoin and Treasuries After Dark ETF.
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Sounds like something on Skinemax back from the 1980s or 90s. Anyway, basically it that charges 0.97% annually. Its strategy is this: it buys Bitcoin only when the stock market is closed. When the stock market is open, it flips to treasuries.
Whatever, man. whatever. there’s one here looking to double the gains or losses of palladium. one that combines options trading and space related stocks. another seeking to generate 15% annual income by layering options contracts on the top 20 most recently disclosed pot stock picks of investor David Tepper’s hedge fund.
All of these charge 0.95% or more annually, which is 95 bucks on a $10,000 investment. most ETFs are basically two to three dollars on a ten thousand dollar investment. almost a third of all new money flowing into ETFs went into non-index funds last year.
Again, dumb ways to lose money. I try. I try. But again, people, you love losing money. It’s amazing to me. You just it’s like you enjoy it. Watchdog on wallstreet.com.

