CSOP Asset Management Ltd will launch Hong Kong’s first batch of leveraged and inverse exchange-traded fund products tracking single stocks overseas in a bid to tap local retail investors with riskier appetites.
The Hong Kong-based asset manager will release nine products Monday that use derivatives to offer two times the daily returns of Berkshire Hathaway Inc, Nvidia Corp, Tesla Inc, MicroStrategy Inc and Coinbase Global Inc, and two times inverse the daily performance of the latter four, the firm said.
The launch comes after the Securities and Futures Commission’s move to expand listed structured fund offerings in the Asian financial hub, citing their increasing popularity in markets abroad. Market watchers are also pinning hopes that the new products will help bolster much-needed retail adoption and support the local ETF market, which lagged behind global peers in growth last year.
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In the US, speculative ETFs tracking just one or two securities are on the rise as issuers try to stand out from the competition and cater to the growing crowd of day traders. Turbocharged bets tied to single stocks like Nvidia and Strategy lured billions of dollars in 2024 as gamblers piled in to ride the equity rally.
Hong Kong’s leveraged and inverse ETF market has $3.3 billion in assets, dominated by products tracking domestic equity index exposure, Bloomberg Intelligence data shows.
With the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region moving fast to embrace this opportunity, market watchers also expect South Korea and Australia to follow suit. Asian regulators’ potential approval of single-stock leveraged and inverse ETFs could boost the regional L&I ETF market by 20 percent, bringing in at least $6 billion in assets, according to BI.
“The products could be a great trading tool for retail and high-net-worth investors and a hedging instrument for institutions,” said Yi Wang, CSOP’s head of quantitative investment. “The Asian trading hours will also offer investors window to price important information that are released after US market close.”