ETFs Expand to NHL Teams: New Investment Opportunities Await

The filing hit the SEC’s database, and for a moment, I had to check my calendar. No, it wasn’t April 1st. Volatility Shares, a firm known for its volatility-focused exchange-traded funds, was proposing something new: 32 ETFs, one for each team in the National Hockey League. The proposed funds wouldn’t hold stocks or bonds. They would hold futures contracts—futures that don’t even exist yet—tied to the on-ice performance of clubs like the New York Rangers or the Chicago Blackhawks. Just three days prior, CME Group had announced it was creating those very futures, slated to start trading in late September, pending regulatory review. The speed of this financial engineering was staggering, even by Wall Street’s standards. It felt less like innovation and more like a race to securitize the air we breathe. As Todd Sohn, ETF strategist at Baird Strategas, put it in a note to clients, “This is getting difficult to keep up with.”

And hockey is merely the latest puck dropped into a crowded rink. According to data from Baird Strategas, more than 900 new ETFs have launched in 2025 through August 5th. That blistering pace puts this year within striking distance of 2024’s full-year record, with nearly five months still to go. The ecosystem is expanding into increasingly niche and conceptual territories. Last week’s filings alone included a proposed fund from Silvia that would build a portfolio based on investment themes extracted from the recent public comments of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Another filing, for a “Peptide and Human Enhancement ETF” with the proposed ticker LOOK, targets longevity and neurotechnology. The “Magnificent Seven” meme has already been commoditized into an ETF; now, with Tesla’s stock performance lagging the group, a new filing proposes a “Magnificent Six” ETF that simply excludes it. Oscar Wilde wrote that literature anticipates life. On modern Wall Street, the internet meme increasingly anticipates the financial product.

To dismiss all of this as mere gimmickry, however, would be a mistake. The underlying ideas often have a kernel of legitimate investment thesis. The proposed “AI Secret Ingredients ETF” from ProShares is essentially a picks-and-shovels play on the artificial intelligence boom, focusing on suppliers of critical materials like helium and rare earths. The human enhancement theme packages several real, rapidly advancing healthcare technologies. The ETF structure itself has proven to be a remarkably efficient “front-end” for delivering exposure to almost anything that can be quantified and traded. If a bank can define a trade, it can increasingly package it into an ETF wrapper and offer it to the public. The proposed Jensen Huang fund pushes this boundary in a novel, if peculiar, direction. Its strategy would involve parsing a rolling 30-day window of the CEO’s speeches and interviews to identify investable themes—a quantitative approach to qualitative commentary. The filing even soberly notes that a risk to the strategy is that Mr. Huang might choose to speak less frequently in public.

But the ease of launching a product does not guarantee its utility or its success. This brings us back to the hockey pucks. CME’s rationale for its team-performance futures is rooted in hedging. A local broadcaster, arena concessionaire, or apparel retailer has real economic exposure to how well their home team performs. A deep playoff run means more ad revenue, more hot dogs sold, more jersey sales. These futures could, in theory, allow those businesses to manage that risk. It’s a logical, if specialized, use case for a derivative. Stuffing those futures into an ETF, however, changes the game entirely. It transforms a bespoke hedging tool for sports businesses into a speculative vehicle for retail and institutional investors. And that creates a host of practical challenges.

Sohn raises critical questions that get to the heart of whether such a product could function:

• How would market makers hedge their own risk?
• How closely could the ETF’s market price track the net asset value of those futures?
• What are the implications during the volatile playoffs?
• What about during the long offseason when there are no games?
• What is the distribution plan for attracting assets?
• What are they trying to solve for?

His firm, Baird Strategas, has expressed serious doubts that the hockey ETFs will come to market anytime soon. The filing is a registration, not a launch announcement. It is a test balloon, a stake in the ground, and a demonstration of capability all at once. In today’s ETF landscape, the act of filing has become its own form of marketing. It signals to the market that a firm is at the cutting edge, thinking about the next frontier. Whether that frontier is investable is a secondary concern.

The story of the proposed NHL ETFs is a microcosm of the current ETF boom. It highlights the breathtaking creativity and the sheer commoditization of finance. Wall Street’s machinery is so efficient that it can now spin conceptual threads—from CEO soundbites to sports statistics—into potential investment products at breakneck speed. The barrier to entry for product creation has never been lower. But as Sohn’s questions underscore, making a ticker is the easy part. Building a liquid, functional, and ultimately useful market for that ticker is an entirely different challenge. The final score for these hockey funds, and many of the other niche ideas now flooding the SEC’s desk, is far from certain. In the relentless game of financial innovation, the third period has just begun, and the ice is getting very, very crowded.