Retail investors who want to buy Bitcoin can still go buy it directly from Coinbase, Robinhood, Kraken, or any number of reputable brokers, but they may balk at what they see as tech hurdles. Ironically, the reason for this is that SEC Chair Gary Gensler believes the rule that covers futures (and mutual funds) better protects the little people. What they got instead is an exotic investment option they may not understand, one that will cost them more in fees. So congratulations to ProShares for running the regulatory gauntlet better than its competition did.Īs for losers, you can include retail investors who were hoping to buy a boring Vanguard-style ETF, one that would let them buy Bitcoin just like a stock. While competing products are expected to receive the same green light from the SEC as soon as this week, Hougan-who used to run an ETF firm-says being early matters a lot since liquidity will flow to the first mover. Indeed, shares of the new ProShares ETF are expected to initially trade at a premium to the actual price of Bitcoin as a result of sophisticated investors who plan to arbitrage future price movements.Īlso in the obvious winner category is ProShares, which will be first out of the gate in this new frontier of crypto ETFs. The obvious winners of the new Bitcoin futures ETF will be professional traders and their wealthy clients, who are familiar with concepts like 'contango' and are good at making money off it. As Matthew Hougan, CIO of crypto investment firm Bitwise, explains, savvy futures traders anticipate price quirks like ' contango, backwardation and slippage' and make offsetting trades to account for them. When you're buying a futures ETF, there are other factors at play that lead the price of the shares to diverge from the asset. When you buy a regular ETF, the value of the shares is based entirely on the price of the underlying asset-be it Bitcoin or gold or oil or a basket of S&P stocks. What this means is the new fund, which is being packaged by a firm called ProShares, won't give you shares backed by Bitcoin, but shares tied a bundle of contracts to buy Bitcoin in the future. Instead, the agency allowed a Bitcoin futures ETF. The SEC allowed an ETF (exchange-traded fund), but not one pegged to the price of Bitcoin, the kind most people wanted. First, let's recap what exactly happened here.

The occasion has already produced winners and losers, which we'll get to in a moment.

The weeknd losers downloasd