By Suzanne McGee
(Reuters) - Defiance ETFs launched an exchange-traded fund (ETF), the Battleshares TSLA vs F ETF, on Thursday, the first of a group pairing bullish bets on innovative companies with bearish ones on their traditional industry counterparts.
The new ETF pairs a leveraged long holding in electric car manufacturer Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA), offering investors 200% of the stock’s upside, with a position that will pay investors 100% of any decline in the shares of Ford.
Investors already can use leveraged single-stock ETFs to bet on where they think shares of individual companies such as Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) and Tesla are going. This is the first attempt to combine two different stocks and two different directional bets in a single product.
"Pairs trades, as these are called, exist out there for professional traders and institutions but just are not accessible in an ETF," said Sylvia Jablonski, CEO of Defiance, a firm that already has a series of leveraged single-stock ETFs on the market.
Each of the lineup of Battleshares ETFs that Jablonski hopes to launch will match a bullish leveraged bet on a "new leader" such as Tesla, with a bearish one on the legacy company, such as ETFs twinning Nvidia with Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN) with Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) & Co and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) with Macy’s (NYSE:M).
The next ETF launch might come as early as next week, Jablonski said, if investors demonstrate interest in the Tesla versus Ford match up.
"Tesla is in the news a lot right now, and so is Elon Musk, so we thought this was a logical product to test out the concept of investors being able to invest in the battle of an incumbent against an innovator."
The ETF carries a hefty 1.29% fee, well above the average 0.45% calculated by Morningstar.