Stockmarket’s wildest trades of 2024
ETFs: Speculation run wild
In a year when red-hot US stocks and crypto sparked furious risk-taking, ETFs (exchange traded funds) have been day traders’ go-to investment. Wall Street pounced on the public’s desire for speculative wagers, launching all kinds of derivative-powered bets, from a bulled-up ETF designed to deliver twice the return of bitcoin, to income-generating products that short the biggest names in corporate America.
For those on the other side of the risk spectrum, there is now a money market ETF.
Trading boomed in products that allow investors to amp up bets on the world’s most popular equities, with investors pouring a record of more than $US6.5 billion into such “single-stock ETFs” – vehicles that track just…
