Emile Hallez
4 min read
Will Rhind has watched the ETF business for more than two decades. He was an original member of the iShares team — back when it was part of Barclays — and he was later CEO of World Gold Trust Services, the sponsor of the now $98 billion SPDR Gold Shares ETF (GLD). He left that company in 2016 to found GraniteShares, which has built out an extensive line of leveraged single-stock ETFs.
Rhind, who has roots in the “Granite City” of Aberdeen, Scotland, joined ETF Upside for a conversation about the burgeoning world of single-stock ETFs. GraniteShares filed last week with the Securities and Exchange Commission for 25 additional leveraged single-stock ETFs. Rhind did not discuss the pending funds, given that they are in the registration period, but he talked about where the firm is headed.
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ETF Upside: How did GraniteShares get its start, and why did you decide to focus on leveraged single-stock ETFs?
Will Rhind: When we started GraniteShares, there were only two companies in the US allowed to do leveraged ETFs, and that was a weird regulatory quirk at the time. The leveraged ETF market hadn’t had a lot of innovation for a long time, and the SEC updated the rules around ETFs back in 2020 or 2019. That allowed anybody to do leveraged ETFs; there were all sorts of harmonization things that came with it. There was “white space” on the leveraged side in doing leverage on single stocks, which no one had done before, and so that’s what we started to do. We’d actually done it in Europe first, because we couldn’t do it here. So we started the first levered single-stock products in Europe, and then bought them here when we were able to.
What do you hear from investors about how they’re using the products? I assume most people are aware of the risks and are trading daily.
The great thing about ETFs is that there are so many different ways to use it. The directional — two times long, two times short —is one obvious application, but you’re able to trade in the pre-market —so before the open, after the close — which is a big benefit against things like options. For example, you’re able to short or take an inverse view, which is very useful in environments like this year that we’ve seen so far. And then, there are other strategies around creating tax events you know could be using short, for example, to generate a taxable loss that you can often offset against gains elsewhere in the portfolio.
