'Investment junk food': New UFO Disclosure ETF shows just how weird this investment tool has become in 2026

Since ETFs came onto the marketplace successful 1993, they’ve offered investors a low-cost, tax-efficient concern vehicle. But purchaser beware: immoderate exchange-traded funds are starting to drift into ‘weird’ territory.

An ETF allows you to clasp a pooled handbasket of assets, including stocks, bonds and commodities, which tin beryllium bought and sold similar stocks — offering diversification without having to bargain and negociate idiosyncratic stocks.

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While galore accepted ETFs way a broad-based scale similar the S&P 500, thematic ETFs absorption connected trends oregon niches.

But ETFs are present becoming a “high-cost conduit for concentrated, risky oregon weird strategies,” writes Jason Zweig, columnist with The Wall Street Journal. “All excessively galore of the newer ones are concern junk food. And, conscionable arsenic with candy, cookies oregon gallic fries, filling up connected them tin beryllium atrocious for you (1).”

ETFs are getting weirder

Zweig points to the motorboat of the Tuttle Capital UFO Disclosure (UFOD) ETF successful February, which is designed to “invest successful companies positioned to payment from authorities disclosure, confirmation oregon exploitation of precocious technologies tied to unidentified anomalous phenomena (2).”

In different words, UFOs and aliens.

The fund, which the steadfast says is engineered for “alien alpha,” is weighted toward companies “at the intersection of aerospace, defense, precocious materials, sensing and energy.” These industries, it says, are poised to person “a monolithic influx of superior and exertion successful the lawsuit of a UFO oregon UAP disclosure.”

So far, the money has $2.9 cardinal successful assets and charges 0.99% annually (3).

But, arsenic Zweig points out: “Is it worthy paying 0.99% a twelvemonth for an ETF tailor-made for E.T.?”

Tuttle Capital Management antecedently offered different unconventional thematic fund: the Inverse Cramer ETF, which was designed to abbreviated banal recommendations by Jim Cramer, erstwhile hedge money manager turned big of CNBC’s Mad Money. The ETF was unopen down and liquidated successful 2024.

Zweig besides points to the Nicholas Bitcoin and Treasuries AfterDark ETF — designed for investors who judge bitcoin performs amended astatine night, aft the markets close.

The money works by providing bitcoin vulnerability aft acheronian (from marketplace adjacent successful the U.S. to marketplace unfastened the pursuing day), holding currency and U.S. Treasuries during daytime trading hours.