[Week 30 of 2026] Launches and Limousines

Welcome back to Price and Prejudice with a few musings from Week 30 of 2026.

Wrapper's Delight

This FT article reports that fund providers have listed 1,084 new ETFs as of mid-July, already nearing last year's record 1,161 for a full year. Morningstar's Bryan Armour calls it a "spaghetti cannon," which is the polite version. The extreme case featured in the article is Corgi Funds, a venture-backed startup that began launching in December and has apparently since put out 188 funds, including the Coffee and Energy Drinks ETF, the Buy Now Pay Later ETF, and the War Machine ETF, with 360 more on file. That puts Corgi on course to pass BlackRock as the largest US issuer by fund count within months.

It's not surprising that a venture-backed startup is doing this since it's essentially emulating the playbook of the VC industry: construct a portfolio of lottery tickets and bet on the convexity. Roundhill's memory-chip fund (ticker DRAM) went from zero to $10 billion in fifty days, so if one fund in two hundred does that, the other one hundred and ninety-nine are basically free.

The interesting contrast comes up on Barry Ritholtz's recent Masters in Business episode, with Howard Lindzon, the StockTwits co-founder. Lindzon runs something called the Degenerate Economy Index, which are sixteen positions built around the idea that trading, ownership, and gambling have collapsed into one activity on a phone, so you should own the modern-day arms dealers rather than the fads. The interesting bit from the episode is that Lindzon keeps refusing to put it in an ETF, and his reason is that "as soon as I monetize it, it'll go to zero." So he publishes it free instead.

He is probably describing capacity constraints, and he is right. A thematic strategy works while the theme is under-owned, and the wrapper is precisely the machine that ends that condition, since it converts a niche view into a distribution channel that pulls in flows until the trade is crowded. And given this difficulty, it probably makes sense to launch as many as you can and hope that one can save all the remaining ones.

Perks and Recreation

This impressive WSJ analysis went through roughly 2,000 proxy filings from the S&P 1500 and found about $600 million spent on some 15,000 perks for executives and directors. Apparently, under Item 402 of Regulation S-K, perks land in the "All Other Compensation" column once they total $10,000 for a named executive, and any single item above the greater of $25,000 or 10% of the total has to be named and quantified in a footnote.

What struck me is not the total (which is a rounding error against equity compensation) but the variety. Rush Enterprises gave its CEO personal use of a company-owned hunting ranch in Texas, and Texas Roadhouse picked up the initiation fees and dues at a Louisville country club after its CEO relocated from Texas. Constellation Brands gave its CEO free booze, Brunswick handed executives an annual boat allowance, and Old Republic spent about as much on one executive's yearly physical as most people spend on a car.

This is also a rare look at what people actually want once the budget constraint stops binding, and the answer is underwhelmingly ordinary. Golf, ball games, a boat, a good doctor, lunch. Cash compensation is one-dimensional and tells you nothing about the person receiving it. Instead, the list of perks is much more diverse and negotiated item by item, and the bundle each executive ends up with is closer to a portrait. It turns out that nobody in this list asked for anything exotic but just slightly nicer versions of things their neighbors also want.

The most interesting bit in the article is Apollo spending $790,000 so that Marc Rowan has a car and driver, against the $85,000 JPMorgan spent on Jamie Dimon's personal car use. It is also almost exactly what Apple spent on Tim Cook's personal flights, so Apollo spends as much moving Rowan around Manhattan as Apple spends moving Cook around the world. One reason for this could be that bank compensation disclosures get picked over by regulators, activists, and congressional staff, so it has to be a number that has to survive that audience. Perhaps this cross-sectional differences in compensation looks less like variation in greed than variation in how many people are watching.