U.S. investors now have a new way to bet against bitcoin in the wake of this year’s crypto market volatility.
ProShares on Tuesday launched its Short Bitcoin Strategy ETF, or BITI, the first inverse exchange-traded fund connected with bitcoin in the U.S. Its shares are trading at around $38.74 on Tuesday, up about 0.6%, according to FactSet data.
The ETF arrived at a time when bitcoin
BTCUSD,
is down almost 70% from its all-time high, though it went up about 5% on Tuesday to around $21,472, according to CoinDesk data.
BITI tracks the inverse of the daily performance of the S&P CME bitcoin futures index, according to the fund’s fact sheet.
“As recent times have shown, bitcoin can drop in value,” ProShares’s chief executive Michael L. Sapir wrote in a statement Monday. “BITI affords investors who believe that the price of bitcoin will drop with an opportunity to potentially profit or to hedge their cryptocurrency holdings,” according to Sapir.
“BITI enables investors to conveniently obtain short exposure to bitcoin through buying an ETF in a traditional brokerage account,” Sapir added.
Still, like other inverse ETFs, BITI is designed to track the opposite of the underlying index over a single day. Investors who hold the fund for longer than one day may get returns worse than they expected, especially when volatility is heightened in the market.
Proshare’s Bitcoin Strategy ETF
BITO,
BITO, which tracks bitcoin futures performance, lost 66% of its value since its launch in November, according to Dow Jones market data.
