Sticking out from the Wall Street crowd is no easy feat at the best of times. Now imagine the plight of money managers across the ever-competitive investment industry, who are struggling to assert ownership of their original ETF offerings as rival firms launch imitator products with strikingly similar tickers.

That’s what happened to VanEck. The asset manager is an early pioneer of tying a fund’s investment theme with its ticker name – a now make-or-break practice for issuers keen to ensure their strategies stick in the minds of investors. After it launched an agriculture-focused fund in the US in 2007 with the ticker MOO, executives at the firm were left reeling after hearing that a similar product was making its debut in the European market some while later.

The ticker for the wannabe fund? MOOO.

As competition becomes more cutthroat, investment firms across both sides of the Atlantic have been launching funds with the same tickers as their competitors in another jurisdiction. It doesn’t stop there: often these copycat funds have comparable allocation strategies, from niche commodity trades to high-octane technology investments.

That’s because all of the biggest and best ideas have already been taken, said Ben Johnson, head of client solutions at Morningstar.

“It’s fair play at the end of the day,” he said. “If your competitors aren’t represented in a particular market with that same underlying benchmark or concept, then it’s finders keepers.”

In some instances, the copycat ETFs have pulled off the seemingly improbable feat of netting more inflows than the original offerings, underscoring how first-mover advantage is no guarantee of success in an industry where marketing and fund distribution can seal the fate for firms of all stripes.

In the case of MOO, the original fund saw its assets skyrocket to above $2.5 billion just three years after its inception. So another company putting out a similar product “crossed the line” and had the potential to confuse investors, said a person familiar with VanEck’s perspective. 

Yet there was little the firm could do about it — it didn’t own the ticker, the exchange the fund was listing on did — and the European MOOO ended up launching in what became an early example of the copycat trend.

Since then, the trend has only picked up. An informal analysis by Bloomberg found that there are currently at least 59 pairs of impersonators — or funds that share similar characteristics and the exact same four-letter ticker base — cross-listed in Europe and the US by different issuers. 

In the US alone, there are more than 3,700 funds, meaning that any new entrants are competing in an already crowded arena and within offerings that span any number of ideas and themes. Against that backdrop, a fund’s ticker can be a major differentiator as retail investors, in particular, tend to favor catchy or easy-to-remember monikers.

‘No Monopoly on Good Ideas’

There’s little stopping a company from transporting a successful American product into Europe, or the other way around. That’s why London-based HANetf, which helps companies bring ETFs to the European markets, has partnered with US-based white-label issuer Tidal to help them cross-launch in both regions.

Copycat ETFs have still faced backlash. Hector McNeil, co-founder and co-CEO of HANetf, has heard from disgruntled issuers who weren’t happy when similar products were getting off the ground in Europe, and he’s sent his own messages of displeasure to competitors. 

“There’s no monopoly on good ideas,” he said in an interview. “If you have something successful there or here, somebody will see that and will say ‘rather than be creative and come up with my own idea, the easiest thing is to copy, and hopefully improve on the idea, if it hasn’t been done already.’” 

‘Shame on Me’

In 2021, Matt Tuttle, chief executive officer at Tuttle Capital Management, launched a 2x Short Innovation ETF with the ticker SARK. The product bets against Cathie Wood’s Ark Innovation ETF, which was coming off its best year ever, having risen 150% in 2020. 

About a month later, the Leverage Shares -3x Short ARK Innovation fund debuted in London — with the ticker SARK.

The company’s tickers typically include a “recognizable reference to the underlying asset/index” with additional notations to highlight what the fund does, said Oktay Kavrak, director of communications and strategy at Leverage Shares. That’s why it went with SARK — to showcase that it was a short strategy. 

Earlier this year, the issuer also launched the Leverage Shares 4x Long Semiconductors ETP in London with the ticker SOXL. That fund debuted 14 years after the original SOXL started to trade in the US. The original fund from issuer Direxion is well known by its ticker and currently has about $10 billion in assets. 

In that case, “the reputation was already there,” Kavrak said. “Since there was at ticker already out there for investors, we thought it would be more straightforward to understand.” Kavrak added that Leverage Shares has seen some of its own tickers and strategies replicated in the US. 

To Tuttle, it’s all fair game. 

“If it’s a good idea and it makes money over in Europe, shame on me for not doing it first,” Tuttle said.