Just because people dream up a conspiracy doesn’t make it so. Let’s dig into the realities of $MSOS. Markets have two things - fundamentals and mechanics. Let’s start with mechanics. $MSOS is like any other ETF with two exceptions – it can’t directly hold all of its underlyings

I was asked about $MSOS Short Interest (SI). Shorts are slippery topic. It is not always easy to get to the root cause and potential effects. A 20+% SI is indeed large. I can think of 4 likely drivers for the $MSOS SI. (Spoiler alert – choose E – All of the above). Let’s break

An interesting development with the SEC finally turning the lights on in the securities lending space. Rules appear to include monthly reporting of short activity over $10M by funds which will be anonymized and shared publicly 20 days later. Stock borrow activity will be made

1/ Viridian Chart of the Week: A Valuable Tool to Track Cannabis Credit Quality "Monitoring the credit quality...has become critical in the capital-starved environment of 2023...We believe the best single number that an investor can calculate is Total Liabilities/Market Cap."

With the recent $MSOS price action, I am again seeing conspiracy theories on root cause. Let’s de-myth with facts. $MSOS is a reflection of its underlyings – full stop. The movement in $MSOS can be fully explained in terms of its holdings and vice versa. The table below breaks

The fundamental mechanics surrounding MSOS are getting lost in the noise as people look for scapegoats for an underperforming sector. Many relevant questions have been tabled around leverage, derivatives, redemptions, arbitrage dynamics etc. which I will address, but bottom line

There is a different dynamic in $MSOS trading these days. It is a pattern we haven’t seen since SAFE failed to be included in the NDAA in Dec of 2022. We are seeing what appears to be a controlled liquidation of a significant position in MSOS by one of their shareholders. The

Why not just think of $MSOS as an alternative custody mechanism. That is the main driver that has made it such a big part of the traded cannabis ecosystem. Shareholders make or break companies not by where they keep their shares, but rather based on rewarding or penalizing

These questions looked fun for a weekend data mining project. My fav is Q1 - Does $MSOS help or harm but lets dispense with the others first. #3 - I would guess that there are 6-10 AP's registered with 3 being active (only Dan really knows) but it doesn't matter. These guys

MSOS as a managed ETF means you are betting on both the horse and the jockey. The chart below shows 2 years of concentration of $GTBIF within the $MSOS portfolio. As you can see, Dan Ahrens built the fund position through the back half of ’23 and throughout ’24 to maintain

Fun Fact - Even after today's redemption, $MSOX has added 1.0 million shares of $GTBIF to its representative holdings since July 4th. A net of $6.95 million flowed into $GTBIF over this last month from $MSOX making the weighted average purchase price ~$6.86 per share. Over this

Today highlighted the impact of custody challenges in the U.S. cannabis sector. Within the MSOS ETF, three companies - $CURLF, $TSNDF, and $VFF – have been able to structure to avoid custody issues, which has also enabled their listing on the TSX or Nasdaq. Their trading

The recent shifts in $MSOS weightings are worth a closer look. On August 1, $GTBIF dominated with a 30.5% weighting, leading second-place $TCNNF by over 9 points. Just seven trading days later, the picture is quite different. $GTBIF's weighting has plunged by 22% to 23.8%, while

The three lead names within $MSOS traded rank with $TCNNF becoming the top holding at 23.6%, $CURLF remaining in second at 23.0% and $GTBIF dropping to third at 22.9%. Below is the updated scorecard. Whether you believe in correlation or causation, today we saw $MSOS pour $3.0M

The cannabis sector’s echo chamber seems slow to learn. As a $GTBIF shareholder, I invested based on its strong fundamentals. But fundamentals alone don’t drive price action - especially when key players thwart liquidity inflows into the name. Fact: Since June, $MSOS has boosted

I was posed an interesting question around potential alternative solutions to the cannabis custody crisis (tZERO). Unfortunately as you can see below, there is no easy way out without reform. I was reminded of things that I think we take for granted in how our sector functions

OPTIONS IMPACT VISUALIZED Let’s put some numbers to the concept. Here is the rebalance impact at various MSOS levels based on current Jan 16 open interest. The assumption here is that options are “delta hedged” and that those deltas will be zero or one at expiry depending on the