Why This ETF’s 1,700% Return Isn’t Attracting Buy-and-Hold Investors

This year’s breakout star in the ETF world is a small fund, one with just $45 million in assets.

The Breakwave Tanker Shipping ETF (BWET) returned over 1,700% this year as of Tuesday, making it by far the best-performing fund on the market. And, that’s no small feat, given the preponderance of double- and even triple-leveraged funds. The closest fund, by performance, is the GraniteShares 2x Long Dell Daily ETF (DLLL), which has returned 732% so far this year. Excluding the lengthy roster of leveraged funds, the next-best-returning fund has been the Arm Holdings PLC ADRHedged ETF (ARMH), which, at an impressive 132% is still less than one-tenth the returns of BWET. Still, the Tanker Shipping ETF is intended to be a highly specific trading tool, not necessarily a buy-and-hold investment. 

“The [trading] volumes have been incredibly strong, but assets under management have not changed much in the last few months, which tells me that most of the folks are in and out,” said John Kartsonas, founder of Breakwave Advisors. It’s common for a day’s trading volume to be twice as high as the fund’s AUM, for example, “which is very unusual for an ETF, but it seems that there are a lot of people who like the volatility, who would like to take a short-term bet either way,” he said.

Break the Mold, Make Waves

The fund’s unique strategy of focusing on crude oil tanker freight futures rates has benefited from the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz amid the Iran war. “It is hard to find something more niche than this,” said Todd Sohn, chief ETF strategist for Baird Strategas. “People are probably looking at it as more of a proxy than putting major dollars to work … If it was anything else, if you had a semiconductor ETF up this much year to date, it would be seeing massive inflows.”

While the fund has been the top performer in 2026, there are plentiful instances of ETFs getting triple-digit rates of return during the first six months in given years, especially recent ones, data from Morningstar Direct show.

Some examples, excluding leveraged funds:

• In the first half of 2021, Grayscale’s Ethereum Classic Trust (ETCG) returned 899.5%, which appears to be the strongest first-half performance of all time. Breakwave’s Dry Shipping ETF (BDRY) returned 264% during that time.
• During the first half of 2026, BWET returned 683.8%, compared with 225.6% for ARMH.

Low-Flow Tank: There’s a big reason why BWET isn’t soaking up assets: An agreement with Iran to reopen the strait would dramatically change the price of oil, and crude oil freight futures. “You had this crisis starting in March, and everybody was expecting this to end relatively soon … But we’re six months into the conflict, and it seems like not much has changed,” Kartsonas said. “There is a lot of risk … If there is a normalization in the Strait of Hormuz, you would expect freight rates to come down, and that would affect freight futures as well.”