Agriculture fund investors may be making hay.

With the Strait of Hormuz still closed, the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war and what forecasters are saying is likely to be the worst El Niño on record, crop supply is tighter than usual. As a result, prices are rising for agricultural funds. Because the sector is driven by crop prices, it’s uncorrelated with the rest of the market, and can act as a hedge against possible losses due to a feared artificial intelligence bubble. Investors who missed the boat on energy when the war in Iran began are turning to agriculture funds to leverage market shifts due to the conflict, said Kathy Kriskey, Invesco’s head of alternatives ETF Strategy.

Kriskey said she asked a client who bought into the Invesco DB Agriculture Fund (DBA) at the start of the war what was behind the move. His answer focused on alternative fuels (soybeans can be turned into biodiesel and corn into ethanol), plus the lack of correlation to the broader market, Kriskey said. “Then he ended with, ‘And people have to eat.’”

Reaping Before Sowing

Usually, investors allocate to agriculture funds when the underlying crop prices start moving higher, said Jake Hanley, CGO at Teucrium. This happened in 2022 when the Russia-Ukraine war sent grain prices soaring: The price moved, and inflows followed. But this year, when the US took action against Iran, inflows came before crop prices moved significantly. About a third of the world’s fertilizer trade moves through the Strait of Hormuz, according to the UN, and while farmers had already bought their fertilizer for the year by the time the war started, it could prove a problem for the next planting season. Farmers will likely use less fertilizer, according to Hanley, which means that crop yields will be smaller, and thus more expensive. “As this continues on through the fall … that’s going to make it a 2027 problem because that input cost goes up,” said Hanley. Those early inflows were likely investors “positioning themselves for a longer-term story relating to fertilizer issues.”

Agriculture ETFs, by the numbers:

• The Teucrium Wheat Fund (WEAT) is the best performer so far this year, up almost 28%, with $163 million in net flows and $320 million under management, according to ETF.com.
• Broad agriculture funds are garnering lower returns than individual crop funds, with the Invesco DB Agriculture Fund (DBA) up about 11% so far this year.
• Meanwhile, agribusiness funds are up, but not quite as high as crop funds. The VanEck Agribusiness ETF (MOO) is up 17% this year, with almost $319 million in net flows and about $1 billion under management.

The Grass Is Greener Where You Water It: Agribusiness and agriculture stocks “tend to move very close together since farmers tend to make their planting decisions based on what crop prices are doing,” said Seth Goldstein, a senior equity analyst at Morningstar. “We’ve recently seen crop prices rise, and so that’s been leading to an outperformance of the actual crops versus the agribusiness.”

The NFL’s regular season hasn’t kicked off just yet, but that isn’t stopping investors from going long.

Yields for 30-year long-dated US Treasurys reached historic highs this month amid a massive selloff, climbing to roughly 5.3%, the highest level since 2007. In July, long government funds raked in almost $6 billion, their largest monthly inflows since May 2025, according to Morningstar data. The fervor seems to stem from inflation risk and fears of mounting government debt, prompting the Treasury to announce last week that it will increase buybacks in an attempt to lower yields. There’s also the rise of AI and increased competition for funding from borrowers such as hyperscalers, said JoAnne Bianco, senior investment strategist at BondBloxx.

“There’s concerns around the federal deficit … inflation risks, and the new wrinkle is people’s fears about increased competition for capital from large corporate debt issuers,” Bianco said. “[That could make] yields for both corporates and long Treasurys have to go higher.”

Long Bond Silver’s

The largest outflows last week out of all US-listed funds, about $4 billion, came from the iShares 7-10 Year Treasury Bond ETF (IEF). Long-dated Treasury performance is also down, while other fixed-income areas are up, making them — contrary to the standard logic — “not a riskless investment,” Bianco said. Still, people are buying the dip, with iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (TLT) growing by $5.3 billion last week. The mixed bag represents investors’ varied perspectives when it comes to the reliability of long-term bonds, Bianco said.

“There can be differences of opinion and flows in and out, especially in ETFs, which are very liquid funds,” she said. “You can take a position and you can change your mind … We’ve seen some [investors] move into the long end and have good reasons for that, versus others wanting to be more short to intermediate and also having good reasons for that.”

The dip has affected ETFs in the category, too:

• The iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (TLT) is down about 6% year-to-date.
• Vanguard’s Long-Term Treasury Index Fund ETF Shares (VGLT) is down 4.9%.
• The State Street SPDR Portfolio Long Term Treasury ETF (SPTL) is also down 5.2%.

Where’s the Horizon Line? The types of bonds to invest in, and whether to buy them at all, depend on the individual investor, their risk profile and time horizon, Bianco said. But other fixed-income products can be a good alternative to Treasurys, she added.

“It’s a pretty healthy environment to be in fixed income,” she said. “You don’t need to focus on the volatility of the long end of US Treasurys to have some areas of fixed-income investing where you can really enhance your returns.”

We’d call it a bitcoin bounce, but no bouncy ball in the world behaves like the volatile digital asset.

Bitcoin’s price has risen significantly over the past week, hovering around $80,000, which is up from just under $60,000 in late June. A roughly 25% jump in recent days has been credited to an initial short squeeze, but other factors likely contributed to the price staying relatively high.

“A lot of the price increase was more mechanical than demand-based,” said Matt Kaufman, head of ETFs at Calamos Investments, noting that the recently announced Treasury buybacks for long-term debt that (at least briefly) brought down yields also may have helped prop up bitcoin. But it’s also notable that the Securities and Exchange Commission issued its proposals for exemptions for crypto issuers, as the Clarity Act faces an uncertain future in Congress.

Follow the Money

As often happens when something appreciates, traders and investors pile in. As prices rose last week, about $2.4 billion flowed into bitcoin ETFs, marking one of the best sales weeks in months. That’s also notable as about $3.2 billion poured out of digital asset ETFs year to date through July, per data from Morningstar Direct. There are hints that institutional investors are once again buying, or at least have backed off from selling.

There are also indications that some of the big crypto ETF issuers are having success with programs that let digital asset owners move assets into their funds via in-kind creations, per data from Bloomberg:

• BlackRock, which reduced the minimum size of such transactions from $25 million to $1 million, has reported a total of about $5 billion in creations via that route for its $60 billion Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT).
• Moving assets to ETFs may help alleviate custody concerns, something that big crypto owners could have on their minds amid kidnappings and ransoms. Also, remember that recent $100 million Coldcard hack?

A Bit of Protection: It’s not lost on investors that the price of bitcoin is down 36% from its high of over $126,000 in October 2025. “The drawdown is still fresh on people’s minds, so I think they’re curious about when it’s going to fully recover,” Kaufman said. Calamos, which provides a series of bitcoin ETFs with downside protection of 80%, 90% or 100%, sees the price volatility as a selling point. “The headline for us is: ‘If you were in the protected products, you didn’t participate in all the drawdown, and now that sets you up well to participate in your recovery,’” Kaufman said.