Little-known ETF is up over 600% amid U.S.-Iran war, a better trade than oil or energy stocks

 As geopolitical tensions ripple through global energy markets and a deal to end the U.S.-Iran war remains elusive, oil prices

 have soared, but there’s an even better trade on energy volatility that investors have flocked to: the cost of moving crude.

The Breakwave Tanker Shipping ETF (BWET), a little-known exchange-traded fund tied to crude oil tanker freight rates, has surged more than 600% year-to-date as war and disruption in key maritime corridors drive shipping rates sharply higher.

“I started getting a lot of questions about this ETF, like, what is up with it? What kind of performance is this?” Cinthia Murphy, VettaFi director of research, said on this week’s CNBC’s “ETF Edge.”

BWET is a $30 million portfolio that launched in May 2023, in an ETF market that has over $13 trillion in assets.

Murphy explained the scale of the move has forced the market to rethink where the real leverage in energy resides. Rather than focusing only on oil prices, which have been extremely volatile this year, investors may be looking toward infrastructure that the world relies on to move energy commodities.

“It really is a story about shipping costs,” Murphy said. “Anytime you have some big disruption to shipping ... freight futures skyrocket and there’s one ETF that captures pretty much that performance better than anybody else.”

Murphy said the ongoing tensions in the Strait of Hormuz have proven to hold the ability to send freight futures higher quickly while markets reprice the risk of moving commodities through the region, and not only oil. For example, the Baltic Exchange Dry Index is up over 6% for the past week and 41% since the beginning of the year.

But, “it’s really moving that oil around that has been a big story,” said Paul Baiocchi, head of fund sales & strategy at SS&C Technologies.

Oil prices have risen sharply this year, with the U.S. Oil Fund (USO) up close to 90% as of Friday, and the SPDR State Street Energy Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLE) up over 23% as energy stocks have posted strong gains. But those moves seem modest compared with the spike in freight futures, and the surge in BWET began even before the outbreak of war in the Middle East, with BWET up over 1,000% in the past year.

“Of course, oil prices have been dramatically higher and the energy sector in general, energy equities, every part of the energy story this year has been a big blockbuster year,” Murphy said. But she added, “BWET is really standing [out].”

Wall Street equity research teams are also placing more attention on surging tanker stocks.

At the same time, Baiocchi said the rally ties into a broader theme that is being played out throughout global markets: underinvestment in energy infrastructure and the growing need to secure more resilient supply chains.

″[We talked] about this idea that even before the Iran conflict, a lot of these global commodities markets were fraught, and if nothing else, this conflict has exacerbated a lot of the challenges,” Baiocchi said.

That includes not just oil transport, but the broader buildout of energy systems. “Countries and companies around the world will be scrambling to find more stable sources of energy,” he said.

Even as BWET draws outsized attention, ETF experts caution that freight rates are inherently volatile and driven by short-term shocks. But as geopolitical conflict continues to reshape global trade, more investors are looking beyond commodity prices and to the system that determines how commodities move to market for investing profits.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/25/crude-oil-freight-tanker-strait-hormuz-iran-war-energy-stocks.html

'Unite the Right' Charlottesville Rally to Smear the Right Underwritten by the Left

 An explosive new indictment was handed down against the Southern Poverty Law Center this week, accusing the storied civil rights organization of 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and money laundering.

The Department of Justice is alleging that between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled over $3 million from donors to leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, Unite the Right, and the Nazi Party, among other extremist organizations.

While telling donors that the money was being used to “dismantle” the violent extremist groups, “that money was then used for the benefit of the individuals as well as the violent extremist groups,” the indictment alleges.

FBI@FBI

NEWS RELEASE: Federal Grand Jury Charges Southern Poverty Law Center for Wire Fraud, False Statements, and Conspiracy to Commit Money Laundering Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals who were associated with

10:03 AM · Apr 22, 2026 · 43K Views

---

145 Replies · 736 Reposts · 2.15K Likes

Paying millions of dollars to Nazis and Klansmen would be bad enough. But the indictment alleges that the SPLC went beyond that, actually underwriting the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, providing material support and supervision to what the Left turned into the symbol of Right-wing hate.

One of the people the SPLC was working with was a leading planner of the rally and attended the event “at the direction of the SPLC.” He also “made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.”

For his pains, he was paid $270,000.

From the indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center

This is absolutely wild stuff.

The Southern Poverty Law Center allegedly supervised the writing of racist posts and coordinated transportation to a White Supremacist rally, literally paying one of the organizers hundreds of thousands of dollars to ensure turnout was good.

The same organization compiling lists of conservatives who should be debanked and censored, that put Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA on a list alongside the KKK, was literally funding the KKK, secretly trying its hardest to grow the racist threat it was pretending was ubiquitous.

The same organization compiling lists of conservatives who should be debanked and censored was secretly trying its hardest to grow the racist threat it was pretending was ubiquitous.

The Unite the Right rally was the symbol to the Left of the rampant White Supremacy introduced by Donald Trump into the American mainstream. President Trump at the time condemned the neo-Nazis, but an edited version of his remarks was played ad infinitum on cable news—then repeated daily by the Democrats. The edit made it sound like Trump said that there were “very fine people on both sides” in reference to the neo-Nazis. I, like many other Americans, believed the hoax for years. And thanks to the mainstream media and the Democrats’ insistence on repeating it whenever they can, many still believe it.

The “fine people on both sides” was the reason Joe Biden gave for running for office in 2020. And as recently as November 2024, President Obama was spreading it while stumping for Kamala Harris.

Shaun Maguire@shaunmmaguire

Barack Obama is using the “very fine people” hoax in an attempt to appeal to Jewish Voters Obama is smart and this is so thoroughly debunked that the only reasonable conclusion is that he’s deliberately lying

4:49 PM · Nov 3, 2024 · 28.1M Views

---

7.19K Replies · 7.79K Reposts · 41.1K Likes

It turns out, not only was the tape of Trump a hoax. The event itself was underwritten by a Leftist organization trying to prove it still had a reason to exist. Someone was paid $270,000 by a Leftist organization to make sure people turned up.

Obviously, there were probably real believers there, too. I’m not saying there wasn’t a single racist at Unite the Right or that there isn’t a single White Supremacist on the Right.

What I am saying is that the SPLC—a storied, legacy, Leftist organization—allegedly felt the need to pay people hundreds of thousands and in some cases a million dollars to ensure that it had enough material to supply to donors to prove that violent extremism on the Right was flourishing and they were still necessary.

The demand for White Supremacy had so outstripped the supply that the SPLC was literally funding racism, supervising racist posts, coordinating racist turnout.

Famously, the men marching at the Unite the Right rally did so wielding tiki torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us.” This became the symbol the Left reached for as proof of the wild, rampant antisemitism of the Right. Turns out, this “Right wing antisemitism” was being helped along by the Left—to the tune of millions of dollars.

One wonders if the SPLC organizer is in that infamous picture.

There’s a truth about America that our elites are loathe to admit, and it’s that America is the most tolerant nation on the planet—probably in human history. Americans simply do not hate each other, despite the immense amount of effort to try to make us.

The SPLC indictment is further proof of that. We don’t need organizations to combat hate. We’re really good at doing it on our own.

Batya Ungar-Sargon American Jew. Host of "Batya!" on @NewsNation, 7PM Saturday, 11AM Sunday. Author of Bad News, Second Class, and The Jews & the Left.
https://www.batya-us.com/p/for-years-the-left-used-the-unite

Qatar condemns drone attack on Kuwait border, urges Iraq action

 

Qatar condemned a drone attack on two Kuwaiti northern border posts launched from Iraq, calling it a violation of Kuwait’s sovereignty and a threat to regional stability.

In a statement on Saturday, the foreign ministry said Iraq must take responsibility to prevent such attacks from happening again.

Qatar also voiced full solidarity with Kuwait and backed measures to protect its security.

https://www.iranintl.com/en/liveblog/202604194357