Roundhill Investments is closing its ETF Pro Sports, Media and Apparel (NYSE: MVP) just over a year after its launch, as the equity fund failed to gain traction with investors. The company announced that the sports fund would be liquidated on April 8, along with another ETF focused on streaming services.

“Effectively, the funds in both cases have failed to gather significant assets under management and, at current levels, are loss-making for the business,” Roundhill co-founder Will Hershey said during an interview. a phonecall. “This, combined with current market conditions, has led us to decide to close them, in conjunction with our board of directors.”

MVP jumped into the highly competitive ETF game in March 2021, quickly amassing $9 million in assets in its first three weeks of operation, according to ETF.com’s net fund flow data. However, the prolonged bear market in sports stocks affected performance and with it investor interest. The sports ETF lost nearly 19% of its stock value last year and it closes with less than $4 million in assets, which will be returned to investors. A rule of thumb in the fund industry is that an ETF must have $50 million in assets to be viable.

Roundhill’s sports betting ETF, known by its symbol BETZ, is unaffected by the news.

“It will allow us to focus on our existing product suite that remains, like BETZ – and that’s March Madness,” Hershey said. BETZ has $212 million in assets, though it has actually performed worse – down 34% – than the broader sports fund over the past year as Wall Street shunned growth stocks and sports betting on valuations and general market turbulence.

The MVP fund had higher hopes, obviously. In an investor presentation in December, the fund touted its ability to tap into sports teams and related businesses as “scarce, high-quality assets that have a solid track record of appreciating in value.” The global sports market is expected to reach $626 billion by 2023, up from $471 billion in 2018, according to the pitch deck. The fund’s main holdings are Formula 1, the Atlanta Braves, German soccer club Borussia Dortmund and MSG Sports.

the Sportico The JohnWallStreet Sports stock index, which focuses on stocks traded in the United States, has fallen 19% in the past 52 weeks, even after experiencing a month-long rebound in February.