UC Investments seeds $2.5B into new ETF as ProShares launches GENIUS Act-compliant fund

The University of California’s investment arm just wrote the biggest opening-day check in ETF history. UC Investments anchored the new State Street SPDR UC Investments 90/10 Endowment Strategy Index ETF (UCBG) with a $2.5 billion seed, making it the largest recorded institutional seeding for any US-listed exchange-traded fund. Meanwhile, ProShares quietly built a different kind of monster. Its GENIUS Money Market ETF (IQMM), designed specifically to comply with the GENIUS Act of 2025, racked up roughly $17 billion in first-day volume when it launched back in February. The average day-one asset size for ETFs has doubled over the past five years, and these two funds are Exhibit A for why. A university endowment strategy, now in ETF form The UCBG fund, which launched September 2-3, mirrors UC’s Blue and Gold Endowment Pool. The recipe is deceptively simple: 90% goes into the S&P 500, and 10% lands in short-duration, investment-grade corporate bonds. State Street Investment Management runs the fund, and UC Investments provided the anchor capital that instantly made UCBG one of the most well-capitalized ETFs at birth. ProShares built an ETF for stablecoin plumbing ProShares launched...