Roundhill S&P Dividend Monarchs ETF (KNGS)

KNGS was an exchange-traded fund that, in its final form, tracked the S&P Dividend Monarchs Index. That index holds US companies that have raised their total dividend per share every year for at least 50 consecutive years. Its roughly 30 members were mostly mature blue-chip companies in consumer staples, industrials and utilities, such as AbbVie, 3M and Kimberly-Clark, and the fund was presented as the first US-listed ETF built on this index.

The KNGS ticker was first used for the Compound Kings ETF, launched on January 8, 2021 on the Cboe BZX Exchange by Upholdings, a Nashville startup. That fund was actively managed and aimed to hold around 30 so-called cash flow compounders in the United States and China, charging a 0.60 percent expense ratio.

The fund was later taken over by Roundhill Investments, a New York ETF sponsor, and repositioned in late 2023 as the Roundhill S&P Dividend Monarchs ETF, listed on NYSE Arca. Roundhill marketed it as a way to own companies with very long records of dividend growth, noting an index yield of about 3.5 percent at the time of the relaunch.

The fund never gathered large assets. On November 6, 2024 Roundhill announced that it would liquidate KNGS along with several other ETFs in its lineup. Shares stopped trading after the close on November 27, 2024, when the last close was about $28.70, and the remaining assets were distributed to shareholders in cash on November 29, 2024. Roundhill paid the costs of the liquidation.