From Common Asset Demand to Intermediary Choice: A Focused Reanalysis of Attention Complementarity across U.S. Spot Bitcoin ETFs

The launch of U.S. spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds created an unusual allocation problem: ten intermediaries offered nearly the same underlying exposure, yet their flows diverged sharply. This article is a focused reanalysis of the fund-flow and Reddit panel introduced by Shi et al. (2026). It does not present the dataset, text measures, BrandScore, or the baseline sentiment-by-visibility association as new. Instead, it asks what the established association reveals about the division between category demand and intermediary choice. The contribution consists of three interpretive emphases applied to estimates already reported by Shi et al. (2026): within-date differences across funds as evidence about allocation, asymmetry across the conditional flow distribution, and variation across market states. The pairwise flow-sensitivity formulation makes the allocation interpretation explicit. In the previously reported two-way fixed-effects model, common daily shocks are absorbed and the sentiment-by-visibility coefficient is identified from differences in issuer visibility among funds facing the same Bitcoin news. The coefficient is positive, the direct visibility effect changes sign between large-redemption and large-creation states, and the interaction appears less consistently during stressed markets. The Driscoll–Kraay and issuer-bootstrap checks apply to the baseline coefficient (2.930), not the two-way fixed-effects coefficient (3.802), for which those checks were not conducted. The evidence is thus an associative allocation regularity, not a causal social-media effect: differences in issuer visibility are consistent with different flows across financial wrappers conditional on common category sentiment.