Why shouldn t you hold leveraged ETFs?
Bottom Line on Leveraged ETFs
Nearly all leveraged ETFs come with a prominent warning in their prospectus: they are not designed for long-term holding. The combination of leverage, market volatility, and an unfavorable sequence of returns can lead to disastrous outcomes.
Leveraged ETFs amplify daily returns and can help traders generate outsized returns and hedge against potential losses. A leveraged ETF's amplified daily returns can trigger steep losses in short periods of time, and a leveraged ETF can lose most or all of its value.
Market risk
The single biggest risk in ETFs is market risk. Like a mutual fund or a closed-end fund, ETFs are only an investment vehicle—a wrapper for their underlying investment. So if you buy an S&P 500 ETF and the S&P 500 goes down 50%, nothing about how cheap, tax efficient, or transparent an ETF is will help you.
Derivatives Risk: As SPXL uses derivatives to gain exposure to the index, it is subject to unique risks associated with their use such as imperfect correlations with the underlying index, counterparty risk, higher volatility, liquidity, and valuation, among others.
Since they maintain a fixed level of leverage, 3x ETFs eventually face complete collapse if the underlying index declines more than 33% on a single day. Even if none of these potential disasters occur, 3x ETFs have high fees that add up to significant losses in the long run.
This longer-term underperformance results from ill-timed rebalancing and the geometric nature of returns compounding. The author uses the concept of a growth-optimized portfolio to show that highly levered ETFs (3x and inverse ETFs) are likely to converge to zero over longer time horizons.
Although you can invest in the TQQQ in the long-term, market analysts advise against it, stating that the TQQQ is a highly volatile leveraged ETF. To learn more about ETF trading through CFDs, visit our page here.
For professional investors, leveraged ETFs are useful in statistical arbitrage, short-term tactical strategies, and for use as short-term hedges without the need to roll futures. For individual investors, leveraged ETFs are alluring because of the potential for higher returns.
Most leveraged and inverse ETFs reset each day, which means they are designed to achieve their stated objective on a daily basis. With the effects of compounding, over longer timeframes the results can differ significantly from their objective.
What is the most famous leveraged ETF?
For these traders, there are more than 170 leveraged funds in the space targeting different asset classes. ProShares UltraPro QQQ is the most popular and liquid ETF in the leveraged space, with AUM of $21.9 billion and an average daily volume of 67.3 million shares a day.
The TQQQ is a 3x leveraged ETF based on the QQQ (a Nasdaq-100 Index ETF). Because it is leveraged, it uses derivatives contracts to amplify its returns based on how the index performs. As such, it does not actually hold the shares of any companies.
As with traditional investment funds, ETFs have to place their underlying investments with a custodian. The fund provider cannot be both the fund manager, and the "guardian" of the assets. So if an ETF provider goes bankrupt, your investments are not gone cause they will still be kept by the custodian.
This ETF follows the Nasdaq 100, which is heavily weighted toward technology and telecommunications stocks. The SQQQ is meant to be held intraday and is not a long-term investment, where expenses and decay will quickly eat into returns. It is not appropriate as a long-term holding, even among bearish investors.
Bottom Line on Leveraged ETFs
Leveraged ETFs decay due to the compounding effect of daily returns, volatility of the market and the cost of leverage. The volatility drag of leveraged ETFs means that losses in the ETF can be magnified over time and they are not suitable for long-term investments.
The Direxion Daily Junior Gold Miners Index Bull 3x Shares (JNUG) and the Direxion Daily Junior Gold Miners Index Bear 3x Shares (JDST) are the two most volatile exchange-traded funds of all. Each has a one-year volatility reading of about 170.
"Leveraged and inverse funds generally aren't meant to be held for longer than a day, and some types of leveraged and inverse ETFs tend to lose the majority of their value over time," Doak explained.
In other words, you could potentially be liable for more than you invested because you bought the position on leverage. But can a leveraged ETF go negative? No. If you own a leveraged ETF you can't lose more than your initial investment amount.
Vanguard S&P 500 ETF
Billionaires don't just buy individual stocks. ETFs can have excellent wealth-building potential over time, as well. Billionaire investors like Warren Buffett and others are often known for their stock-picking abilities, and for good reason.
BMO has launched the first quadruple leveraged ETN fund that tracks the S&P 500. The fund will trade under the ticker symbol "XXXX" and seeks to generate four time the S&P 500's return on a daily basis. The launch come as bullishness rise among investors and Wall Street predicts more gains to come in 2024.
Can Tqqq fail?
The triple leverage can significantly magnify losses, making TQQQ a high-risk, high-reward option. The compounding of daily returns can also lead to tracking error, causing its performance to deviate from three times the index's returns over time.
The two major risks associated with leveraged ETFs are decay and high volatility. High volatility translates to high risk. Decay emanates from holding the ETFs for long periods.
Warning. As we mentioned, there are large risks trying to use TQQQ to profit from market moves. There is a constant downward price bias and the risk of loss grows the longer one holds the fund. This is especially true with higher interest rates as the carrying cost to leverage the fund 3X go up with higher rates.
Average Return
In the past year, QQQ returned a total of 30.38%, which is higher than VOO's 27.99% return. Over the past 10 years, QQQ has had annualized average returns of 18.30% , compared to 12.63% for VOO. These numbers are adjusted for stock splits and include dividends.
QQQ appears to be the single best long-term investment option for investors seeking total returns due to its ability to expose holders to top U.S. companies on an ongoing basis. The Nasdaq 100 has consistently outperformed the S&P 500 in terms of total returns, making it a favorable choice for long-term investors.
