Skip to main content

Investors bullied out of leveraged ETFs at exactly the wrong time

Saturday's Wall Street Journal has an article titled "Investors Pull $2.1 Billion out of Leveraged ETFs." What's going on?

The article says assets in ETFs increased by $20.1 billion in August but declined in only two asset classes: leveraged and inverse ETFs.

The article goes on to discuss how the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority have issued warnings that leveraged ETFs may not be suitable for all investors. These warnings have been especially targeted at retail investors.

The SEC and FINRA, however, aren't the only ones pointing fingers at leveraged ETFs. Let's see how many ambulance chasers have initiated class action lawsuits against the ProShares company:
This list is the result of a quick search on Google and doesn't include any litigation against the folks who bring you the Direxion 3X leveraged ETFs. There are probably more lawsuits in the works out there.

With lawyers and government agencies ganging up on the providers of leveraged ETFs it's no wonder that many investors are pulling back from using these funds.

Unfortunately, this has been exactly the wrong time. As we discussed in earlier posts (here, here and here), 2X leveraged ETFs work quite well in strongly trending markets. Since the March lows, we have indeed had strongly trending markets in the bullish direction and the benefits have accrued to almost every sector. This scenario is the best time to be in leveraged long ETFs yet the frenzy around the warnings and lawsuits has driven many investors away from these vehicles.

As we have written before (here and here), taking a few simple precautions and riding a trend can lead to superior results using the 2X leveraged ETFs. It is unfortunate that "educating investors" doesn't extend beyond scare tactics.

Dislosure: long ROM and USD
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Brazil - in a bubble or on a roll?

A couple of years ago, no one recognized the real estate bubble even though it was under everyone's nose. Now, analysts and bloggers are seeing bubbles everywhere they look. One of them, they say is in Brazil whose Bovespa stock market index has doubled in the last 12 months. Does the bubble accusation hold water? I don't think so and here are 7 reasons why Brazil is by no means a bubble economy: Exports have held up over the past year thanks to demand from China for Brazil's soya exports and iron ore. This was helped by the the Brazilian government's drive to improve trade links with Asia and Africa. Export diversification, spurred by a more active trade policy and increased focus on "south-south" trade under current president Lula, helped mitigate the decline in demand from OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries A "sensible" economic framework has been in place since the 1990's. This has included inflation ...
4 comments
Read more

Trade Radar gets another update

Some of our data sources changed again and it impacted our ability to load fundamental/financial data. In response, we are rolling out a new version of the software: 7.1.24 The data sourcing issues are fixed and some dead links in the Chart menu were removed. So whether you are a registered user or someone engaged in the free trial, head over to our update page and download the latest version. The update page is here:   https://tradingstockalerts.com/software/downloadpatch Contact us if you have questions or identify any new issues.
Post a Comment
Read more

Time to be conservative with your 401K

Most of the posts I and other financial bloggers write are typically focused on individual stocks or ETFs and managing active portfolios. For those folks who are more conservative investors, those whose main investment vehicle is a 401K, for example, the techniques for portfolio management might be a little different. The news of stock markets falling and pundits predicting recession is disconcerting to professional investors as well as to those of us who are watching our balances in an IRA or 401K sag. What approach should the average 401K investor take? Let's assume that the investor is contributing on a regular basis to one of these retirement accounts. There are two questions that the investor needs to ask: 1. Should I stop putting the regular contribution into stocks? My feeling is that investors making regular contributions are being handed a present by the markets. Every week the market goes down, these investors are lowering their average cost. When markets reco...
7 comments
Read more