Your Guide to 3x Leveraged Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) (2024)

FAQs

What are 3X leveraged ETFs? ›

Leveraged 3X ETFs are funds that track a wide variety of asset classes, such as stocks, bonds and commodity futures, and apply leverage in order to gain three times the daily or monthly return of the respective underlying index. Such ETFs come in the long and short varieties.

Funds that offer 3x leverage are particularly risky because they require higher leverage to achieve their returns.

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.

We found that leveraged ETFs in three out of the four categories provide sufficient returns over the long run to justify their costs and risks, and despite persistent tracking-error divergence.

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 fund seeks to deliver three times the return of the daily performance of the NASDAQ-100 Index, charging investors 0.88% in annual fees.

Several papers have established that investors who hold these investments for periods longer than a day expose themselves to substantial risk as the holding period returns will deviate from the returns to a leveraged or inverse investment in the index.

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.

Using leverage can result in much higher downside risk, sometimes resulting in losses greater than your initial capital investment. On top of that, brokers and contract traders often charge fees, premiums, and margin rates and require you to maintain a margin account with a specific balance.

Because they rebalance daily, leveraged ETFs usually never lose all of their value. They can, however, fall toward zero over time. If a leveraged ETF approaches zero, its manager typically liquidates its assets and pays out all remaining holders in cash.

Can you lose money on leveraged ETF? ›

While a traditional ETF typically tracks the securities in its underlying index on a one-to-one basis, a LETF may aim for a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio. Leverage is a double-edged sword since it can lead to significant gains, but can also lead to significant losses.

For most standard, unleveraged ETFs that track an index, the maximum you can theoretically lose is the amount you invested, driving your investment value to zero. However, it's rare for broad-market ETFs to go to zero unless the entire market or sector it tracks collapses entirely.

The objective of the ETP Securities is to provide 5 times the value of the daily performance of the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust Exchange Traded Fund, net of fees and expenses.

Leveraged ETFs use derivatives to multiply returns on an index by ratios like 2:1 or 3:1. Inverse-leveraged ETFs track an index in reverse. Single-stock leveraged ETFs use derivatives to track a single stock instead of an index or asset class.

1. Market risk. The single biggest risk in ETFs is market risk.

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.

Investment Policy

The Fund seeks daily investment results, before fees and expenses, of 300% of the performance of the S&P 500 Index. The Fund seeks daily leveraged investment results and does not seek to achieve its stated investment objective over a period of time greater than one day.