The Dog Days of Summer: The New DOG ETF Allows You to Short the Entire DJIA (DOG)

The number of new ETFs reaching the market has been steadily increasing in recent months, leading some people, including Jim Cramer, to remark that there are too many ETFs these days. There are close to 8,000 mutual funds in the United States and the worldwide figure exceeds 55,000. Once you compare this against the paltry 200 ETFs on the market, it makes you wonder why anyone would think there are too many ETFs.

I agree that some of these new ETFs track "hot" sectors or have a very narrow definition, but I certainly welcome the opportunity to buy gold or silver through the streetTRACKS Gold (GLD) ETF or the iShares Silver Trust (SLV) ETF instead of having to buy the physical asset or a mining company. But I digress.

I started writing this column to mention a few new ETFs that have just entered the market and the rather amusing ticker symbol that one of them trades under. You guessed it right. It is DOG and it is the ticker symbol for a new ETF called Short Dow30 ProShares (DOG) that started trading on June 21, 2006. This ETF allows you to short the entire Dow Jones Industrial Average and you would be up 2% if the Dow Jones were to go down 2%.

The three other siblings of DOG that will allow you to short the Nasdaq, the S&P500 and the S&P MidCap 400 Index are listed below,

* Short QQQ ProShares Inverse of the Nasdaq -100 Index (PSQ)
* Short S&P500 ProShares Inverse of the S&P500 Index (SH)
* Short MidCap400 ProShares Inverse of the S&P MidCap 400 Index (MYY)

DOG 1-month chart:

Comments

[Daniel Winter:]

On top of that, the 2x inverse ETFs from Proshares are trading since yesterday: QID, SDS, DXD, MZZ. Proshares website has more details.

2006 Jul 14 03:26 AM

[Asif Suria:]

Thanks for mentioning those Daniel. Here is the press release from the ProShares website that lists all 12 ETFs including the short ETFs, the maginified short ETFs (UltraShort) and the magnified long ETFs (Ultra).

www.proshares.com/home...

2006 Jul 16 03:09 AM