squark62

Everybody Hates Leveraged ETFs

whiners....whiners...w... a happy medium would be to allow individuals with a certain amount of capital in their accounts to buy leveraged ETFs perhaps even with a required limit down lock on the account. or just require a certain margin ratio between losses & cash in the account. you don't have to be a professional financial planner to know how to use these ETFs. i know many advisers who don't have a clue. many of them don't have a clue about trading options. should options be banned too???

Does Anyone Else Miss Stock Picking?

answer to your question - no!

Leveraged ETFs: Making Volatility More Volatile?

i concur with AndrewBaker, Luck-o-the-Irish and Marc Gerstein on just about everything they said here. leveraged ETFs shouldn't be traded like normal equities or typical sector or index ETFs. leveraged ETFs are "tools", just like other derivatives markets, to mitigate or exploit volatility. as such, don't use them if you don't know how to handle them. because people don't know how to handle them DOES NOT, a priori, make them bad instruments.

Testing a Leveraged ETF Strategy

yet another interesting tool. and i agree, all the huff and puff over leveraged ETFs is based on lack of knowledge in my opinion. just remember backtesting is essential for developing a sound model but not a guarantee of future results. this applies to any equity model.

Ultra ETF Reality Check

jeff, i agree with you that chart history of some of the leveraged etfs betray their advertised 'performance' - i would include DUG in your list. however, it would be a mistake to conclude these instruments are useless by themselves. they can be good ingredients for building a simple hedge when paired together with their respective inverse etfs. using some classical mathematics, it's possible to weight each pair to construct a delta neutral hedge. this can be very useful for the individual investor how doesn't trade options or swaps. the etf does it for you. now i will say the better the etf tracks it's index, the better the hedging performance will be. look at SDS & SSO as a pair. very efficient tracking but still very useful for hedging against sudden down turns in the market.

Understanding Levered ETFs and Geometric Returns

like Luck-of-the-Irish, i too have benefited from quantitatively pairing short and long etfs to form a delta neutral hedge and profit during sudden down-turns in the market. does hamiltonian ring a bell?

Triple-Levered ETFs: Bomb Shelters, or Bomb-Making Kits?

hi paul,

i see this post has bee out for a minute but i'll comment any way. for an trader who doesn't do options, i think leveraged etfs in this type of market are a great way to hedge and/or make money by doing a delta neutral arbitrage. i've made out fairly well doing over the last 6 weeks with arbitrage scheme i developed by pitting sector based long & short etfs against each other. like anything else, it requires discipline and patience but it has worked for me - i don't trade options. i primarily use 2X etfs that are tightly coupled to each others relative changes. my favorite pairs are SKF-UYG and QID-QLD. plus, these etfs pay dividends and cap gains while you trade them.