Thursday, April 9, 2009

Direxion 3x Financial ETFs Go Certifiably Crazy (FAS; FAZ etc.)

From Bespoke:
The volume on Direxionshares' 3x leveraged bull and bear financial ETFs shows that traders love the product. However, the ETFs have returned some crazy numbers this year. The 3x ETFs provide 3 times the daily change of the underlying index, and year to date, the financial index that FAS (long) and FAZ (short) track is down 14%. However, the 3x long ETF (FAS) is down 68% year to date, but the 3x short ETF (FAZ) is down 65%! And since the lows on March 9th, these things have returned some whopping numbers. FAS is up 195%, while FAZ is down $102.78 (or 87%)....MORE
One approach is to short both of them, in effect writing an option. Ooops, have I said too much?