FAS Looks Pretty Good, If You Just Look At It

and don't think about the underlying sector or about the imminent disclosure of bank "stress test" results.

FAS is the ticker symbol for the ETF that tries to replicate 300% of the daily performance of the Russell 1000 Financial Services Index. It is a relatively new ETF (launched last November, in the middle of the crash, as you can see on the chart), but it is increasingly popular particularly since the March low, with the financial sector perceived to have hit the bottom for some time.

I'm in this stock for several weeks, small position, bought in stages. My average is somewhere mid $6. They say double and triple ETF, long or inverse, are just for day trading and not for investment, but I somehow ended up with "investment".

These stocks, double or triple, swings wildly and are decidedly not for the faint of heart. They act more like options, except they don't expire.

I didn't bother to even check the chart when I first bought it in mid March as a partial hedge against FAZ, which is the inverse of FAS (so FAZ is triple short).

Now that FAZ is a miniscule hedge against FAS, I finally bothered to check the chart. And I'm happy with what I see. Too bad the government has to publish the stress test results today (5:00pm EST, I heard).