Monday, May 18, 2009

Unleveraged short ETF Does Not Perform, Either

SEF is Proshare Short Financials, an unleveraged short ETF. Having examined the performance of leveraged (2x, 3x) short and long ETFs, I thought, maybe an unleveraged short ETF would be the way to go when the market turns south again, because it was the leverage that exercebated the volatility decay.

Wrong again. Take a look at the chart below. It compares SEF and XLF (unleveraged Financial Sector SPDR ETF) for the same 6 months. The green line is at 0% change. XLF is back to the same level, an SEF is down almost 40%. If I connect the points where two lines intersect (the black line on the chart), the symmetry does exist on the either side of this declining line.


From the looks of it, even if XLF were to correct 50% from here, SEF would only go up to about November 08 level, at best.

No comments:

Post a Comment