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Displaying 51-60 out of 62 results for "Leveraged ETF".

Reserve your Clever ETF Ticker Before it's Too Late

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that descriptive and catchy tickers for Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) are getting harder and harder to come by these days. From the article:

But finding a catchy symbol can be tough these days. Many have already been taken: 1,350 symbols are in use on the NYSE Arca alone, the biggest U.S. market for exchange-traded products. That's up 108% over the past five years, says Ms. Morrison. In addition, fund firms have reserved 2,446 symbols for future...

Dealbreaker on the Hayes award and LCM VII CLO

Matt Levine at Dealbreaker posted last night on our work regarding the Hayes award and the LCM VII CLO. He interpreted some of the facts of the case differently, but we think he did touch upon the key issue: the proper disclosure of the decline in the market price of collateral on the closing date. We wanted to directly address a couple points he raised.

To be clear, at least by the closing date the CLO did track the daily mark-to-market value of the loans in the LCM VII portfolio using...

A Wipeout That Didn't Have to Happen

This weekend the New York Times' Gretchen Morgenson wrote an article about the recent FINRA award against Banc of America Securities for their LCM VII CLO. We have blogged about this case before, and have put together a research paper describing the underlying issue of warehousing assets in structured credit derivatives. We are very grateful to the New York Times and Gretchen Morgenson for giving this story the attention it deserves.

The fundamental problem with structured credit and many...

Did BoA's 2007 CLOs Defraud Investors?

We have posted a new paper today showing that on July 2007 Banc of America appears to have transferred at least $35 million of previous losses to unsuspecting investors in two of its CLO offerings - LCM VII and Bryn Mawr II. Investors ultimately lost nearly $150 million in October 2008 when these two CLOs backed by leveraged loans were liquidated.

Leveraged loans issued to below investment grade corporations were frequently extended by a syndicate of lenders intending to re-sell...

President and CIO of Direxion admits that leveraged ETFs are not appropriate for most investors

Today Seeking Alpha posted an interview with Dan O'Neill, President and CIO of Direxion, one of the first and best known issuers of leveraged ETFs. Readers familiar with our work on leveraged ETFs know that we feel these products are almost always unsuitable for retail investors.

Surprisingly enough, Mr. O'Neill agrees completely:

The leveraged indexed ETFs are used by very tactical investors, and so there we have bull and bear funds. They have daily betas, which means that essentially...

FINRA Regulatory Notice: Complex Products

FINRA recently released Regulatory Notice 12-03: Heightened Supervision of Complex Products, outlining their increased scrutiny of a wide variety of alternative investments including structured products, inverse or leveraged exchange traded funds, and asset-backed securities. Here at SLCG, we've done research on each of those subjects, and have a variety of ongoing projects that bear directly on the issues highlighted by the Notice.

The products identified include:

  • Asset-backed...

Futures-Based (Commodities) ETFs

Investors may think, when investing in Futures-Based Commodities exchange traded funds (ETFs), that they are gaining exposure to the underlying commodity. In this blog post, we discuss the ability of these ETFs to track the spot price of the underlying commodity.

In a previous blog post, we introduced the basics of Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). In this post, we are going to discuss a specific kind of ETF: Commodities Futures Based ETFs.

There are a large number of Exchange Traded Funds...

NY Times on the Hosier decision

The New York times has an article about the MAT and ASTA products sold by Citigroup that were the subject of a $54.1 million award in Denver last April. SLCG provided expert testimony and analysis for the claimants in this case, including assessing the MAT/ASTA products at issue, and we are excited that the Times has drawn attention to these highly risky investments.

The MAT and ASTA products were hedge funds that implemented a leveraged municipal bond arbitrage strategy. Essentially,...

Leveraged ETFs

Leveraged Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) are some of the most popular exchange-traded vehicles and (as a result) are liquid, widely available, and very likely to be on the radar screen of even casual investors.

In a previous blog post, we introduced the basics of ETFs. In this post, we are going to discuss a specific kind of ETF: Leveraged ETFs. This post is part of a two-part series. The next post will concern a related instrument called Inverse Leveraged ETFs.

A Leveraged ETF offers...

Inverse ETFs

Inverse exchange traded funds (ETFs) are, by most measures, just as popular and liquid as their leveraged counterparts. In this post we discuss the rebalancing and tracking behavior of these ETFs.

This is the second part of our two part series. Last time we discussed leveraged Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). In this post, we are going to discuss a related kind of ETF: Inverse ETFs.

An Inverse ETF offers investors a daily return that is opposite of the daily return of the index or asset...

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