By Jack Pitcher
When stocks started tanking last week, investors in the biggest leveraged exchange-traded funds doubled down. They just made a fortune on paper.
Investors plowed a net $3.4 billion into the ProShares UltraPro QQQ ETF from Thursday to Tuesday, according to FactSet, including a record high $1.8 billion on Monday alone. The fund seeks to triple the daily performance of the Nasdaq-100 index, up or down.
As the Nasdaq posted one of its biggest days in history Wednesday, the triple-leveraged fund rose 35%.
Another popular leveraged fund, the Direxion Daily Semiconductor Bull 3x Shares, reported $2.3 billion of inflows from Thursday through Tuesday. It soared 56% Wednesday.
Because leveraged ETFs only try to amplify the return of their underlying assets on a single day basis, performance can differ substantially from the underlying assets over a longer period of time. Read more about leveraged funds here.
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April 09, 2025 16:12 ET (20:12 GMT)
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