2009-08-21

A better ETF to short the Long Bond launched today

Until a few days ago, if one wanted to short the far end of the Treasury curve, the only choice was the UltraShort 20+ Year Treasury ProShares (TBT) ETF which is a leveraged ETF (and hence evil, for many reasons). If you want to know why leveraged ETF are dangerous, Google is your friend.

Here's a short description of TBT:
The investment seeks daily investment results, before fees and expenses, which correspond to twice the inverse of the daily performance of the Lehman Brothers 20+ Year U.S. Treasury index. The fund normally invests at least 80% of assets to investments that, in combination, have economic characteristics that are inverse to those of the index. It also typically invests in taking positions in financial instruments, including derivatives that should have similar daily return characteristics as twice the inverse of the index. The fund is non-diversified.
Index Universe Reports:
The ProShares Short 20+ Year Treasury (NYSEArca: TBF) is expected to charge an annual expense ratio of 0.95.

TBF seeks to provide 100% inverse exposure to the daily performance of its underlying Barclays Capital index.
Finally, another even more leveraged short long bond ETF I didn't know about, Direxion Daily 30 Yr Trs Bear 3X Shares (TMV):
The investment seeks daily investment results, before fees and expenses, of 300% of the inverse (or opposite) of the price performance of the NYSE Current 30-Year Treasury Index. The fund normally creates short positions by investing at least 80% of net assets in financial instruments that, in combination, provide leveraged and unleveraged exposure to the target index, and the remainder in money market instruments. It is nondiversified.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's hard to follow a blog where the first paragraph makes no grammatical sense.

pej said...

Cheers Anonymous mate. It's fixed now.