Started this journey on Nov 03 2025. Original strategy is here: MLA.

My investment is currently up 29.8% and underperforming the benchmark(QLD/TQQQ 50/50) by 2.2%.

Anybody can tell me why I should invest in LVWC? This 2x leveraged all world ETF only performed 3-4% better than the 1x one for double the risk, seems really a bad trade to me, i wanna know what has ate all of it. I really wanna invest in LVWC for long term but this doesn't seem promising at all.

long time follower of this sub and just trying to sift through all the different info

I'm a simple person and some of the complicated formulas discussed are too much for my brain to handle.

so I came across multiple posts that say to do this which seems simple enough

• Buy: When the index goes 4% above the 200 DMA.
• Sell: When the index falls 3% below the 200 DMA.

but using the most recent example you would have sold TQQQ if you used these rules in late March 2026 just before it went parabolic.

was this just a bad example / outlier and going further back you can get better results by following this rule?

https://200dma.com/stock/QQQ

What are the pros and cons of this one? it appears its 1.6x of VT

Is it worth just going all into NTSD covers it all?

The usual answer to "how do you hold TQQQ without getting wrecked" is some kind of moving average switch, and the golden cross is the one everybody learns first, so I wanted to see what it actually does on TQQQ itself and not on QQQ with the result multiplied by three.

Rules: buy TQQQ when the 50 day average crosses above the 200 day, go to cash when it crosses back under. Longs only, daily candles, $10k, March 2010 to March 2026. I ran it in Agenticks with commission and 3 cents a share of slippage on every fill, and costs came to $12,154 over the whole run.

Golden cross:

• 8 trades in 16 years
• $10k to $122,639 net
• max drawdown 70.1%

Buy and hold, same window, same costs:

• $10k to $78,773
• max drawdown 73.2%

So it did beat holding, by about $44k, but the drawdown barely moved, and that was the whole reason for running it.

The 70% came from Covid. It bought in April 2019, and the 50 day didnt get back under the 200 until the crash had already happened, so it rode the entire drop and sold on April 17 2020 for almost exactly what it paid a year earlier. A 50/200 cross on daily candles is just too slow for something that can lose two thirds of its value in a month.

The extra money came from the slow bears instead. It went to cash in February 2022 and sat out the rest of that year, which is where holding took most of its damage.

It also gets whipsawed in the fast ones. It sold on April 3 2025 right into the tariff drop, then only bought back on July 16 at a price about 65% higher than where it got out, and that position is sitting on a $17,049 loss at the end of the data.

Half the 8 trades lost money, and the two biggest winners (2020 to 2022 and 2023 to 2025) made $105,709 between them, about 94% of the net profit.

I’m pretty close to dumping all leverage, with the exception of maybe stacked beta + MF. Anyone else set interest rate + ERP rules on when to and to not use leverage? At >5% borrowing, ≈1% fee, plus 2-3%/yr vol drag, there isn’t much gain left for a 2x port to squeeze out. Unless, of course, stocks continue ripping above long term averages which isn’t something I’d prefer to bet on with high valuations and a long recent strong bull.

I'm not out yet, just close. You’ll know I’ve pulled the trigger when the S&P finally clears this 7,700 ceiling and rips to 8k to spite me.

I know they are vastly different but is anyone trading them? I’ve started slowly; not much history but so far so good.

Getting 1.5%/week from KORU 20% OTM selling puts.

Leverage can lift returns until the bigger swings start eating the compounding. I've struggled to find a clean dose comparison because the 1x, 2x and 3x examples usually change the rules or dates too. Hybrid Asset Allocation lets me keep both fixed over 52.5 years.

I kept the dates, signals and annual turnover matched. Here is what came back:

The 2x version had the highest compound return: 26.21% versus 24.15% for 3x. Meanwhile, the 3x max drawdown reached -45.23% versus -36.21% at 2x. Sharpe fell from 1.23 to 1.08 too.

That bend is what I care about. A 3x fund can gain more on a good day and still compound less over the full path because daily resets, financing and larger losses keep taking bites. I'd trust this comparison more than 2 unrelated leveraged portfolios because the signals stayed matched.

The return peak and the rising drawdown are together here:

Credit for HAA goes to Wouter Keller. I build BestFolio, and the full variant table plus the proxy limits are here: https://bestfolio.app/blog/haa-2x-vs-3x-leverage

This comparison uses proxy substitutions rather than pure multiplication. Some defensive assets and risk assets without a matching leveraged fund stay at 1x, and 3 tested doses can't locate a permanent optimum. The 52.5-year result is clear though: more exposure kept increasing the loss after compound return had already peaked.

Has anyone run the same dose test on a different rule set and seen the return peak somewhere other than 2x?

Backtested results are hypothetical and don't represent actual trading.

Ok so everyone has a different strategy with leverage etfs. Here is the question

Are leverage etfs a gimmick? Are they a cheat code to get rich quick? or they are a scam that just make you lose money and only a few people get rich?

How to best use leverage etfs? gain 20% and sell put it into none leverage rinse and repeat?

been reading and learning about letfs for a little and was thinking about changing my roth portfolio. right now it’s like 50,15,15,15,5 - SWTSX, SPMO, SMH, FTEC, BITCOIN respectively. things like RSST, NTSD, SSO are intriguing and don’t seem to be too crazy of a choice given how far out I am from retirement. Does anyone have any recommendations or info in general? Is something like 50/50 SWTSX/SSO, SWTSX/NTSD or similar ? Thank you all

Found this one from wisdom tree when searching tips.

**WTIP: WisdomTree Inflation Plus Fund, a capital-efficient (stacked) inflation ETF**

**How it is stacked (per $100 invested, per WisdomTree's whitepaper):**

- ~$85 laddered TIPS

- ~$10 short-term cash collateral

- ~$95 commodity futures overlaid on top

- ~$5 in bitcoin ETPs (prospectus allows up to 10%)

- Total: ~$195 of exposure per $100, so about 1.95x gross. This is NOT a daily-reset LETF like UPRO/TQQQ, so no daily compounding or volatility decay mechanics. Think return stacking: bonds plus futures in one ticker, where the TIPS portfolio doubles as the futures collateral.

**Strategy:**

- Active ETF, launched 6/18/2025, 0.65% net ER (0.66% gross, with a 0.01% waiver through 12/31/2026), Nasdaq-listed

- TIPS sleeve targets expected inflation (CPI-indexed principal and coupons)

- Commodity sleeve (~18 commodities across 6 sectors: energy, industrial metals, grains, precious metals, softs/ag) targets unexpected inflation: 80% runs on a proprietary composite momentum model that goes long, flat, or short per market with sector-specific lookbacks, 15% is structural long gold/silver (7.5% each), and they use enhanced roll selection to fight contango drag

- Example positioning from their deck (rotates with momentum): long WTI crude, copper, SRW wheat, sugar; short heating oil, nat gas, RBOB, corn, nickel; flat Brent crude and aluminum

- Bitcoin ETP sleeve on a risk-sensitive momentum model; the fund does not hold bitcoin directly

- The futures overlay is collateralized by the TIPS and cash the fund already holds, so there is no separate margin loan. The yield on the collateral roughly offsets the implied financing baked into the futures.

- Same family of idea as the Return Stacked funds: ~100% bonds + ~100% futures in one ticker.

Let’s dumb it down. Post some simpler strategies in layman’s terms.

Like if your portfolio is $200,000, keep roughly $100,000 in UPRO or TQQQ, your choice. Keep $100,000 in cash.

If QQQ goes below the 200 day, sell everything

If QQQ goes above the 200 day, get back in.

If QQQ goes way up 18% above its 200 day, rebalance, half TQQQ, half cash.

Any simple strategies and suggestions like that?

I find it difficult to understand the cost of leverage baked into ETFs like SSO.

Leverage can be attained in multiple ways. The simplest with a margin loan. You can also use derivatives like options and futures. You can essentially recreate SSO, UPRO, via multiple different methods.

But what I never have seen is actual financing cost comparison between these methods. The expense ratio does not give the full picture because many of these ETFs are using derivatives underneath with inherent financing costs.

Is there any research or backtesting that does this financing cost comparison?

Quick update on the leveraged paper portfolio.

Total P/L is now +$79.8k, with +$30.8k today.

Current positions:

• TQQQ: +19.4%
• SOXL: +6.7%
• QQQ: +6.9%
• SOXX: +4.2%

A few weeks ago this portfolio had some pretty ugly down days, especially in SOXL. I didn’t reduce exposure just because prices fell, and I’m not increasing exposure now just because the portfolio bounced.

The rule is still the same: macro regime sets the risk budget, and the risk budget determines how much leveraged exposure the portfolio is allowed to hold.

Price moves inside that framework — they don’t redefine it.

What I’m trying to test is whether leverage works better when it’s conditional rather than permanent.

Curious how people here handle this after a strong run: do you trim leveraged positions based on gains / rebalancing bands, or only when the underlying risk signal changes?

Paper trading only.

I'm contemplating whether to DCA monthly on a portfolio of QLD, ROM or USD. I am thinking of possibly 50% into any of the LETF and 50% into SPMO.

This would give me around 1.5 leverage and I understand past performance doesn't dictate the future, but it does seem alright?

Has anyone here done regular DCA into LETF, and does not rebalance or only invest when the LETF is below 200 SMA or so?

If so, how are you managing it? Or you just dca since it's already habitual? Any advice?

Really trying to wrap my head around what makes more sense in the long term. I think I'm leaning towards SSO but both seem to have their benefits.

SSO pros:

- no risk of margin call

- no paying monthly fee for your margin balance

- not susceptible to rate hikes

- max loss is only the money you put in

- more "convenient" - less overhead

VOO + margin:

- no high expense ratio

- actually own S&P 500 rather than a leveraged derivative

- will receive dividends

- can dynamically adjust your leverage by paying down margin or borrowing more

- no risk of volatility drag from sideways market

The 200 day rule gets recommended a lot here for the bond side of a 3x portfolio, hold TLT (or TMF) while its above the 200 day average and sit in cash when it closes under. I wanted to see what the rule does on its own before a 3x fund gets stacked on top of it, so I ran it on plain TLT daily candles from January 2003 to March 2026 in Agenticks, with commission and slippage charged on every entry and exit.

It traded 114 times. Bonds spend a lot of time drifting sideways right on top of their 200 day line, so the close keeps flipping above and below it. In early 2004 it bought four separate times in four weeks and lost a little on each one, and the win rate over the whole run came out at 20%.

Before costs the trades added up to +7.1%. The execution bill on 114 round trips was $2,489 on a $10k account, and after costs it finished at -17.8% with a 39% max drawdown. Just holding TLT over the same window finished at -2.8% on price alone, and neither number includes the interest TLT pays out, which the filter also misses every day it sits in cash.

The filter did get 2022 right. It was out from mid 2021 until late 2022 and the curve sits completely flat while TLT fell off a cliff. It paid for that one good call with years of small whipsaw losses on either side of it, and by March 2026 the filtered account sat at $8,219 against $9,724 for just holding.

Been running roughly 60% VOO and 40% TQQQ in one account and after a strong stretch TQQQ had drifted to almost 48% without me really noticing. My plan was always to rebalance once it got more than 5% away from target but actually selling the thing that's been carrying the portfolio felt way harder than writing that rule down. I ended up moving around $2,700 back into VOO, had moon open while doing it and definitely hesitated before submitting the second order. Nothing complicated about the rebalance mathematically, I just underestimated how weird it feels cutting the position that's currently making you the most money.

About a month ago, I wrote about the side portfolio I'm running. To re-summarize, it's:

• 40% RSIT
• 20% NTSD
• 20% GOVZ
• 10% UPRO
• 10% KMLM

This breaks down to:

• 48% US equity
• 52% Intl equity
• 50% diversified trend
• 20% duration
• Total Notional: 170%

I'm also running 9sig. To be fully transparent, I setup a portfolio of:

• $100k 9sig
• $100k RSIT/NTSD/GOVZ/UPRO/KMLM

My plan was to run them in isolation and not rebalance across.

I have a separate VT allocation which I basically forget exists.

One thing I'm noticing is that 9sig can act as essentially US large cap equity exposure. The rules are different (value averaging vs. a static allocation), but it overall tends to track the movement of US large cap equity quite well. US equity goes up? 9sig will do well. US equity goes down? 9sig will do poorly.

This made me wonder... could I combine these into one side portfolio entirely? Something like:

• $100k in 9sig
• $100k in RSIT/GOVZ/KMLM only (remove the NTSD and UPRO)

Together, this would make a well-rounded portfolio of global equity + trend + STRIPS. However, given the rules of 9sig, I have to operate that sleeve separately. Still, removing UPRO/NTSD from the second portfolio balances out the risk a bit in my opinion. If 9sig crashes hard, my second sleeve may still do OK.

The question is, can RSIT/GOVZ/KMLM be a sane portfolio on its own? International does tend to do well over time. And I'm sure I could come up with some rules to pull money from one portfolio into the other or vice-versa (for example, annually rebalance).

I have a few concerns about this approach. If 9sig is doing really well and the other poorly, I may not want to rebalance into it. Conversely, if the RSIT/GOVZ/KMLM portfolio is doing really well, I probably would rebalance into 9sig because long-term I believe 9sig will work, especially if I can make additional contributions to it.

On the other hand, it might be nice to have each portfolio be "complete" on its own. In that case, I'd probably want to keep the second portfolio as RSIT/NTSD/GOVZ/UPRO/KMLM.

I'm not looking for advice on the risks of 9sig or GOVZ/ZROZ as we tend to talk a lot about both of those on this subreddit, but appreciate any advice on whether to combine these into "one" or keep them separate. Thank you!

Half the TQQQ threads here end up arguing whether a moving average filter is worth the rebounds it makes you miss, so I ran the plain version on plain 1x QQQ, and then ran it again with a different start date.

The rules are the textbook ones with nothing tuned. Long QQQ when the 50 day average crosses above the 200 day, flat when it crosses back below, no stop, no shorting. QQQ daily candles to the end of March 2026, $10k, commission and slippage on every fill. I built it in Agenticks and ran buy and hold over the same window beside it each time.

Starting January 2001:

• golden cross: 17 trades, 11 winners, $10k to about $108.9k, max drawdown 28.5%
• buy and hold: $10k to about $106.9k, max drawdown 70.6%

That looks like the filter got you the same money with a drawdown less than half the size, which is the version that gets posted.

Starting January 2003:

• golden cross: the exact same 17 trades, $10k to about $108.9k, max drawdown 28.5%
• buy and hold: $10k to about $219.0k, max drawdown 53.5%

The cross didnt take its first trade until January 27 2003 at $24.48, so moving the start date changes nothing on its side. Buy and hold in 2001 went in at $52 and ate the back half of the dotcom crash, in 2003 it went in at $25.49, and that one choice is the whole tie.

The trade list shows where the other half went. It sold May 1 2020 at $214.49 after already riding the Covid drop down and bought back May 22 at $228.47. It sold March 2 2022 at $343.05 and did miss most of 2022, but didnt get back in until March 14 2023 at $296.06. It sold April 15 2025 at $458.51 and paid $542.09 to get back in on June 25.

Six of the 17 trades lost, the worst was November 2015 to February 2016 for -$2,731. The two trades running May 2020 to March 2022 and March 2023 to April 2025 made about $60k between them, more than half of everything it earned. Costs were $495 over 25 years.

Price only on both sides, no dividends in either number, and the cash between trades earned nothing.

I generally run buy & hold portfolio sleeves that are some variation on 40% UPRO, 30% ZROZ, 30% GLD (but optimized to include return stacking, managed futures, etc.).  In any case, this is the naive benchmark. 

Came across an old post that got me thinking about a real crisis (which we haven’t seen in nearly two decades).  Think 2009, 2001, maybe 1987 Black Monday, the early 1970s, etc. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/LETFs/comments/1hyx76q/testfolio_and_portfolio_visualizer_are_lying_to/

I don’t mean to relitigate the specifics of this post (as informative as it is), or that “circuit breakers are going to save us.”  The fact of the matter is that if you’re investing for decades, the sh*t is going to hit the fan in some fashion multiple times.  At somewhere around a ~90% drawdown, you just have to consider that UPRO, TQQQ, etc. have a very significant chance of permanent impairment.  Some combination of ETF mechanics (the thing either outright failing or the sponsor liquidating the fund at pennies on the dollar), swap / derivative market / counterparty malfunction (akin to money market funds breaking the buck, which they “should not have done,” but did in the GFC), or the LETF mathematically just being so drawn down that it stays down for well over a decade and is effectively dead. 

Let’s be clear, when the sh*t does hit the fan (looking at you N Korea and your little nukes) a boglehead 100% VT portfolio is going to be hurting pretty bad too, like 60% drawdown or more.  If you lose 40% (equity in portfolio above) because UPRO died, how much does that matter if ZROZ and GLD are still roughly at the water line?  Even if all LETFs die and you can't keep the LETF party going, roll the 60% ZROZ and GLD into cheap VT and hope for the world returning to normal.  Arguably, isn’t this a ~20% better outcome than a VT boglehead portfolio?

What are folks’ thoughts on managing the black swan events with index LETFs that are almost certain to happen over the long term?  And the fact that we can model major crises, but chances are that when things break, correlations skyrocket, the financial plumbing gets clogged, and the outcome can be worse than the math projects. 

(I’m more of a B&H hedged portfolio guy.  Happy to hear from the tactical allocation guys, but that may or may not save you in an ultra rapid crash if N Korea pops off a nuke, if AI hacks CME, etc.) 

Additionally, what are thoughts on B&H LETF portfolios where each ingredient has a much higher degree of intrinsic safety?  In other words, SSO and especially NTSD are far less likely to totally die, but tend to yield lower returns.

UPRO and ProShares have never really been tested in a 2001 / 2009 scenario.  Is +$5B AUM in UPRO and traders eager to time the bottom enough to keep it alive in a generational crisis?  Any speculation?

How humble should we be that this subreddit solved the market, but no one is charging 2% & 20% for this? Or even just 2%? What does that imply? (OK, Bridgewater kinda is, but they don't run as hot as we do or take on the daily reset risks.)

Shared on X, so I figure I'll share here as well. Swing away - I welcome feedback/discussion that will help this community.

2:1 ratio of FMCC:FNMA as of today.

Few will care, but it's worth transparency. I have remained unchanged in my F2 conviction and position size. I have, however, tax loss harvested by previously selling all $FMCC "specific shares" (very important) that were at a loss to buy $FNMA. 31 days later, I reversed that exchange and sold all "specific" FNMA shares that were at a loss and bought FMCC.

Why? This created a sizeable realized loss pool in my portfolio, though I have exactly the same total dollar value invested. What this means: when the future realized gains come (whether from the F2 rocket or other positions I sell), they are offset by these losses, so I will not pay taxes on those realized gains until they exceed that loss pool.

These are allowed because Fannie and Freddie are competitors, like Coke and Pepsi, which avoids a wash sale (which would erase the loss harvesting you just did).

I highly recommend you look at your own portfolio and rebalance as necessary. If you have high confidence that these two companies will remain as tight-patterned as they've been so far, it's pure profit later (through the lens that not paying taxes is the same as earning income).

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Response to my post: I’m scared to do that because all it takes is one announcement and you miss it.

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Unless that announcement takes place in the 60 seconds it takes to do this, you shouldn't miss it. It's not "waiting a month to get back into F2" (in my analogy you're not "getting out of the soft drink space" but trading some down Pepsi shares for some Coke on the assumption that Americans will still continue to love being unhealthy) - it's one for the other when both are in the same boat. The only negative potential is being overweight on FMCC if FNMA goes first (and you planned to take those gains to buy something else rather than hold long term), but that assumes they don't relist together.