Let's be honest about why these things are so seductive.
The index goes up 1%. The 2x fund goes up 2%. The 3x fund goes up 3%. Your brain does the obvious arithmetic and asks the obvious question:
Why would anyone settle for 1x?
Because of one word buried in the prospectus, doing more damage than any market crash ever has:
Daily.
A 3x ETF isn't promising you 3x the index's long-term return. It's targeting 3x its daily return, then resetting the whole thing every single afternoon like a nightly software update.
Which produces the single weirdest outcome in retail investing: you can be completely right about where the market is headed and still get destroyed on the way there.
Let's do the math. 👇