With bond prices rallying globally late into this week (and yields falling), the popular leveraged inverse fund TBT (ProShares
UltraShort 20 Year Treasury, Expense Ratio 0.93%) is trading at a fresh multi-year low today and volume has been moderately heavy in the fund considering the overall lackluster pre-holiday weekend volumes in everything else.
Even moreinteresting is that the fund has net attracted more than $1.24 billion in new assets year to date despite the consistent
plunge in price.
In fact, TBT is now a $4.2 billion fund, just slightly smaller than the unlevered, long TLT (iShares Barclays 20 Year Treasury Bond, Expense Ratio 0.15%) which has about $4.3 billion in AUM.
TLT has also net raised assets year to date, pulling in north of $1.5 billion, so it is interesting to see the battle between bulls and bears in the Bond world play out to some extent via ETFs.
TBF (ProShares Short 20 Year Treasury, Expense Ratio 0.95%) has raised a much smaller amount year to date (about $85 million) and this fund is an unleveraged way to get inverse exposure to the Barclays Capital U.S. 20+ Year Treasury Index and bet against bond prices.
TMV (Direxion Daily 20 Year Treasury Bear 3X, Expense Ratio0.95%), TTT (ProShares UltraPro Short 20+ Year Treasury, Expense Ratio 0.95%), and SBND (PowerShares DB 3X Short 25+ Year Treasury Bond ETN, Expense Ratio 0.95%) also come to mind as funds that bond bears may typically utilize in order to take the other side of rising bond prices.
These funds, like TBT, are also trading at multi-year lows, and SBND especially has seen a notable spike in trading volume this week.
As has been the case for several years despite bond prices largely rallying over this period, the inverse and levered inverse funds in the Treasury space have always been more popular and larger than the levered long strategies and have a higher level of familiarity largely amongst investors.
TMF (Direxion Daily 20 Year Treasury Bull 3X, Expense Ratio 0.95%), UBT (ProShares Ultra 20 Year Treasury, Expense Ratio
0.95%) and LBND (PowerShares DB 3X 25+ Year Treasury Bond ETN, Expense Ratio 0.95%) all come to mind but none of these funds has more than $59 million (TMF being the largest) in AUM at the moment.
For more information on Street One ETF research and ETF trade execution/liquidity services, contact Paul Weisbruch at pweisbruch@streetonefinancial.com.
Street One Financial is an educational/research firm utilizing the Broker Dealer services of Precision Securities, a FINRA registered Broker/Dealer.