In the 1985 classic “The Breakfast Club,” (sorry millennials, you simply are not cinematically savvy enough to remember such fare), Principal Richard Vernon reminds John Bender that messing with the bull leads one to getting the horns.
Messing with the biotech bull has horned some traders and investors as the newly minted Direxion Daily S&P Biotech Bull Shares (NYSEArca: LABU) is proving to have particularly sharp horns. LABU is not yet a month old, but the first triple-leveraged bullish biotech ETF is already setting a torrid pace.
With Monday’s 8.6% gain, which was accrued on more than triple the ETF’s average daily turnover, LABU is up 33.7% since coming to market on May 28.
LABU attempts to deliver three times the daily returns of the S&P Biotechnology Select Industry Index. The S&P Biotechnology Select Industry Index is the underlying benchmark for the well-known SPDR S&P Biotech ETF (NYSEArca: XBI), the third-largest biotech ETF by assets. [More to Come for Biotech ETFs]
As of April 30, 2015, the Index was comprised of 98 stocks. The companies included in the
Index have a median market capitalization of $1.54 billion and are concentrated in the energy and biotechnology sectors as of April 30, 2015. Component securities have capitalizations ranging from $320.9 million to $149.0 billion as of April 30, 2015,” according to Direxion.