Pretty interesting products, which provide a leveraged spread play on the S&P 500 versus T-bonds, the dollar, gold and oil. http://www.interactivebrokers.com/factorshares/
Interesting (er, "surprisingly responsible") that they include wording about "...in one day or less" .... IMHO IB (or FactorShares) gets a thumbs-up from me for saying that so clearly and plainly up-front.
Interesting concept. I would never trade a brand new ETF until it's had 4-6 months of price history and starts to gain some liquidity. But these are definitely something to watch down the road. It seems that the major discount brokers will all be offering free etf trading soon.
I put them on the watch list several days ago. Right now I am just watching the volume and the spread (both bid-ask and the actual instrument spread correlation). Looks interesting.
I really would be interested in these products if they rebalanced monthly, rather than daily. Daily rebalanced leveraged products under-perform so badly on longer time frames, like I trade. This is a great concept though, and hopefully in a couple of years, there will be a monthly rebalance version that perform like the Direxion monthly's.
These are the first 5 of 23 spread ETF's that factorshares has filed to launch so it will be interesting to see the other options.
Not surprisingly, the oil/S&P product, FOL, seems to have done the most trading. Good timing on that one, as it captured the inverse relationship the past few days. Usually, these markets tend to move togethe rhowever, so I wonder how popular this ETF will be in more normal times.
Why not create a 10x ETF and lets get a year's performance in a single day. Hell you can make a decade's worth of returns in one good melt-up week.
These ETFs will be a dud, as it's not a real fund but rather a partnership that you are buying into and out of. K-1s will be issued for each ETF traded. As far as the leverage, FINRA has already issued new rules that require proportionately higher margins for higher leveraged ETFs so there is no free lunch. http://www.fool.com/investing/brokerage/2011/03/04/this-brokers-losing-the-free-etf-battle.aspx