Why does everyone get surprised by this every quarter, a few of these etfs pay out big short term dividends, this was one of them this quarter. All you have to do is go to proshares.com and click on distributions, its all there, no need to question why its down.
It was a distribution. Not everyone knows about these. They're not listed like a normal dividend so alot of trading software programs don't pick them up and list them as a dividend. Unless you trade proshares all the time, you wouldn't know these distributions exist. Who's got time to download a PDF file and check every time before you make a darn trade. They should have a newsletter with alerts or list the distributions about to be made on their front page. It's a pain.