Two More Firms Ban Sales of Leveraged ETFs
July 25th, 2009
Two more firms that feel their clients are unable to make educated decisions for themselves and need to be coddled. On Wednesday of this week we wrote about Edward Jones dropping the sale of leveraged ETFs, now you can add LPL Financial, and Ameriprise to the list of firms who will not allow you access to these investment tools. Tom Lydon, writing for ETF Trends states, “LPL Financial said yesterday that they were banning the sale of ETFs that use more than 200% leverage, while Ameriprise said they were banning sales of all leveraged ETFs. Luisa Beltran for Ignites says that the regulatory scrutiny of the products is making the brokers nervous.”
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This is absolutely horrible. Leveraged ETFs are fantastic investments for those who know how to use them properly.
I have personally lost $100K in a single day using leveraged ETFs; however, I have no one but myself to blame. I did the right thing, accepted responsibility for this mistake rather than blaming the ETFs themselves, learned from my mistakes, and now know how to time these ETFs properly. I’ve since made back that $100K and then some.
The performance decay of leveraged ETFs if held more than a week is a well-known phenomenon, and it is up to investors to use them properly and not hold them for too long. The current talk of banning these ETFs is absolutely terrifying to me; I find it morally repugnant and absolutely un-American.
Leveraged ETFs are one of the most powerful tools available to ordinary investors. For Wall Street to forbid the use of these funds to ordinary investors like me (while continuing to use similar strategies themselves) would be utterly criminal, and would make it even more difficult for average investors to succeed, especially after the royal hosing we’ve received over the last two years.
While I do not oppose warning users regarding the potential pitfalls of leveraged ETFs, fundamentally, these are decisions that must be made by the individual investors themselves and not by an over-regulated “nanny state.”