With the S & P 500 at a new high, many traders are gravitating toward riskier leveraged ETF products. It’s part of a broader trend, where investors are seeking out more complex exchange-traded funds. It’s been a topic for months on CNBC’s ETF Edge show: in the past year, there has been a huge increase in ETFs that employ complex derivatives strategies to obtain a variety of outcomes, from leverage on stock indexes and individual stocks to downside protection from a decline in the stock market, or even a decline in bitcoin. The ETF model: a victim of its own success Partly, this is due to the maturation and incredible success of the ETF model. The vast majority of the roughly $10.5 trillion in assets under management are in passive index-based funds like those that follow the S & P 500 ( SPY , IVV , VOO ). As the industry has matured, the business has sought to offer a broader array of products to the investing public.
