This pair of charts kind of encapsulates 2011 in a nutshell.
Very bearish folks might want bought ultra-bearish TWM at the beginning of the year. They are staring at a loss of over 20% now, in spite of some very hopeful moments.
So the bulls have had a great year, then, right? Not so fast. Here's UWM, the ultra BULLISH instrument, and the mirror image of TWM, with a similarly nasty loss.
So this proves leveraged ETFs are for suckers, right? Well, not necessarily. In a market with any decent trends, they can work well. But the above two charts sum up how getting jerked back and forth is especially devastating to such instruments.
