sales—the short sale proceeds—is an asset of the Fund that can generate income to help offset the Fund’s operating expenses. However, the costs of creating short exposure, which may require the Fund’s counterparties to borrow and sell certain securities, may offset or outweigh such income. As the holder of a short position, the Fund also is responsible for paying the dividends and interest accruing on the short position, which is an expense to the Fund that could cause the Fund to lose money on the short sale and may adversely affect its performance. The Fund will reposition its portfolio at the end of every trading day. Therefore, if an investor purchases Fund shares at close of the markets on a given trading day, the investor’s exposure to the Index of the Fund would reflect 100% of the inverse performance of the Index during the following trading day, subject to the charges and expenses noted above.
The Fund may have difficulty in achieving its daily inverse investment objective due to fees, expenses, transaction costs, income items, accounting standards, significant purchase and redemption activity by Fund shareholders and/or disruptions or a temporary lack of liquidity in the markets for the securities held by the Fund. Additionally, if the Index includes foreign securities or tracks a foreign market index where the foreign market closes before or after the New York Stock Exchange (“NYSE”) closes (generally at 4 p.m. Eastern Time), the performance of the Index may differ from the expected daily inverse performance.
An exchange or market may close or issue trading halts on specific securities, or the ability to buy or sell certain securities or financial instruments may be restricted, which may result in the Fund being unable to buy or sell certain securities or financial instruments. In such circumstances, the Fund may be unable to rebalance its portfolio, may be unable to accurately price its investments and/or may incur substantial trading losses.
If the Fund is unable to obtain inverse exposure to the Index consistent with its investment objective, such as situations in which the instruments utilized by the Fund are thinly traded or have a limited market, the Fund could, among other things, fail to meet its daily investment objective, increase its transaction fee, or reject one or more orders for Creation Units. Under such circumstances, the Fund could trade at a premium or discount to its NAV and the bid-ask spread in its shares could widen.
The Fund seeks daily returns while repositioning exposure daily. Therefore, for a period longer than one day, the pursuit of a daily investment objective will result in daily compounding. This means that the return of the Index over a period of time greater than one day multiplied by the Fund’s daily target (i.e., -100%) generally will not equal the Fund’s performance over that same period. As a consequence, investors should not plan to hold the Fund unmonitored for periods longer than a single trading day. Further, the return for investors that invest for periods less than a full trading day or for a period different than a trading day will not be the product of the return of the Fund’s stated daily inverse investment objective and the performance of the Index for the full trading day. The Fund is not suitable for all investors.
Consider the following examples:
Mary is considering investments in two funds, Funds A and B. Fund A is a traditional index ETF which seeks (before fees and expenses) to match the performance of the XYZ index. Similar to the Funds, Fund B is an ETF that seeks daily investment results (before fees and expenses) that correspond to -100% of the daily performance of the XYZ index.
On Day 1, the XYZ index increases in value from $100 to $105, a gain of 5%. On Day 2, the XYZ index decreases in value from $105 back to $100, a loss of 4.76%. In the aggregate, the XYZ index has not moved.
An investment in Fund A would be expected to gain 5% on Day 1 and lose 4.76% on Day 2, returning the investment to its original value. The following example assumes a $100 investment in Fund A when the index is also valued at $100:
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Value of Fund A Investment |
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The same $100 investment in Fund B would be expected to lose 5% on Day 1 (-100% of 5%) but gain 4.76% on Day 2.
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-100% of Index Performance |
Value of Fund B Investment |
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In the case of Fund B, although the percentage decrease on Day 2 is sufficient to bring the value of the index back to its starting point, because the inverse of that percentage is applied to a lower principal amount on Day 2, Fund B has a loss. (These calculations do not include the charges for fund fees and expenses.) As you can see, an investment in Fund B has additional risks than Fund A due to the effects of compounding on Fund B.
An investor who purchases shares of a Fund intra-day will generally receive more, or less, than -100% exposure to the underlying index from that point until the end of the trading day. The actual exposure will be largely a function of the performance of the underlying index from the end of the prior trading day. If a Fund’s shares are held for a period longer