Todays video is based on Mondays Wall Street Journal article on Leveraged ETN’s called “Bankrupt in just two weeks, Individual investors get burned by collapse of complex securities”. by Akane Otani. We will learn about levered ETN’s and the investors who have seen their retirement savings evaporate because of them. We will learn the difference between an ETF and an ETN. Stay tuned to the end where I will explain why a two times leveraged product doesn’t actually give you twice the long term return of the index it is tracking, just twice the one day return. We will also learn about inverse ETN’s like the XIV the short volatility ETN that blew up in 2018.
Hello and welcome back to patrick boyle on finance today we’re going to be talking about the wall street journal article that came out yesterday on levered etns and the investors who’ve seen their retirement savings evaporate because of them we’ll learn about what they are and why it might be wise to avoid these types of products stay tuned until the very end and
I’ll explain why a two times leveraged etf doesn’t actually give you twice the long term return of the index it’s tracking just twice the one day return okay so yesterday’s wall street journal had an article by akan otani called bankrupt in just two weeks individual investors get burned by the collapse of complex securities in it the writer tells the stories
Of a number of investors many of whom were retirees who saw their savings wiped out by the collapse of leveraged etns so let’s talk about what these products are and why they might be unsuitable for many portfolios the article starts out with the story of william mark an investor who needed to play catch-up in his retirement account after the credit crunch
12 years ago he found a levered etn that earned him 18 a year on average in dividends a year and he invested 800 000 of his savings into this product and then during the coronavirus sell-off he ended up losing almost a hundred percent of his investment the guy in the store is 67 years old and basically bankrupt so what on earth are these products and how did
It all go so wrong what had happened is william had invested in a leveraged etn issued by ubs that invested in mortgage rates so let’s unpack that and see what that means a reit as many of you probably already know is a real estate investment trust most reits own property and rent it out and then the irs requires reits to pay out at least 90 percent of their
Taxable income to shareholders now mortgage rates are a little bit different mortgage rates provide financing for income producing real estate by purchasing or originating mortgages and mortgage-backed securities or mbs and earning income from the interest on these investments so that’s kind of quite a bit different to at least a lot of people’s idea of what a
Real estate investment trust is and then an etn that the thing that it was packaged in an etn is an exchange-traded note which is similar to an etf that many of you probably heard of which is an exchange-traded fund in that they trade on a stock exchange and track a benchmark index however an etn is a senior unsecured debt security issued by a bank it doesn’t
Hold the underlying securities the way an etf does and the return on an etn is linked to a market index or other benchmark an etn basically promises to pay at maturity the full value of the index minus the management fee like any other debt security the investor is of course subject to the credit risk of the bank that issues it in in the product in question it
Was ubs etns were actually developed in around 2006 by barclays bank to make it easier for retail investors to invest and to maximize the returns in hard to access instruments particularly in the commodity and currency areas by moving to a debt structure barclays eliminated the costs associated with holding commodities currencies and futures and improved the
Tax structure for investors an etn is essentially a bet on the indexes direction guaranteed by an investment bank so of course you have to worry about the investment bank’s credit risk and as the index moves so does the etn the financial engineering underlying etns is similar to the financial engineering that investment banks have long used to create structured
Products and i’ve already created a video explaining what structured products are and how they work and i will link to that up there etns are different from etfs because they don’t own the underlying assets that their return tracks they’re just unsecured debt obligations of the issuing bank so the product in question was a double leveraged etn which means it gives
An investor not just exposure to this underlying instrument but two times leverage to an index comprised of reits that hold us residential and commercial mortgages now the article doesn’t name the specific etn but there are two tickers that roughly match the description one is m-o-r-l and the other is m-r-r-l i’m not sure which of them are if it even was one of
Those two products but they certainly match the description in the wall street journal article so who invests in these things well it’s usually retail investors large asset managers uh fund managers professional investors tend not to invest in these products largely because the fees are quite high there’s a lack of transparency and the kind of exposure that you
Can get from this is maybe just not that attractive to a professional investor so why do investors want to invest in these products well it’s a little bit like the structured product video i did where essentially investors are usually looking for some sort of savings account type thing but since the financial crisis and even before then with interest rates being
Very low uh there’s not really an awful lot of attractive products for that type of investor and they started looking around for products that looked a bit like bonds but at higher returns and these things seem to kind of meet their needs now of course the problem with these is that the returns are much higher and therefore the risk is and an investor should know
Like this guy who invested and saw that the returns i think his average return was 18 and in certain years he had returns at 24 maybe he should have known that that type of return is the return of a risky product there are a lot of people arguing that this type of product should maybe be less accessible to retail investors and that was kind of the argument in
The wall street journal article now it’s not just investors who actually lost money in this space so far in 2020 many of the banks that structured these products lost money as well it listed society general bmp powerball and the taxes all french banks each lost over 200 million dollars in their structured product businesses so far this year now in the past as
Well these things have run into problems in 2012 regulators sanctioned banks for failing to educate investors about the risks of leveraged etfs and even this year wells fargo paid 35 million dollars to settle claims that its financial advisors recommended inverse etfs that were too risky for their retail clients another example that was given in the wall street
Journal article was of a 78 year old retiree just looking for basic income who invested in these products and lost seven hundred thousand dollars and that guy at the article said is suing his broker for not adequately disclosing the risks so as you can imagine some of these products have disappeared but a lot of the banks are actually issuing new ones to replace
The ones that that crashed ubs has announced five new products to replace those that crashed just months ago a lot of people who were talking about this article are pointing out that there’s just a ton of conflicts when financial institutions sell structured products to retail investors they’re usually designed to look appealing with a big coupon sales people
Are paid very high commissions and retail investors can’t really understand the risks and that’s just bad all around and that’s something that i mentioned in in the piece that i did on uh structured products to begin with so what is it about these products that goes so horribly wrong well the first problem is usually when you take something that looks like a very
Safe stream of returns and lever it up you no longer are left with a safe investment a lot of people don’t seem to realize that something that can earn 18 to 25 a year is a risky investment just the returns tell you that there’s risk there in addition leveraged etfs lose out from compounding so compounding which is supposed to make investors rich in the long run
Is actually what keeps leveraged etfs from mimicking the indexes in the long run and simple math can show you why leveraged etfs don’t necessarily give you the return you might expect these products don’t amplify the annual returns of an index but instead what they do is they amplify the daily changes in the index so let’s suppose that the s p 500 was to lose
10 on one day and then gain 10 the next day so if the s p it’s around 3 000 right now if it lost 10 that would mean that it fell by 300 points which is 10 to 3 000 to to then 2 700. now the next if it went up 10 from 2700 that would mean it went up 270 points and now it’s at 2970 which is a total loss of 30 points from its starting point at 3 000 and 30 points
Just happens to be one percent so when things go down and go back up by the same percentage amount there’s usually some sort of a loss in there now these products aim to maintain a constant leverage ratio typically two times or three times and to do this is a little bit complicated so fluctuations in the price of the underlying index changed the value of the
Leveraged firm’s assets and this requires the fund to change the total amount of index exposure it has so let’s work through an example let’s say if uh on a given week if the market or the the index loses one percent every day for four days in a row then what it needs to do to get back to its starting point is to go up 4.1 and that’s just the compounding effect
That i explained a few seconds ago so it needs to go up 4.1 on the fifth day in order to get back to break even a two times leveraged etf would need the market to rally 4.21 on the final day to get back to even and that’s because the losses that it took on a leveraged amount it then needs far greater gains to recover to get back so while a one times leveraged
Etf needs to scope 4.1 the two times leverage dtf needs the market to go up 4.21 in order to get back to break even this isn’t a rounding error thing it’s just a result of the proportionally smaller asset base in the leveraged fund which would have been down 8.42 after the 41 down days a three times leveraged etf would be even worse so as you can see here the
More volatile the market is the more volatile the underlying is the worse these leveraged etfs do investors in addition pay usually much higher fees on these products than the management fee of a traditional etf and in addition to that there’s also this high level of trading associated with the daily rebalancing and all of that just adds up to kind of bad returns
For these products and all of that is of course like the trading fees and the derivatives being traded or all passed through to the end investors so leveraged and inverse etfs are often tax efficient in addition to that but of course that varies by investor and by the account that they’re investing in investors are of course notified of these risks if they read
The fund’s prospectus the velocity shares three times leveraged crude oil etn was a product that was issued by citigroup the prospectus says that it may not be suitable for investors who plan to hold for a period of time longer than one day it noted that it is possible that you will suffer losses in the etn even if the long-term performance of the applicable index
Is positive so that is explained to investors but the question is does the type of person who invest in these products do they actually understand what that means and how it works or that that’s even a not not like a a possibility but actually a likelihood so an inverse leveraged etf then or etn uses leverage to make money when the underlying index is declining in
Value so it gives you short exposure to whatever the underlying is an inverse etf rises when the underlying index is falling allowing investors to profit from a bearish market or market declines now it’s worth noting that these products are capable of going below zero if the index they’re tracking goes up and off and there was an example of this back in february
2018 the vix index nearly doubled in a day wiping out a popular inverse etn which was called the xiv it’s sort of vixx backwards xiv and i think that was a credit suisse product and there was all sorts of drama around it because it was actually such a big product that when the vik started moving that much credit suisse had built into it a rule that that should
More than 70 percent of the value of the etn be destroyed that that it would then be liquidated and so it’s thought that a big part of the move in the vix at that day actually related to the liquidation of the xiv product now an awful lot of people argued that these types of products should be less accessible to retail investors or that there should be a better
Risk disclosures because there’s a lot of investment types that you you might want to invest in like derivatives and so on and usually you have to sign off on a risk disclosure explaining that you understand the risks that you’re taking in investing in these products and in many ways uh you know it could be argued that some of these products are almost designed
To give people these exposures without getting them to sign off on the risk disclosures are to necessarily fully understand the risks okay well if you found this video useful do hit the like button below hit the subscribe and bell button if you want to see more content like this all on finance and quantitative finance in general talk to you later have a great day bye you
Transcribed from video
What Are Leveraged ETN's? | VelocityShares | UWTIF MORL MRRL | Structured Notes, Structured Products By Patrick Boyle