ProShares

Categories: Index Funds

As with almost any other industry, financial products have brands. Burger King is known for burgers. KFC is known for chicken. Taco Bell is known for causing you to make a beeline for the toilet at 3 am.

ProShares represents a particular brand of ETF, or exchange-traded fund. It offers many plain vanilla ETFs, i.e. the kind you'd find at most other firms that provide these investment vehicles. But the company has a specialty. It's known for its leverage (or inverse) funds. You can get burgers at Burger King, Wendy's, or McDonald's, but you can only get a Big Mac at Mickey D's. You can get vanilla ETFs anywhere, but if you want a leveraged or inverse one...ProShares is for you.

Most ETFs track a particular index or industry. Buy an ETF based on a particular biotech index. The index rises 10%. Your ETF rise 10%. Leveraged ETFs come with a multiplier. Buy a 2x leveraged ETF, and a 10% rise in the index equals a 20% rise in your position.

Meanwhile, an inverse fund goes the opposite direction of the index in question. A 10% increase in the index means a 10% drop in the ETF. Or vice versa. It allows you to bet against particular industries, i.e. make a short without the hassle of buying options or actually putting a short sale in place.

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Finance: What Are ETFs?275 Views

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Finance allah shmoop shmoop what are efs Well first this

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is the random financial terms you want to be asked

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in the financial term spelling bee and second you should

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know that e t f stands for exchange traded fund

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f's are kissing cousins of index funds with one key

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subtle but important difference f don't change at least generally

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speaking an index fund might reflect the transportation industry and

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have so much exposure to ford gm united airlines tesla

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etcetera But it's required tohave say sixty five percent of

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its exposure to companies based in the united states in

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its charter every month that index fund has to re

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balanced that exposure So if the auto companies do very

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poorly in a given month index fund has to re

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balance by buying mohr shares of those auto companies to

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make up the difference you know given that they've performed

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poorly relative toa airlines trucking company's railroads jeff howard segways

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and so on But in a t f the fund

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is basically set once and the shares just really kind

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of float if over a decade the auto companies do

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really well then in an e t f the auto

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companies will just have a dominant influence on the overall

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performance of the fund The management company doesn't have to

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buy and sell shares regularly in an e t f

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till fulfill the legal promises it agreed to at the

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outset of the fund in the way in index fund

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re balances its shares by buying and selling them So

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what does that mean to you Well it means that

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fc may drift in given directions like this guy For

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example a generic technology e t f might have had

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a total exposure of say five percent to internet stocks

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in the beginning of nineteen ninety seven but amazon ebay

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yahoo netflix and a well performed massively better than the

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broader technology market which did well but just not omg

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dot com well so that five percent waiting twenty years

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later might be more like fifty percent or mohr of

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that particular e t f but one other key aspect

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of it is that it's traded like a stock i

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e in one block and trade throughout the day there's

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a bid and an ask price The bids are all

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added up and shares in the fund can be bought

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And sold at any time throughout the day Although the

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market sets the price of an f just like it

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does on a stock Well there now you're all ready

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for the financial term spelling bee And they might also

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ask you to spell lipo Yeah you might want to 00:02:33.69 --> [endTime] write that one on your arm

Find other enlightening terms in Shmoop Finance Genius Bar(f)