No you would not. Your existing position would continue to decay even if you were right directionally. The "geared" ETF's replicate single day moves, they get eaten up by choppiness and time. Search the forum for more details, it has been covered to death.
I've seen a lot of academic and anecdotal evidence that leveraged equity ETF's have not been "eaten up by chopiness and time", at least in the modern era where borrowing costs have been low.
I'm talking 2x or 3x S&P or Nasdaq ETF's (my preference is S&P) with a historical upward bias, not leveraged commodity ETF's that have big structural problems like contango, etc. Or inverse ETF's on upward biased markets. Those get crushed into oblivion.
Most of the evidence I've seen states that the ideal leverage is somewhere around 1.7-1.9 on equities. The 3x versions have crushed their 1x and 2x counterparts, but they've only been around since early 2009, which was nearly a perfect time to start owning 3x. Anything longer term on 3x ETF's would need to be simulated.
I've seen some long term simulations of 2x ETF's dating back to at last 1950.
Personally, I like to leveraged ETF's rebalanced with cash or bonds to reduce my leverage. The re-balancing affect is good for capturing volatility.
A real world example of a leveraged portfolio of 60% SSO (2x S&P) and 40% BTTRX (zero coupon bond fund) rebalanced annually since 2007 (first year for SSO) has beaten 100% SPY by over 4% CAGR, which includes the bear market of 08/09.
I think DCA'ing into a falling market with a leveraged ETF would make a lot of sense too, because you would be buying in at extremely low prices. Shares of SSO bought on 2/2/09 for example would be up +970% vs SPY shares bought the same day which are currently up +296%.
With DCA, volatility is your friend.
