What transaction costs? Buying 100 shares of stock (including ETFs) with IB is like $1 for me most times. So buying or selling (short) 100 shares of TQQQ, controlling ~$2127 of notional equity, would cost like $1 no? And that's for retail. Sure seems a very small transaction fee, like .047%, or double it to .094% for a round-trip trade. What am I missing?
Good to see you post again Rickshaw Man!
Okay, so for the sake of argument, let's say you pay $1 on 100 shares of SPY. There are 252 trading days in a year. You buy at the close and sell the following morning. That's 252 * 2 * 1 = 504 in commissions. You also have the bid/ask. For the sake of argument, let' say you cross half the time on a spread of a penny. That's 252 * 100 shares * 0.01 = 252. So, you pay 252 + 504 = 756 on 37,500. That's a 2% drag.
So, you'll pay 2% so that, with SPY at least, you would have earned ~9.8%-2% = 7.8% on 11% vol instead of ~12.1% on 16.5% vol. Is it worth it? You earn 4.3% less to save 5.5% on vol. Depends on you, I guess. If you just want to use sharpe as a proxy, the answer is no: 0.73 vs 0.71. That's a lot of work to earn a lower sharpe.
You might point to IWM where you would actually have made more on this strategy by avoiding the day losses. Meh, maybe. Look at the other research on all the other markets first. Last time I looked (~10 years ago) it didn't look good. There's a reason nobody has eaten away this 'free lunch' after all these years... it's rotten.
Yes, maybe they can cut down on those costs with swaps etc. I'm not sure it'll be worth it. I do think, however, they'll garner a lot of interest with the right marketing. That's why I'll be interested to watch the prospects of the company, but I won't be buying the ETF.