Rational Pricing of Leveraged ETF Expense Ratios

TL;DR

This paper establishes a theoretical framework linking leveraged ETF expense ratios to their gearing ratios, providing optimal combination strategies and conditions for undominated products to improve investor welfare.

Contribution

It introduces necessary and sufficient conditions for undominated leveraged ETFs and proves a two-fund theorem for optimal ETF combinations using linear programming duality.

Findings

Identifies conditions for undominated LETFs in the price-gearing plane.

Proves a two-fund theorem for combining LETFs to achieve target gearing ratios.

Shows that introducing new undominated 2.5x products benefits investors.

Abstract

This paper studies the general relationship between the gearing ratio of a Leveraged ETF and its corresponding expense ratio, viz., the investment management fees that are charged for the provision of this levered financial service. It must not be possible for an investor to combine two or more LETFs in such a way that his (continuously-rebalanced) LETF portfolio can match the gearing ratio of a given, professionally managed product and, at the same time, enjoy lower weighted-average expenses than the existing LETF. Given a finite set of LETFs that exist in the marketplace, I give necessary and sufficient conditions for these products to be undominated in the price-gearing plane. In a beautiful application of the duality theorem of linear programming, I prove a kind of two-fund theorem for LETFs: given a target gearing ratio for the investor, the cheapest way to achieve it is to combine (uniquely) the two nearest undominated LETF products that bracket it on the leverage axis. This also happens to be the implementation that has the lowest annual turnover. For the writer's enjoyment, we supply a second proof of the Main Theorem on LETFs that is based on Carath\'eodory's theorem in convex geometry. Thus, say, a triple-leveraged ("UltraPro") exchange-traded product should never be mixed with cash, if the investor is able to trade in the underlying index. In terms of financial innovation, our two-fund theorem for LETFs implies that the introduction of new, undominated 2.5x products would increase the welfare of all investors whose preferred gearing ratios lie between 2x ("Ultra") and 3x ("UltraPro"). Similarly for a 1.5x product.