Saturday, 2 February 2013

The Art of Inverse Equity ETFs

Inverse ETFs allow investors to hedge long equity positions. It also facilitates some form of long/short equity trading.

Proshares (it seems) offers good liquidity in Inverse ETFs.

Here's a case study of SH, which was created in 2006. SH allows you to go 100% short the S&P 500. The expense fee is 0.89%. The NAV is calculated at 4pm ET.

How does Proshares the ETF work? As of 1 Feb 2013, it's partly achieved by being ~$64m short on the S&P 500 e-Mini March contract - a massively popular futures contract (trades 5 days a week on a March quarterly cycle). But as not all the liquidity can be executed on the exchange, a large percentage of the short position is achieved via Equity Index Swaps (e.g. they are short $380m against Goldman Sachs, $306m short against Deutsche Bank).

This is an interesting concept: selling protection (insurance) via an ETF by massively shorting the futures market.

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