The Six Leveraged ETFs That Quietly Returned Over 100x

You read that right. And it’s all passive investing.

Regular S&P 500 ETFs like VOO have returned 812% since 2010.

Those are pretty solid returns. A 9x return on your portfolio from a totally passive investment over a 16-year period is considered pretty good for “normal” investors.

But what if you’re not a “normal” investor? What if you want to take math and statistics a step further and invest with some leverage to get optimal risk-adjusted returns?

Could you get not a 9x return, but potentially over 100x on your investment?

In fact, there are six ETFs that have returned over 100x, and even a small allocation to any of them would have made a huge impact on your portfolio.

Here are these ETFs, from the “worst” to the best.

Important note: Past returns are not a guarantee of future returns. What I focus on is showing investors how to maximize their wealth through systematic investment strategies on my Henrique Wealth Academy.

Honorable mentions: UPRO, UDOW, and SSO

These three leveraged ETFs are widely used, but they don’t make the 100x club. Still, I want to mention them because they can play a role in a portfolio seeking better risk-adjusted returns.

These three are a little more conservative in the leveraged ETF space and offer returns that are multiples of what you’d get from a regular S&P 500 ETF like VOO.

They are:

• SSO — ProShares Ultra S&P500 (2x leverage). Return: 3,144%
• UDOW — ProShares UltraPro Dow30 (3x leverage). Return: 3,854%
• UPRO — ProShares UltraPro S&P500 (3x leverage). Return: 8,059%

Chart with VOO, UDOW, SSO and UPRO. Screenshot by the author from TradingView.

One thing you might start noticing: over prolonged periods, these ETFs don’t return just 2x or 3x of the index. They return significantly more because they compound faster during bull markets.

The >100x club: ROM, USD, TECL, SOXL, QLD, TQQQ

These six ETFs returned over 100x — some of them gave investors absolutely ridiculous returns of over 400x and even 600x.

These kinds of returns are usually only seen in venture capital , where, if you were lucky enough to invest in Facebook in 2005, you’d have walked away with a 400x return. The difference here is that you’re investing in an index, a basket of companies, which is much less risky than investing in startups.

There’s still plenty of volatility, of course, but as I always say, volatility is the price you pay for performance.

• ROM — ProShares Ultra Technology (2x leverage). Return: 11,957%
• USD — ProShares Ultra Semiconductors (2x leverage). Return: 46,024%
• TECL — Direxion Daily Technology Bull 3X Shares. Return: 42,247%
• SOXL — Direxion Daily Semiconductor Bull 3X Shares. Return: 62,372%
• QLD — ProShares Ultra QQQ (2x leverage). Return: 10,829%
• TQQQ — ProShares UltraPro QQQ (3x leverage). Return: 37,183%

The performance of these ETFs was so ridiculous that VOO looks like a flat line at the bottom of the chart:

Chart with VOO, QLD, ROM, TQQQ, TECL, USD and SOXL. Screenshot by the author from Tradingview.

I know plenty of people are already heading to the comments section to say, “Oh, but volatility decay will kill your returns!”

Just look at the chart. Does it look like volatility decay is killing returns?

To talk about volatility decay, you first need to understand the Kelly Criterion.

I cover the Kelly Criterion extensively in other posts, but in short: it’s a mathematical formula used to calculate the optimal safe leverage for an investment.

Leverage will definitely work in your favor if you have a positive expected return (which you should, or you shouldn’t be investing in the first place).

The “decay” people talk about mainly happens in choppy or sideways markets. But the reality is that we spend far more time in uptrend markets than in bear or sideways ones.

Let me show you a crazy example of how, despite the volatility and drawdowns, you still got outstanding returns: TQQQ.

As we saw earlier, from 2011 until now, TQQQ has returned 37,000% — despite an annualized volatility of almost 50%, and many large drawdowns, some of them over 50%:

TQQQ drawdowns over time. Screenshot by the author from Tradingview.

Still, if you had the mental toughness not to sell, you’d be very happy because, according to the Kelly Criterion and market history, you’d still get great returns.

And again, psychology plays a huge role here. Do you have the mental fortitude and the stomach to handle multiple drawdowns of over 50%? That’s why allocations to leveraged ETFs should only make up a small percentage of your entire portfolio.

To minimize volatility, investors often use something called “half Kelly,” which in most cases is closer to 2x leverage than 3x. Most investors should probably stick with 2x, not 3x.

What does that “half-Kelly” of 2x look like in the QQQ space? Well, it could be 66% in TQQQ and 34% in cash; or to make it simpler, a position in QLD, which is the 2x version of QQQ.

If there’s one conclusion, this should be it

Over long bull markets, the right leverage absolutely crushes it. While most investors settle for 1x, a disciplined allocation to 2x leverage (via QLD or a 66/34 TQQQ + cash blend) could have turned modest capital into life-changing wealth.

The question is: do you have the stomach?

Volatility is the price of admission. But for those with the discipline and stomach to stay the course, leveraged ETFs are a true wealth accelerator.

I teach and implement these and many more investment strategies in my ***Henrique Wealth Academy ***— check it out for free.

— Henrique Centieiro 🕺🏻

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