Market Absurdity Squared: There Is Now An ETF ETF
By now everyone is familiar with the charts showing the tremendous growth of passive investing in general, and ETFs in particular, shown most recently in our discussion of how ETFs make markets dumber.
To be sure, everyone is also quite familiar with the mutant permutations of the above assets, such as inverse and 2x or 3x levered ETFs, whose only function is to fleece retail investors with unprecedented theta, including ETFs on VIX, essentially making them the modern day equivalent of Synthetic CDOs so familiar from the peak of the last financial crisis.