Leveraged and inverse ETFs promise a fixed multiple of their underlying's daily move. Over the three months to October 12, 2026, 502 of 627 such funds finished short of that stated multiple, with the median fund landing 5.6 percentage points below it. This is not a flaw in any single fund. These products reset daily and compound their results day by day, so holding one across a stretch of time does not produce the multiple times the period's overall move. The gap between what was promised and what a holder received tends to widen with how much the underlying moved around during the period, not simply with where the underlying ended up.
The data across holding periods bears this out. At one month, 494 of 681 funds were short, with a median difference of -1.4% against a median underlying distance of 1.6%. By three years, only 97 funds had a long enough history to measure, and 66 of them were short, with a median difference of -27.2% against a median underlying distance of 35.3%. The pattern holds within the three-month window too: funds tracking underlyings with volatility of 0% to 30% showed a median difference of -1.9%, while those tracking underlyings with volatility of 80% and above showed a median difference of -18.0%, with 114 of 121 such funds short of their stated multiple. Volatility, not direction, is doing the work here.
A further pattern shows up where more than one issuer runs the same mandate on the same underlying over the same days. Because the rules and the market are identical, any spread in outcomes comes entirely from implementation. Across 114 underlyings with more than one issuer offering the same stated multiple, the widest spreads in this sample appear on BMNR +2x, where three issuers' funds diverged by 10.9 percentage points between the closest and furthest from the stated multiple, and GME +2x, where two issuers diverged by 6.0 points. Further down the list, pairs and small groups tracking MSTR, ONDS, PLTR, SMCI, CRCL, SPCX, CPER, IONQ, AXTI, and Ether +2x all show spreads of 3.0 to 5.7 points among funds with the identical stated multiple and the identical underlying move.
None of this says whether a given fund did well or badly in some absolute sense, only how far its result sat from the number in its name, and that distance is a function of how the underlying moved during the period, not just where it landed. A fund can finish close to its stated multiple after a calm stretch and far from it after a choppy one, even if the underlying ends up in the same place.
Readers can look up any individual leveraged or inverse fund on ETFIQ's fund pages to see its own stated multiple, its underlying, and the measured difference over the window that matters to them.