Millennials Get Slaughtered Trading Trump

According to Bloomberg, millennials piled into high-risk, high-reward bearish leveraged ETFs following Trump’s win. The two most popular ETFs are triple-levered ETFs that own gold miners, The Direxion Daily Gold Miners Index Bull 3x and Direxion Daily Junior Gold Miners Index Bull 3xThe ProShares Ultra VIX Short-Term Futures is the second most popular trading instrument. These three ETFs have lost 55%, 61%, and 38% respectively since the election.

It’s not just highly speculative leveraged instruments that have been popular with millennials since November 08. The fourth and fifth -most purchased instruments are the Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF and iShares Russell 2000 ETF both of which have gained with the market since the election.

This isn’t the first time TD Ameritrade’s research has shown that millennials prefer highly risky Wall Street products. And the beginning of 2016, the online brokerage published a list of the top stocks traded by millennials using its platform throughout 2015. Apple topped the list, followed by a Netflix, Facebook and Disney. At number five was the VelocityShares Daily 3x Long Crude ETN, which is possibly one of the worst product ever developed by Wall Street. Due to the structure of the product, contract roll costs, and a daily reset, the product is only useful for day traders and has produced a return over the first 47 months since inception of -99.7%.

Still, millennials can hardly be blamed for piling into gold and gold like instruments following Trump’s election. Almost every analyst on Wall Street was recommending the same thing, although I doubt any were recommending 3X leveraged junior miner ETFs.