The base rate
For each fund we take its full daily history and mark, for every day, how far below its 1-year high it closed.
Days are grouped into depth bands. For each band we count what happened over the following 90 trading days:
how often the fund ended higher, how deep it dipped along the way, how long it took to get back above the entry
price, and how often it fell another 5%, 10% or 20% within the next month.
What we don't do
We don't call tops or bottoms. We tested six candidate entry signals on nearly thirty years of index data —
momentum exhaustion, Heikin Ashi deceleration, first upper wick, ATR contraction, volume climax, RSI, and
implied volatility. Five produced no edge at all. The sixth looked promising until we counted independent
entries instead of overlapping days, and it collapsed. Depth and the age of the decline were the only
inputs that survived.
Leveraged funds and simulated history
The 3x funds launched around 2009–2010, so their own records contain no real bear market. For each one we also
build a simulated series from the underlying index — levered daily returns minus an estimated annual cost —
going back to the 1990s. Those rows are always labelled as simulated. No such fund existed then, and the
simulation ignores tracking error, borrowing spikes and liquidity gaps, so treat it as a floor on the risk
rather than a precise history.
Counting honestly
The counts are days, not independent events. One long decline contributes many days to the same band, so a
large sample size is not the same as a large amount of evidence. Wait figures count only the cases that
eventually got there. Every band shows how many of three market eras it has data for; if that number is
below three, the figures describe those periods and not a general rule.
What StockJelli is not
Not financial advice, not a signal service, not a guarantee. Leveraged funds in particular can decline further
and stay down longer than any figure here suggests. Always do your own research.
