Returns for Leveraged Securities

Are investors willing to pay for easy access to leverage? In the April 2020 version of their draft paper entitled “Embedded Leverage”, Andrea Frazzini and Lasse Pedersen investigate the relationship between the leverage of a financial asset (absolute percentage price change per one percent change in the underlying) and its return. They consider equity index options and individual stock options for different maturities and levels of moneyness, and leveraged exchange-traded funds (ETF). They consider three ways to test whether securities with more embedded leverage offer lower (monthly) returns: (1) portfolios sorted on leverage; (2) long-short factors that bet against leverage; and, (3) regression analysis. They consider alphas based on four (market, size, book-to-market, momentum) and five (plus market volatility) risk factors. Using groomed daily data for options on around 3,300 individual stocks and 12 stock indexes during 1996 through 2018, and daily data for seven 2X leveraged ETFs for seven major U.S. stock indexes during 2006 through 2018, they find that: (more…)