The Semiconductor Index Rose 9 Percent. My 3x ETF Fell 34.

The clock on my work monitor said 12:40 pm on a Wednesday in June, and my turkey sandwich had been dry for ten minutes before I spotted it. Two browser tabs sat side by side: the portfolio view, showing my leveraged fund down $8,530 since purchase, and a chart of the plain semiconductor index, up 9.1 percent over the identical window. I stared at both for a long time. Ate the sandwich anyways. The afternoon sun was glare-washing half the screen, so I kept tilting my head as if a better angle could reconcile the two numbers.

In went $25,400 over sixteen months. Out came $16,870, which is the sentence-length version of what the screen said. The first buy was $19,400 on Feb 11, 2025, the morning after a 37-minute video convinced me, and the second was $6,000 more in October when the dip looked like the bottom that it absolutely was not. That $8,530 gap had a name in my head all spring. The kitchen, minus its renovation.

The explanation was sitting in my kitchen the whole time, in a fourth-grade workbook. Averaging up and averaging down multiply badly when a fund performs em every single day, which is what a 3x product does by design, and none of the charts I clicked through that spring laid it out as cleanly as my daughter's homework did. Her worksheet. My $8,530.

two tabs and a dry sandwich

I took a screenshot of the two-tab layout and saved it to a folder I labeled evidence, then sent it to nobody, cuz there was nobody to send it to who would be gentle about it. The shame of lunchbreak math is a specific flavor: you are surrounded by coworkers eating poke bowls, someone is describing their marathon plan four feet away, and you are watching a leveraged fund bleed out in real time next to an index that rose on the same days. I did that for most of June. The tab titles are burned into memory, Portfolio and Chart, like two witnesses who disagree.

the 37-minute video

January 2025, a channel I had watched for two years, a creator with 900,000 subscribers and a whiteboard. The pitch had three parts: semiconductors are the railroad of the AI buildout, a 3x fund lets you ride it with less capital, and the fine print says do not hold forever, which he said while smiling, which meant hold forever. I watched it on a Tuesday night. I snagged at 9:31 the next morning, $19,400 at $23.44 a share, 827 shares, and the confirmation email used the word filled like a dentist. I zeroed in on the disclaimer at the 34:10 mark exactly once, for about four seconds.

daily reset, the phrase I scrolled past

The prospectus does not hide it. The fund seeks daily investment results, before fees and expenses, of 300 percent of the daily performance of the index, and that word daily is doin all the work in that sentence. Every night the fund resets its leverage to the new NAV, which means the product is not built to track the index over months at all; it is built to track exactly one day, over and over, with a 0.94 percent expense ratio as the toll. I scrolled past that paragraph in January. I have it memorized now, the way you memorize the staircase you fell down.

$25,400 in, $16,870 out

The timeline reads like a weather report for a hurricane season. February and March of 2025 were fine, up 11 percent by late March, and then the tariff shock hit semis for a 24 percent drawdown in six weeks that my fund turned into something close to 47 percent. Summer rally, partial recovery, and in October I added $6,000 at what looked like a floor, which turned out to be a landing. By June 2026 the index had ground its way to plus 9.1 percent cumulative while the fund's total return over the same window was negative 34.4 percent. I typed both numbers into a note. I looked at em for a week.

Maya's worksheet, four days, two endings

My daughter Maya brought home a multiplication worksheet in May, and one problem stuck with me: a store raises a price 10 percent, cuts it 10 percent, raises it 10 percent, cuts it 10 percent, and the question is whether you end where you began. You do not. The index version of those four days ends at 0.9801, down 2 percent, but the tripled version ends at 1.3 times 0.7 times 1.3 times 0.7, which is 0.8281, down 17.2 percent. Same four days. She got a gold star. I got a tuition bill with eighteen digits of explanation.

the walk at 4:02 pm

I sold everything on Jun 3 at 2:57 pm, one market order, sixteen months compressed into four seconds of execution, $16,870 and change. Then I walked away from the desk at 4:02, did a slow lap of the parking lot in 84-degree heat, and sat in my car doing nothing with the radio off. What I felt was not regret exactly. It was the specific relief of setting down something heavy that you had been carrying out of stubbornness rather than need. The trading app came off my phone that same night.

what the boring fund did instead

The counterfactual is the part I made myself calculate by hand. The same $25,400 into a plain total-market index fund on the same dates would have ended June at about $27,710, approximately plus 9 percent with dividends, a difference of $10,840 between my path and the boring path over sixteen months. The ETF I actually replaced the leveraged fund with charges 0.03 percent, holds about 500 more companies, and has never once required me to tilt my head at a screen. Boring compounds. Leveraged decays. I paid $8,530 to have both of those sentences in my own handwriting.

the tab that stays open

I kept one dead watchlist tab, renamed tuition, with the leveraged ticker still in it, because I want the scar tissue visible at lunch. Same desk, same glare, same dry-sandwich hour, and now the two windows open side by side are the index fund and a savings goal tracker instead of a position and its autopsy. Maya's worksheet page is folded into my planner, the four-day problem circled in pencil. Some lessons arrive as homework. Mine arrived as a minus sign with four digits after it, and it resets daily too, in the sense that I relearn it every time Im tempted.