Toronto-based Horizons ETFs Management (Canada) Inc. has announced a change to the exposure of the underlying proprietary index of two leveraged crude oil ETFs.
Thanks in part to stabilizing crude oil futures prices, the firm said that its Horizons Crude Oil Rolling Futures Index — the underlying index of the BetaPro Crude Oil Leveraged Daily Bull ETF and the BetaPro Crude Oil Inverse Leveraged Daily Bear ETF — will remain in the November crude oil futures contract on Aug. 20, 2020, which is the expiry date for the current front-month September crude oil futures contract.
The underlying index is now expected to remain exposed to the November crude oil futures through most of September, and at least until Sept. 22, 2020, which is the contract expiry date for the October crude oil futures contract.
In a release, Horizons said that keeping the funds exposed to the November futures contract would essentially move their exposure from the third-month contract for crude oil to the second-month contract. The change is in keeping with the goal of having the funds “provide exposure to as close to the front-month crude oil futures contract as is deemed reasonable by the manager,” the release said.
Following unprecedented volatility in the oil futures market in April, investors were at risk of losing all their money if the underlying index of the ETFs — which, at the time, sought to correspond to two times the daily performance and two times the inverse daily performance of a different index — moved up or down by 50% in a single trading day.
In April, Horizons rolled the underlying exposure of the ETFs to the September futures contract in an effort to save the funds. Horizons also made other changes, such as moving the funds to their current proprietary underlying index and changing their investment objectives to allow for variable leverage, rather than double leverage.
In July, the funds were renamed to reflect their new investment objectives.