Betting on individual stocks by the hour: Wall Street leveraged ETF evolves again

Leveraged ETFs are further compressing the reset cycle for return targets from "daily" to "hourly."

On September 9, according to Bloomberg, Defiance ETFs filed documents with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on August 21, 2026, seeking to launch a series of leveraged funds tracking popular technology stocks, including Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Palantir Technologies, and Tesla. The goal is to shorten the calculation period for returns from a single trading day to several hours.

This design further compresses the operating cycle of existing daily-reset leveraged ETFs, allowing leverage to be recalibrated multiple times intraday.

The filing comes as regulators continue to tighten scrutiny of leveraged ETF products. The SEC has slowed its approval process for triple-, quadruple-, and even five-times leveraged funds, and South Korean regulators also strengthened related rules this summer. If the product is approved, it will provide active traders with a more granular intraday directional betting tool. At the same time, this means both gains and losses will compound repeatedly within the same trading day, causing further increased volatility risk.

Product Design: Hourly Reset, Six Rebalances Per Day

According to the documents submitted by Defiance ETFs, the proposed funds will use swap contracts or options to maintain approximately double the exposure to the underlying securities and will rebalance six times each trading day, while current products usually only reset once at market close. Each reset does not use a single price but rather a time-weighted average price as the benchmark.

This means that if a trader anticipates Nvidia will rise during a certain time period due to specific news, they can buy the fund within the corresponding hourly window targeting roughly 2x the stock’s gain within that period, rather than 2x the entire day's increase. After the next reset, the 2x return target is recalculated.

Sylvia Jablonski, Chief Investment Officer at Defiance ETFs, stated that the product is designed to “provide investors with a different way to express intraday views.” Rather than aiming to capture twice the price move from one market close to the next, the hourly-reset product seeks to achieve the targeted multiple in a much shorter, one-hour measurement cycle.

Compound Effects: The Double-Edged Sword Becomes More Apparent

ETF issuers have long emphasized that leveraged ETFs are more akin to trading tools rather than traditional buy-and-hold investments. The hourly reset mechanism further amplifies this characteristic.

Under an hourly reset structure, each period’s gains or losses become the starting point for the next period, with gains and losses compounding repeatedly within the same trading day. If the underlying stock continues to rise unilaterally, this mechanism helps magnify gains; however, in a choppy or declining market, the same compounding effect will also amplify losses and lead to greater volatility drag.

James Seyffart, ETF Analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, remains cautious. He noted that, except for certain hourly windows tied to earnings reports or other announcements, he "is not fully convinced this will provide a genuinely different exposure compared to daily-reset products."

Regulatory Pressure: Stricter Leveraged ETF Scrutiny Globally

The backdrop to this application is that global regulators are showing less tolerance for leveraged ETF products. The SEC has hit the brakes on approving products with three times or greater leverage and is conducting a broader review of the increasingly speculative wave of ETF products.

According to Bloomberg, this summer in South Korea, massive inflows from retail investors into SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics-related leveraged funds led to major losses and intense public backlash, an issue that drew the attention of the country’s president. Afterward, South Korean regulators tightened rules, requiring investors to complete five days of simulated trading before participating, resulting in a sharp decline in demand for some domestic popular leveraged products.

Whether Defiance ETFs' application will receive SEC approval remains uncertain. With regulators generally taking a cautious stance toward leveraged products, this new attempt to compress speculation cycles to the hourly level will also face more stringent regulatory scrutiny.