Great way to get leverage. Too bad there’s no NTSX combo with Swiss government bonds and MSCI World equity though 
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There are NTSX, NTSI, and NTSE for US, ex-US, and EM, respectively. So getting some kind of world allocation should be easy.
Regarding government bonds I don’t know a clean and easy solution. Maybe hedge the bond portion to CHF manually?
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I’m not sure the second allocation can stay around 2x without frequent rebalancing. This frequent rebalancing would have to stay below 0.42% cost.
EDIT: Checking numbers
If one accepts a maximum of 0.2 leverage deviation (coresponding to 60/40 or 40/60), then portfoliovisualizer.com gives me about one rebalancing per year in the last 5 years. A bit less frequently before, and 2 events in 2020. The rebalancing band was set to absolute 10%.
Rebalancing cost thus breaks even at a yearly:
0.42% / 10% = 4.2% = 2 x 2.1%
To spend more than 2.1% for buying or selling assets is highly unrealistic with a mustachian broker. IBKR wants 0.005 per share in FIXED (1 USD minimum). Assuming your share costs more than 5, then your cost is a maximum of 0.1%. Probably more like 0.01% or 0.001% looking at the actual price of UPRO and VOO.
That means my assumptions can be off by at least 21x, probably more like 210x, and still hold.
Congratulations, your solution seems efficient. 
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Note that I am accumulating, so I can reduce the need for selling to rebalance by directing new funds and dividends.
If someone speaks German perchance: I found “ZahlGrafs Exzellente Abenteuer” on Reddit.
ZahlGraf extensively discusses different leverages and allocations on S&P 500 and Treasuries. They also elaborate how they generate backtesting data down to 1943 including fund management cost and variable borrowing rates. The discussion has a focus on Germany (available instruments, taxes). The data is available for download (git clone).
If your German is not that good: You could probably use Google Translate and still get lots of information. But still there is heavy use of Reddit German (direct translations of English words. E.g. “mauerstrassenwetten” aka. “wallstreetbets”) which could confuse the translation engine (and normal people for that matter).
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Hi Helix,
Considering that CHF tends to be considered as a safe haven in case of a crash and typically the CHF becomes stronger vs USD is not holding simply CHF a good alternative to a government bond?
I‘m using a combination of VTI and UPRO to stay slightly leveraged into the US stock market. Aiming for 15% UPRO and 85% VTI. I plan to rebalance once my leverage ratio of 1.3 is below 1.2 or above 1.4. For example a 20% correction:
VTI goes from 85k to 68k, UPRO goes from 15k to 6k (simplified, I now). New leverage is 1.16. So I buy 5.1k UPRO and sell 5.1k VTI. Thus being back to a leverage ratio of 1.3 with 62.9k VTI and 11.1k UPRO. Market recovers back to previous levels (+25%), VTI goes from 62.9k to 78.6k and UPRO from 11.1k to 19.4k (again simplified). I‘m back at 98k and lost 2% due to volatility drag.
Is there a cheaper variant to stay leveraged? Buying call options? Futures?
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A cheaper: yes, definitely, futures. But my conclusion was that UPRO wins by simplicity of leveraging (and granularity) without being overly expensive.
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Hi Velli
I don’t quite get what this has to do with leverage. I also don’t know so much about FX-trading. Lastly there also exist government bonds in CHF (of course).
Generally holding cash as cash in an account gives subpar returns as the provider takes its cut. At least consider money-market and short-term government bonds (-fund).
Hi Helix
You are right per se holding cash has nothing to do with leverage. But as I try to look on my overall portfolio asset allocation preferably you have a risky part
e.g. 55% UPRO (3x of SP500) or any pther leverage you prefer (combi UPRO + VOO) and
a negativ correlated part
e.g. 45% TMF (like proposed by HEDGEFUNGIE 3x on US Treaury Bonds but they performed horribly during inflation 
)
Thus i was thinking if it might not make sense to stay with those 45% in CHF cash (ok without leverage unfortunetaly but i don’t know any better )e.g. on wiLLBe at 1.55% interest rate. In a crisis (UPRO decreases significantly) i could imagine that the CHF will get stronger as typically a lot of liqidity goes into CHF in a crisis and then rebalance using the CHF cash to buy UPRO to get back to 55/45%.
What are your thoughts about it? Would be happy and gratful if anybody has a different strategy on this less risky part of the portfolio.
Thx 
If you have 55% Upro and 45% cash you WILL have a bad time during crisis.
The big draw to TMF is that it is also 3x leveraged and tends to go up during crisis/severe market drawdowns. And because it‘s 3x leveraged, you can counteract the severe drawdown (and I cant state this enough, in 2008 for example Upro would have been close to wiped out, meaning drawdown of 90+%).
Yes totally. 10‘000$ invested in „UPRO“ in December 2000 decreased to 574$ in September 2002 (-94.3%). Recovered back to 9‘200$ in October 2007 to get crushed again to 229$ in February 2009 (-97.5%). This doesn‘t include TER or other costs.
Going down from 100k to 2.5k in 1.5 years is as close to a wipeout as you can get.
I dont think anyone here could handle that psychologically. Just imagine that you have have half a million melting down to 15k. You would absolutely panic. You can only attempt to withstand that, if you have something like TMF going up at the same time. But 2022 has shown that both can drop severely at the same time also.
UPRO is a tactical tool that I am trying to use strategically 
. It means that it should constitute only a small part of the overall stocks portfolio, and you should look at the whole portfolio, not just at individual components.
Furthermore, I would never use leverage in the consumption phase.
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I think it makes sense if you are young and have the risk appetite for it. But I wouldn‘t go as far as implementing a 1.5-2x leverage portfolio with it.
I bought it in September 2023 and currently at +45% (in CHF) with it lol.
Generally, it doesn’t make sense to stay leveraged with cash on the side.
Let’s look at 55% UPRO and 45% cash. The total allocation is 165% stocks and 45% cash. You get some interest on your cash. But then you pay interest on 2x 55% = 110%. The interest rate you get is of course less than the one you pay, so you lose the full spread on your cash allocation. It would have been better to only lend money for 65% and buy the rest directly. For example, 32.5% to UPRO and 67.5% to IVV.
UPRO likely owes USD and its interest rate plus some spread. If you increase UPRO to hold more CHF you basically go short USD and long CHF.
The benefit of holding CHF to your portfolio has to be quite large because you pay the total spread on each CHF. How much could that be? IBKR adds to or subtracts from the Benchmark a minimum of 0.5%. So 45% of your portfolio loses 1% ever year. So your whole portfolio now loses an additional 0.45% every year.
And because of interest rate parity it also gives no additional expected return. But if USD/CHF is sufficiently anti-correlated to US stocks you might beat 0.45%. But it needs to do so on average to only get back to 0.
Just read your and @johndoe1 's comments and wanted to comment on that, if other’s also come across this topic again.
There would be no point to hedge currency with treasury bond futures, they are as much short on USD as they are long, so no effective currency exposure.
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Right your are. If the value of the USD changes, but interest does not, then the futures contract will not change your balance.
But the value in USD of all other assets just changed, while the notional value of your futures contract in USD did not. The funds will need to buy/sell contracts to rebalance the allocations.
If the interest then changes before rebalancing, the impact will be different than at target allocation.
So no direct currency exposure, but a (probably negligible) indirect currency exposure.
This also doesn’t seem hedge-able by USD/CHF futures.
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I had some in it too from around the same time, but fun money only (500CHF), now sold. I figured it would never move any needle other than some trivial luxury and I’d never have the guts to put any substantial amount in it or any other exotic product.
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Digging up an old thread. I’m looking into adding some leverage as well, and still can’t wrap my head around how the futures work. Could you give an example? E.g., you deposited $5k to your account on day1, bought a micro e-mini (what a terrible name…) with $X. The s&p dropped by 10% on day-2. Is your cash balance negative then? Do you keep extra cash in your account? Or does it only become so on the expiration date?