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40 p. ; Includes bibliographical references (pp. 30-31). ; "June 2014." ; We would like to thank the anonymous referee and the editor for their helpful suggestions. We also thank Donghui Chen and Yue Zhang for research assistance. The financial support from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council is gratefully acknowledged. We examine the effects of daily return compounding, financing costs, and management factors on the performance of leveraged exchange-traded funds (LETFs) over various holding periods. We propose a new method to measure LETFs' tracking errors that allows us to disentangle these effects. Our results show that the compounding effect generally has more influence on tracking errors than other factors, especially for long holding periods and in a "sideways" market. The explicit costs (i.e., the expense ratios) and other factors (e.g., financing costs) can materially affect the performance of LETFs, especially for those with high leverage ratios and bear funds. Valuation Insight: Charupat and Miu evaluate the performance of leveraged exchange-traded funds. The tracking errors of these funds can be quite different even though they have similar expense ratios. ETFs with higher leverage provide less value, which can be attributed to their higher transaction costs.

In twelve sessions conducted in a typical bubble-generating experimental environment, we design a pair of assets that can detect both irrationality and speculative behavior. The specific form of irrationality we investigate is probability judgment error associated with low-probability, high-payoff outcomes. Independently, we test for speculation by comparing prices of identically paying assets in multiperiod versus single-period markets. When these tests indicate the presence of probability judgment error and speculation, bubbles are more likely to occur. This finding suggests that both factors are important bubble drivers.

We show that, since the inception of energy futures markets, prices have on average exhibited backwardation. Normal backwardation has also been the norm, but, because of the low power of the standard tests, most researchers have concluded that the unbiased expectations model cannot be rejected. The fact that backwardation has been and (though somewhat more weakly) continues to be prevalent makes MGRM?s strategy of hedging long-term supply commitments with short-dated futures contracts look somewhat better than previous observers have argued. That said, it should be re-stressed that their strategy was a highly speculative one and its unraveling should have come as no great surprise.