Love Leverage? Look At This ETN (RWXL, RWX)

On day when multiple new ETFs debuted it's not surprising that one new fund went unnoticed. Such is life for the ETRACS Monthly Pay 2xLeveraged Dow Jones International Real Estate ETN RWXL, which had to fight with the Market Vectors Indonesia-specific Small Cap ETF IDXJ and the Direxion NASDAQ-100 Equal Weighted Index Shares QQQE for new ETF headline space on Wednesday. The ETRACS Monthly Pay 2xLeveraged Dow Jones International Real Estate ETN may not go unnoticed for long. RWXL pays a USD-denominated variable monthly coupon linked to 2 times the cash distributions, if any, on the Index constituents and as has been noted, retail investors love leveraged funds. RWXL offers exposure to 22 countries, but roughly two-thirds of the ETN's weight is devoted to Australia, Japan, the U.K., Hong Kong and Japan. RWXL's top-10 holdings account for just over 38% of the ETN's weight. The new ETN tracks the Dow Jones Global ex-U.S. Select Real Estate Securities Index and offers 2x leverage with monthly reset resulting in a 2x index yield of 7.6%. The index was created at on March 21, 2006 and RWXL tracks the same index used by the SPDR Dow Jones International Real Estate ETF RWX, which has $2.6 billion in AUM. RWXL isn't without its risks as UBS notes "The ETN is exposed to two times any monthly decline in the level of the Index and a number of factors may affect the ETN's ability to achieve a high degree of correlation with the performance of the Index, and there can be no guarantee that the ETN will achieve a high degree of correlation," the bank said on RWXL's Web site.