Leveraged funds are designed to produce a fund performance that is a multiple of the underlying index. A 2x fund should increase twice as much as the index. Inverse funds are designed to move in the opposite direction of the benchmark and they can also be leveraged. Levered and inverse exchange trade products (ETPs) are designed to provide geared long and short exposures to the daily returns of various benchmark indexes. The benchmarks may be any reference index, but the popular ones are indexes of stocks, bonds, commodities and volatility. The problem with these products is that they are not generally well understood, particularly those with futures-based benchmarks. In a study conducted by Cheng and Madhavan (2009), they concluded that levered and inverse ETPs are neither suitable buy-and-hold investments nor effective hedging tools. They are unstable and exist only as mechanisms for placing short-term directional bets. Levered and inverse products are not, and cannot be, effective investment management tools.