My Story
Which makes me a strange fit for a FIRE blog, I know. I'm Tran, I live in Sydney, and I'm not counting down to a retirement date. I'm doing this because I want financial freedom to be a real option one day instead of a maybe, and I don't think the standard index-fund answer gets me there on its own.
Chapter one
You don't need me to explain what living here costs. Anyone who has looked at a rental listing or a mortgage repayment already knows. Sydney has a way of making a good income feel like a treadmill.
The moment it landed was pretty boring. I had a spreadsheet open with the mortgage on one side and a projection of index returns on the other. I'd spent years filing one under "debt" and the other under "investing", like they belonged to different parts of my life. Side by side as plain numbers they weren't different at all. They were two prices for the same spare dollar, and the risky one wasn't paying much extra.
Chapter two
Two things happened in 2026 that changed the arithmetic for anyone with a mortgage and a share portfolio.
Rates went up. After three cuts in 2025, the Reserve Bank started hiking again in February and has now lifted the cash rate three times to 4.35%, driven by an energy shock and inflation sitting well above target. The average owner-occupier variable home loan is around 6.7%, and higher again if you haven't refinanced in a while.
And capital gains tax was rewritten. From 1 July 2027 the 50% discount is replaced by indexing your cost base to inflation and paying your marginal rate on the real gain, with a floor of 30%. It passed in June and it applies to shares, not just property.
Individually, neither is dramatic. Together they squeeze the gap between the safest thing I can do with a spare dollar and the riskiest thing I'd normally consider.
| Pay down the mortgage | Shares, old rules | Shares, from Jul 2027 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Headline return | 6.7% | ~10% | ~10% |
| What tax takes | Nothing | Half the gain is exempt | Inflation exempt, rest at 47% |
| Keep, if you sold this year | 6.7% | 7.7% | 6.7% |
| Keep, held 20 years then sold | 6.7% | 8.8% | 7.7% |
| Risk you carry | None | The whole market | The whole market |
The premium I get paid for carrying the entire market on my back just halved.
That's the honest version, and it's less dramatic than the version I first talked myself into. Shares still win. Over twenty years, 7.7% after tax beats 6.7% guaranteed, and deferring the tax bill for two decades is worth about a full percentage point a year on its own. Anyone telling you the mortgage now beats the market has done the sum for a single year and stopped there.
But look at the gap. Under the old rules I was paid roughly 2.1 percentage points a year for taking on every bit of market risk. Under the new ones it's closer to 1.0. Paying down a home loan is the nearest thing to a risk-free return an Australian can get. It can't fall, it isn't taxed, and it doesn't care what the Nasdaq does this decade. Halving the reward for choosing risk over that is a real change, even if it isn't the dramatic one.
Inflation complicates it. Indexation shields more of your gain when inflation is high, so right now the squeeze is softer than the table makes it look. If inflation drops back, it bites harder again. Either way, taking risk pays less than it used to, and I didn't want to answer that by just working a few more years.
Cash rate and mortgage figures: RBA and Canstar, July 2026. Tax treatment: Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Act 2026. Twenty-year figures assume a single sale at the end and ignore dividends, franking credits and brokerage. I'm not a tax agent, so check your own position with one.
Chapter three
This is where most people will disagree with me, and they might be right. A low-cost index fund, bought every month and held for decades, is an excellent plan. It has beaten most professionals. It asks almost nothing of you. If a friend with no interest in this stuff asked me what to do, that is what I'd tell them.
But I want more than "don't lose". I'd like to build something well past the market average, over a long enough horizon that a bad decade can happen and I'm still standing. The index gives me the market. I wanted to know what else was available, and whether the reasons everyone avoids it are actually good reasons.
Most of what I'd absorbed about leveraged ETFs turned out to be things I'd never checked.
Embarrassing, but true. Here are the three I had most wrong.
The maths says otherwise. Collins works a case where the index falls one percent a day. After ten days the unleveraged fund is down about 9% and the 3× is down about 26%, or 2.88 times worse, not three. Push it to a hundred days and the index is down 64% while the 3× is down 95%: only 1.48 times worse. As the price falls, the multiplier compresses. It approaches zero without arriving.
What's still true. Ninety-five percent down is not a rescue. "Doesn't reach zero" and "survivable" are different claims, and only the first one is proven.
Collins tested that. He ran the same twenty years of contributions twice, changing only the month he began. Starting at the bottom of 2003 and starting at the top of 2007 produced the same annual growth rate. Buying consistently for long enough makes the entry point far less decisive than it feels when you're standing at the start.
What's still true. Same growth rate, wildly different totals. The 2007 starter ends with a fraction of what the 2003 starter has. Timing doesn't ruin it, but it doesn't stop mattering either.
It isn't unique to leverage. Every volatile asset has drag, including a plain index fund. If 1× is safe to hold forever despite it, drag alone can't be the objection, which leaves the harder question of where the line actually sits, and why it's drawn at exactly 1×.
What's still true. The reliable cost isn't drag, it's fees. Roughly 1% a year, every year, whatever the market does. No tier schedule makes that go away.
And the part the enthusiasts skip. The S&P 500 had recovered its late-2021 level by the end of 2023 while a 2× S&P fund was still about 12% underwater. Collins is blunter still: the Nasdaq fell more than 80% in the dot-com crash and 55% in 2008, and a 3× product would have dropped roughly 95% in the second one alone. He also concedes, in a book arguing for these instruments, that they have no real place in conventional investing and exist for a narrow set of experienced traders.
That admission is a big part of why I trusted the rest of it.
Chapter four
Neither of these is gospel and I'm not asking you to take them on faith. They're just where my thinking shifted. I'd rather name my sources than pretend I worked it out alone.
B.D. Collins · Proven Strategies for Triple Leveraged ETF Success
Works through the arithmetic of decay rather than asserting it, tests two methods, dollar-cost averaging and a moving-average system, and insists any strategy be measured against simply buying and holding the index. It made me realise the case against leverage is usually argued at the level of a slogan.
Henrique Centieiro · Limitless Investor
His question stuck with me: if 1× leverage is fine, why is 1.2× or 1.5× automatically reckless? Where exactly is the line, and who drew it? His adaptation turns that into a rule set: hold cash near highs, convert it as the market falls.
Video explainer · plus the TradingView tester
Collins and Centieiro are both coded into one public indicator, so you can run either against real price history rather than take anyone's word for it. Collins runs four tiers at −20/−40/−60/−80%. Centieiro simplifies to three at −20/−40/−60%. I'm following the second one.
I found both of them convincing. Convincing isn't the same as right, though, and neither of them has to live with my results. So I'm putting my own money behind the claims instead of just repeating them.
That's what this site is for. I'm not summarising anyone's book. I'm running the idea with real money in Australia and posting what happens every month, good or bad.
Chapter five
Exploring and testing. That's the honest version, and I want it written down before there's any track record to point at.
One thing to be clear about: this is a carve-out, not my whole financial life. I have a mortgage, super, and boring holdings that aren't discussed here. What you see on this site is a defined slice I've set aside to test an idea with, sized so that if it goes badly wrong, it hurts without being ruinous. Every figure published here is that slice only.
From August 2026 I'm putting US$1,000 a month into TQQQ under Henrique's original rules. 20% of my available cash near the high, a third at −20%, two thirds at −40%, all of it at −60%. Every month I'll publish the price, the drawdown, what I bought, what's left in cash, and how the whole thing compares to simply buying the same fund every month without any rules at all.
I don't know how this ends. The tiers might add nothing and I'd have been better off with a boring monthly purchase. Or a 2000-style crash arrives in year three and takes most of it. Both are real outcomes and I'll publish them at the same size as the good months.
I publish it for accountability, mostly. A strategy that lives only in a spreadsheet is easy to quietly drop in month forty, when the market is down and the rules say to spend the reserve. One that strangers are watching is harder to walk away from. I'd rather say that than pretend I'm doing it to be helpful.
I'm not on my way to retirement. I'm on my way to having the choice.
That's the whole ambition. Keep doing work I like, in a city that isn't cheap, while building something underneath it so the choice is mine rather than my employer's. If leverage helps, good. If it doesn't, this site is the record of why not.
Follow the money
It doesn't. That's deliberate. Anyone writing publicly about a 3× leveraged fund has every reason to make it sound better than it is, and taking the money out is the only way I know to reduce that.
I hold TQQQ and I hold cash. Those are the only two positions on this site, and you'll see both, in dollars, every month. The links to Collins and Centieiro above are plain links. I earn nothing if you click them. If any line here ever changes, it changes here first, with the date it changed and why.
Read me sceptically
I'd rather list these myself than have you find them.
Whatever happens here is one sample from a very wide distribution. If it works it might be luck. If it fails it might also be luck. One person's twenty years proves less than it feels like it should.
I own the thing I'm writing about. Even with no money coming in, publicly committing to a strategy makes it psychologically harder to admit it's wrong.
People who tried leveraged strategies and were wiped out in 2000 or 2008 mostly didn't stick around to blog about it. That's true of this whole genre, mine included, and of the backtests that made it look appealing.
I don't hold an AFSL and I'm not licensed to advise anyone, so nothing here carries any professional weight. Everything is reasoning you can check yourself, which is exactly why the rules and the numbers are published in full.
Get in touch
[hello@trantofire.au] — I read everything. I answer most things, eventually.
Open on every update. Disagreement is the point. If you think this whole approach is a mistake, say so there where everyone can see it.