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.
It clicked on a boring afternoon. I had a spreadsheet open with the mortgage on one side and a rough projection of index returns on the other. For years I had thought of those as separate things: one a debt to get rid of, the other money to grow. Sitting next to each other they were just two options for the same spare dollar, and the gap between them was thinner than I had assumed.
Chapter two
Two things in 2026 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 is not yet law. It was announced in the 2026–27 Budget and is before Parliament now. If it passes 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% |
| Return is | Certain, but it moves with my rate | Uncertain | Uncertain |
| Risk you carry | A large debt against one house, at a rate that moves | The whole market | The whole market |
Paying down the mortgage is often called the risk-free option. It is not, quite. The saving is certain, in that a dollar off the balance saves exactly the interest that dollar would have cost, and no tax is charged on money you never earn. But the saving is only ever whatever my rate happens to be, so it falls when rates fall, and it is nothing like fixed for the twenty years the right-hand columns assume.
A mortgage is borrowed money, secured against one house, repaid out of one income. Putting a dollar into it makes that position slightly smaller. It does not make it safe. I am carrying far more leverage in the loan than I will ever carry in this experiment, and the only reason it does not feel that way is that nobody marks a house to market every afternoon.
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.
Leveraged ETFs were not on my radar. Living in Australia you do not run into them. They are not in the super menus, the local brokers do not put them in front of you, and the conversation here is index funds and property. I only found out they existed by reading what people overseas were doing with them.
They are index funds. QLD tracks the Nasdaq-100, the same index QQQ tracks, and SSO tracks the S&P 500. Nothing is stock-picked and nobody is forecasting anything. What changes is how much index each dollar buys: a dollar in QQQ moves with the Nasdaq, and a dollar in QLD moves like two dollars would, day by day. The borrowing that makes that possible sits inside the fund, not in a loan with my name on it.
So I went and learned. I read what I could find, then built my own backtests, because I wanted the numbers coming out of a spreadsheet I had made rather than off a chart someone had posted.
The warnings are always the same. That they get margin-called. That you can't hold one past a day. That decay grinds them to zero.
Here are the four I went through first.
The borrowing sits inside the fund. ProShares puts the comparison plainly: $10 in a 2× fund buys $20 of exposure and the most you can lose is the $10, while borrowing $10 to put $20 on margin risks the whole $20, and a sharp fall there can bring a call for more cash or a forced sale. The fund resets its own exposure at each day's close and no broker can ask me for money. Losing the lot is still possible, through the price rather than a phone call: SSO's prospectus says that if the S&P 500 approaches a 50% loss at any point in a single day, the fund could lose its entire investment. Buying the fund itself on margin would put the call straight back, and FINRA doubles the maintenance requirement on a 2× fund to 50% for exactly that reason.
The maths says otherwise. Collins takes an index that falls one percent every single day and follows both funds down. After ten days the plain fund is down about 9% and the 3× is down about 26%. That is 2.88 times worse, not three. After a hundred days the index is down 64% and the 3× is down 95%, which is only 1.48 times worse. Three times a shrinking number is itself a shrinking number, so the further it falls the less the multiple costs you. It gets very close to zero and never arrives.
Collins tested that. He ran the same twenty years of monthly buying twice, changing one thing: the month he started. One run began at the bottom of the 2003 crash, the best moment available. The other began at the top of the 2007 peak, close to the worst. Both ended on the same annual growth rate. Keep buying for long enough and the day you started stops being the thing that decides it.
Every fund has it. Drag is what a bouncing price costs you. Fall 10% and then rise 10% and you are not back where you started, you are 1% down. That happens to a plain index fund too, in smaller amounts. So if 1× is fine to hold for decades with drag in it, drag on its own cannot be the reason to rule out 3×. The real question is where the line belongs, and nobody explains why it lands at exactly 1×.
Sources: ProShares, About Geared Funds, for the exposure and maximum-loss comparison. The 50% figure is the Leverage Risk paragraph in the ProShares Ultra S&P500 prospectus. Margin requirements are FINRA's interpretations of Rule 4210, which raise the requirement on a leveraged fund in line with its multiple, capped at 100% on a long position. Decay and timing figures are from Collins.
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 just 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
Centieiro's rules are coded into a public TradingView indicator, so you can run them against real price history rather than take my word for it. His third strategy uses the tiers I follow: 20% near the high, then more as the drawdown deepens. Collins' book argues the same idea in words, starting at 20% and buying harder into falls, without pinning it to a fixed numbered ladder.
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, and every figure published here is that part only. It is two funds: US$800 a month into QLD and US$800 into SSO, the 2× Nasdaq-100 and 2× S&P 500 funds, each with its own reserve, so the geared part of what I own isn't all one index. Both are published here.
From August 2026 I'm putting US$800 a month into QLD and US$800 into SSO, both under Henrique's original rules. Two doubles rather than a triple: I want to sit near twice the index and leave it alone. 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 just buying the same fund every month with no rules at all.
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 the funds 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.
Get in touch
Comments are open on every update. If you think this whole approach is a mistake, say so there where everyone can see it.
Comments
Tell me yours.
How did you end up holding what you hold? If leveraged ETFs are part of it, I'd like to know how long you have held them and how it has gone. If your approach looks nothing like mine, that is worth hearing too.