TQQQ · SOXL · daily data Mar 11, 2010 – Oct 1, 2026
Sixteen years of 3× leverage
3× a day is not 3× a year. TQQQ and SOXL deliver almost exactly three times their index's move every single day. Compounded over 16 years that turned $10,000 into $3.03M and $2.56M, about 17× and 6× what the unleveraged ETFs made. On the way TQQQ lost 82% and SOXL 90%, and in choppy years a fund can fall while its index rises.
ProShares UltraPro QQQ (TQQQ) and Direxion Daily Semiconductor Bull 3X (SOXL) are the two biggest leveraged ETFs: each resets to 3× its index's daily return every day, the first on the Nasdaq-100, the second on semiconductor stocks. This page charts them against the unleveraged ETFs on the same indexes, QQQ and SOXX, using one hue per index family: the 3× fund solid, its reference dashed and lighter. Every chart is a Holochart example that runs live in your browser and doubles as a visual regression test; together they use more than 25 chart types. Nothing here is investment advice.
Where they are today
The last close, the year so far against the unleveraged index, where the price sits in its 52-week range, and how far below its all-time high each fund is.
Daily candles
Six months of daily candles with 20- and 50-day moving averages and volume. Weekends and market holidays are removed from the date axis (range breaks), and the range slider below zooms the window. SOXL more than sextupled from its April low to its June high, then gave half of it back.
The last five sessions
Five-minute OHLC bars, with nights and the weekend cut from the time axis, the volume-weighted average price of each session, and the close before the first bar.
The long run
$10,000 invested on SOXL's first day, with dividends reinvested. On the log axis equal heights are equal percentage moves; switch to linear to see how much of the gain came in the last few years.
Drawdowns
How far each fund was below its previous high on every day. QQQ never fell more than 35% and SOXX not more than 46%. TQQQ fell more than half four times (deepest 82%, in 2022); SOXL fell more than 60% seven times, including 90% in 2022 and 69% this summer.
Calendar years
Three times the index in a good year is a lot more than three times: in 2023 QQQ rose 55% and TQQQ 198%. In 2022 the index fell a third and the funds lost four fifths.
Every month
Monthly returns since 2010, with the year in the last column. Switch between the funds; hover a cell for the exact figure.
The same months as 3D bars, years running into the screen. Drag to orbit: SOXL's April 2026 (+165%) towers over sixteen years of mostly ±30% months, three months before its worst (−57%).
Year by year
How daily 3× works
Plot each day's fund return against its index's: the points sit on a line with slope 2.96 (TQQQ) and 2.96 (SOXL), just under 3 because of fees, financing and, for SOXL, a proxy index.
The same relation built with Holochart Express from a table of days, in one call with OLS trendlines and marginal histograms. Coloring each day by how volatile the market was shows the slope slipping as markets get rough: 3.005 on calm days, 2.988 on normal ones, 2.919 on volatile ones, where SOXX's trailing volatility was above 40%.
Three times the risk
Volatility is three times the index's too: about 61% a year for TQQQ against 21% for QQQ, and 92% for SOXL against 31% for SOXX. SOXL's 63-day volatility peaked at 222% in May 2020.
Volatility decay
Because the leverage resets daily, a 3× fund's yearly return depends on the path, not just on the index's yearly return. A simple model (no fees, no financing) gives (1 + R)³ · e^(−3σ²) − 1 for an index return R with volatility σ: in calm, trending years the fund beats three times the index; in volatile, sideways years it falls well behind, and can lose money while the index gains, as TQQQ did in 2011 (−8% while QQQ rose 3%) and SOXL in 2024 (−12% while SOXX rose 13%). The contours show the gap to "3× the index"; the dots are the actual calendar years.
TQQQ beat three times QQQ in 6 of 15 full years (2023 by 33 points); SOXL beat three times SOXX in 7, and fell 88 points short in 2020.
The model's full surface, fund return over index return and volatility, with the actual years as points. Drag to orbit: the years sit on the surface, a median of about 4 points below it, the cost of fees, financing and tracking.
Risk and return, year by year
Each year as a bubble: volatility across, return up, size the year's deepest drawdown. Press play to step through the years. Leverage triples the volatility but not the return: in 2025 TQQQ made 34% on 70% volatility against QQQ's 21% on 24%.
Every year of both funds on parallel axes. Drag along an axis to filter: the calmer years tend to be the better ones (correlation of volatility and return across full years: −0.4).
The shape of daily returns
Daily returns are not normally distributed. Switch the y axis to log to see the tails: each fund had 8 days more than five standard deviations from its mean, moves a normal curve with the same spread would expect about once in 7,000 years.
Each year's daily returns, TQQQ on the left of each violin and SOXL on the right. 2017 was the calmest year; 2020 and 2022 the wildest, when SOXL's daily standard deviation passed 8%.
Monthly returns of all four ETFs: leverage spreads the months about three times wider. TQQQ's middle half of months runs from −6% to +15%, QQQ's from −2% to +5%.
Daily returns of each pair of ETFs against each other, colored by year. Each fund is a near perfect line against its own index; across the two index families the correlation is 0.86.
Seasonality and co-movement
The median return of each calendar month, with the 0% ring part-way out: bars grow outward for gains and inward for losses. May has been the best month (SOXL's median +18%), September the worst. Switch to the win rate to see how often each month closed up.
How often the two funds move together: every trading day by TQQQ's direction, SOXL's direction and the size of SOXL's move. They closed the same way on 81% of days, and SOXL moved more than 5% on 1,262 of them, three days in ten.
What's inside
A 3× fund can't buy three times its assets in stock. It holds some stock and lots of cash and Treasury bills, and gets the rest of its exposure from total return swaps with banks (and, for TQQQ, index futures). Per $100 of net assets:
The same exposure by instrument and counterparty. Swaps are 86% of TQQQ's exposure and 77% of SOXL's; no bank holds more than 11% of TQQQ's, while Goldman Sachs and Barclays each carry 18% of SOXL's.
The same banks are on the other side of both funds: $152.5B of swap notional in total.
What the funds actually own. Only a third of TQQQ's net assets is stock; most of the rest is T-bills, a money-market fund and amounts owed under the swaps. SOXL holds 70% stock.
The stocks held outright, sized by market value and colored by weight in the fund. TQQQ holds all of the Nasdaq-100; SOXL 30 chip stocks.
Sources
Daily and intraday prices: Yahoo Finance, retrieved Oct 1, 2026 after the close. Returns use split- and dividend-adjusted prices. Holdings: the issuers' daily holdings files, ProShares (TQQQ, Sep 30, 2026) and Direxion (SOXL, Oct 1, 2026). SOXX stands in for SOXL's index, which it tracks closely but not exactly. Details: SOURCES.md. Chart sources: examples/demos/tqqq-soxl. This page is a charting demo, not investment advice.