TQQQ Stock Is Making Wealth Managers Nervous — And They’re Still Buying It

Every time there is a Fed meeting, an earnings season, or a bad Monday morning on Wall Street, there is a certain level of tension that follows leveraged ETFs. It’s not quite terror. The feeling you get when you see someone order the most popular dish on the menu and then reach for a glass of water they know won’t be sufficient is more akin to fascinated uneasiness. For those who keep a close eye on the markets, ProShares’ triple-leveraged Nasdaq-100 fund, TQQQ, creates precisely that feeling.

The fund fulfills its commitments. TQQQ strives to climb three times as hard on days when the Nasdaq-100 rises. The math is equally brutal on days when it falls, as it has been lately. In late March, the Nasdaq Composite fell more than 10% from its October peak, formally entering correction territory.

Every moment of that decline was felt by TQQQ, intensified and intensified. However, during the last quarter of 2025, a number of U.S. wealth managers—the type of companies that oversee other people’s retirement funds—quietly increased their numbers.

42,668 shares, worth about $2.25 million, were acquired by Sherman Wealth Management. Wealth Enhancement Advisory Services ended the quarter with 135,309 shares valued at about $7.44 million, more than doubling its stake.

Hunched over a laptop at midnight, these aren’t anonymous day traders. These are registered advisers submitting documentation to the SEC. It is difficult to ignore the size of the wager, especially when the underlying trade was already beginning to show signs of weakness.

Some of these companies seem to think they are buying into weakness rather than chasing momentum. Chris Galipeau of Franklin Templeton publicly argued that the risk-reward ratio is improving, citing the tech sector’s forward price-to-earnings ratio dropping from 32 at the end of October to about 20. That is a significant change. The markets haven’t provided a clear response to the question of whether triple leverage is sufficient.

ProShares’ documentation contains a clear warning that is often overlooked: if you hold TQQQ for more than a day, your actual returns may differ significantly from the stated 3x multiple. The culprit is the daily reset mechanism. It works against long-term holders in erratic markets in ways that aren’t immediately clear from the pitch or name. Some investors may be fully aware of this and are trading appropriately. Perhaps a lot of people don’t.

ProShares Ultra QQQ, which aims to double rather than triple the Nasdaq-100’s daily return, was added to Woodward Diversified Capital’s QLD position. By December 31, its holdings had increased by almost 128% in just one quarter, to 26,519 shares. Leverage-wise, it’s smaller than TQQQ, but the trade’s direction is the same: a focused wager that technology will soon recover.

The timing is what makes everything so strange. Citing the need to more thoroughly evaluate risk, the SEC discreetly decided in December to halt its evaluations of leveraged funds that provide more than two times exposure. At the same time that advisers were flooding in, regulators were raising red flags. Mo Sparks at Direxion acknowledged the obvious: interest in volatility trading has increased.

Despite this, Direxion and GraniteShares continued to push new leveraged products to market. Bryan Armour of Morningstar presented it in a more circumspect manner, characterizing it as an increasing dependence on conjecture. Most likely, both are correct.

The fact that those Form 13F filings only record a frozen moment—holdings as of December 31, released with a 45-day delay—adds to the complexity. The drawdowns, sector rotation, and general market anxiety caused by trade policy and geopolitical noise that followed March’s turbulence are all still unseen. Mid-May is when the next round of applications, which covers positions through March 31, will be released. Until then, it is impossible to determine whether those leveraged positions were maintained, reduced, or discreetly abandoned between January and the present.

Layering leverage on top of an instrument that already operates at 3x, Bitget recently listed TQQQ and SQQQ as stock contracts on its platform, supporting up to 20x leverage. There are live trading accounts that contain that combination right now. Whether that kind of product finds a serious market or just becomes a cautionary tale waiting to be told is still up in the air.

It’s clear from watching all of this that TQQQ is now more than just a trading tool. In markets that continue to insist on being cautious, it has evolved into a sort of gauge for the level of risk appetite. Strategists observe the perfect storm developing over megacap tech, advisers file their disclosures, and the fund keeps doing exactly what it was designed to do: magnifying everything, both the good and the bad days, without preference or mercy.