Over the last few years, the market has seen a number of trends that have led to huge market moves. Apart from AI, which is the main impetus to the jet fueled “Magnificent 7” tech stocks leading the S&P 500 and still going strong, some of the booms that became busts in the latter part of 2025 going into January 2026 are:
- ETFs with extreme leverage
- Ultra high yield ETFs using options for income
- Cryptocurrencies
- Meme Stocks
While there is nothing preventing any of these sectors from resurging again if the justifications are valid, the retail fervor that supplied the ammunition for them to defy naysayers had decidedly cooled starting in Q3 2025 and the redemption selloffs seemed to mirror their ascendancies. Although there are a few exceptions, the sectors, on a whole, have definitely rediscovered the laws of gravity. The following ETFs are representative of these trends’ precipitous descents:
- Direxion Daily Gold Miners Index Bear 2x Shares ETF (NYSE: DUST)
- YieldMax MSTR Option Income Strategy ETF (NYSE: MSTY)
- Roundhill Meme Stock ETF (NYSE: MEME)
Direxion Daily Gold Miners Index Bear 2x Shares ETF
With gold’s unprecedented price soar to stratospheric new heights, those that have long bet against it, such as ETFs like DUST, are seeing proportionately large losses.
One of the biggest market upheavals of 2025 going into 2026 has been the huge bull run of gold and silver. At the time of this writing, In the past year, gold has risen over +70%, from $2,778 per oz. to $4,983, fast approaching $5,000. Silver has made an even bigger percentage move in the same period, from $31 to over $103 for a +230% rise.
That said, there are many who have done well in past decades betting against gold making a big positive move, since it historically was only a flight to safety and failed to generate any returns that could approach the S&P 500, let alone those of tech stocks or other fast movers.
DUST is an ETF that deploys leverage to generate a 200% move that is inverse to the referenced market, which is in DUST’s case, the price of gold. So as gold continued to climb, DUST lost double the amount each day, commensurately. Therefore, it should be no surprise that it has dropped -79% since August 2025, and -91% in the past year.
While some analysts think that gold is overbought, past 24-7 Wall Street articles have mentioned why the bull run has good reason to continue for quite a while longer.
YieldMax MSTR Option Income Strategy ETF
Bitcoin’s heavy sell off price drop from $124,000 in October to $89,000 at present has dragged down stocks and ETFs also riding on BTC’s fortunes.
The YieldMax ETF model takes advantage of highly volatile stocks in a bull run and uses a call option strategy to generate substantial income. These ETFs have worked well when pegged to Magnificent 7 stocks. When pegged to a stock with a sizable cryptocurrency experiencing a selloff, the results have not been pretty. Michael Saylor’s agenda of loading up on Bitcoin into Strategy’s (NASDAQ: MSTR | MSTR Price Prediction) coffers, had a sizable bull run in sympathy with Bitcoin’s gains. Viewed as an equity proxy play on Bitcoin, MSTR has lost over 60% of its value since August.
MSTY is the YieldMax ETF pegged to MSTR. While its yield is listed presently at 294%, it is paying a nice chunk of those dividends out of NAV, resulting in its valuation drop from $101 in August to $29.80 at present. That’s a -71.94% drop.
Roundhill Meme Stock ETF
Game Stop became the first meme stock and spawned a movie as well as a list of other stocks that underwent short squeeze appreciation.
The film, Dumb Money (2023), is a comedy about the Game Stop short squeeze of 2021. Essentially, a bunch of retail investors who communicated on Reddit discovered that there was a massive institutional short position on Game Stop stock. By continually placing small retail buy orders, their acquisition created a short squeeze that forced the institutions to buy back stock at much higher valuations. The “meme stock” phenomenon would subsequently replicate with Hertz, AMC, Koss, and a few other stocks.
MEME was an ETF created by Roundhill Investments at the end of 2021. The NASDAQ had just peaked, and the tech sector dropped off about 32% in 2022, enough to cause MEME to shut down in late 2023. In 2025, interest in meme stocks began resurfacing, and Roundhill CEO Dave Mazza decided to relaunch MEME as an actively managed ETF that rebalances weekly. Its holdings target highly volatile stocks with substantial retail investor interest that have “cutting edge themes”.
Since October 2025 when it was as high as $11.47, MEME has since fallen to $7.82 for a roughly -31% drop.
While comebacks for all three of these ETFs and others that are in related areas are possible, they serve as a good reminder that the old Wall Street maxim about greed still holds true, so timing one’s selling is the secret to profits: “Bulls make money. Bears make money. Pigs get slaughtered.”
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