Bets on falling prices are increasing

Dusseldorf Stock prices are rising again. But investors should be careful – at least that’s what the behavior of hedge funds suggests. Because the unregulated investment funds rely on falling prices for large exchange-traded US funds (ETF). This emerges from data from the financial data provider S3 Partners, which is available to the Handelsblatt.

According to this, the value of open “short bets” in the more than 3000 ETFs in the USA is around $250 billion. And the trend is rising, although the markets have recently stabilized: at the beginning of May, the value was still 243 billion dollars. Hedge funds therefore continue to anticipate price risks.

“This is a warning signal,” says Volker Brühl, Managing Director of the Center for Financial Studies in Frankfurt. “Hedge fund behavior is a very strong market indicator.”