Here is the number that should stop any GraniteShares 2x Long NVDA Daily ETF (NASDAQ:NVDL) holder cold. Over the past year, NVIDIA stock returned 22.21%. A perfect 2x product should have doubled that. Instead, NVDL returned 17.21%. Holders paid for two-times leverage and quietly received less than one.
What You Are Actually Paying
NVDL does not charge you a fee the way a normal index fund does. It charges you through a swap. The fund holds cash collateral and pays a counterparty a financing rate (typically an overnight benchmark plus a spread) to rent 2x NVDA exposure for a single trading day. This exposure is reset every day. That daily reset is the entire product design.
The published expense ratio is only the beginning. Add the swap financing spread and the bid/ask cost inside the derivative, and the true annual carry on a single-stock 2x product can quietly run well above the sticker fee. On a $10,000 position, a 1% headline expense ratio is already $100 per year, and the financing built into the swaps can layer on more. Compound that against simply owning NVIDIA shares (which cost you nothing in fund fees) and the gap over a decade compounds into real money.
The Part the Factsheet Does Not Highlight
Volatility decay is the bigger tax. A 2x daily-reset fund does not compound to 2x over any period longer than one day. It compounds to whatever the sequence of daily returns produces after resetting the leverage at the close of every trading day. In a smooth uptrend, funds like NVDL can beat 2x for a period longer than one day. However, in a choppy/drawdown-heavy stretch, it tends to lag (badly).
The past year serves as a prime example. The VIX spiked to 31.05 on March 27, 2026, with elevated readings across March and early April. Those are exactly the market conditions where daily rebalancing bleeds money: the fund sells low after down days and buys high after up days. The result is that NVDA is up 22.21% over one year, while NVDL is up only 17.21% over that same period. The leverage promise evaporated in the volatility.
The structural picture in a peer product makes the mechanism more visible. In the Direxion Daily NVDA Bull 2X Shares (NASDAQ:NVDU), roughly 85.5% of net assets sit in cash and short-term instruments, with only 10.14% held in actual NVDA stock as of April 30, 2026. The rest of the exposure is synthetic. You are effectively buying cash plus a daily swap contract, and paying to rent the upside.
The Cheaper Mirror
Two lower-cost mirrors exist for the same bullish view. Owning NVIDIA shares directly costs zero fund fee, avoids all daily-reset decay, and captured the full 978.94% five-year return.
If a reader specifically wants 2x daily exposure, NVDU is a direct alternative, though it carries the same structural decay. Over the past year, NVDU returned 17.23%, essentially matching NVDL and confirming the drag is a category feature that affects every single-stock 2x product.
Additionally, a margin account with plain NVDA shares gives leverage without a daily reset, at broker-set financing rates you can actually see.
What This Means for You
The question worth asking centers on what you receive over the holding period you actually care about. On any given day, NVDL will move with NVIDIA. Over longer stretches, that relationship breaks down. If your horizon is longer than one trading session, the fund’s own recent record shows leverage that failed to leverage.
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