The New York Stock Exchange has more than doubled its ambitions to offer bitcoin-related securities with a new application to the Securities and Exchange Commission now seeking approval to list five exchange-traded funds.

NYSE Acra, the exchange’s Chicago-based stocks and options market, applied for approval for two ETFs in December: the ProShares Bitcoin ETF and the ProShares Short Bitcoin ETF. In its new application, it has applied for approval for three additional ETFs: the Direxion Asset Management 1.25X Bull Fund, the 1.5X Bull Fund and the 2X Bull Fund.

An ETF is a marketable security that tracks an index, a commodity, bonds or a basket of assets like an index fund. In the case of the Direxion Asset Management ETF, each fund will attempt to leverage “investment results (before fees and expenses) that correlate positively to either 125 percent, 150 percent, or 200 percent the daily return of the target benchmark.” According to CNBC, for each fund, that means a 1 percent rise in the price of bitcoin futures should result in a per-share gain of between 1.25 and 2 percent, depending on which Bull Fund is used. Conversely, if the price of bitcoin falls, investors’ losses would be multiplied by 1.25.

The high risks involved, particularly given the ETFs themselves will trade in bitcoin futures, cannot be emphasized enough. Bitcoin futures, first released on the Cboe Global Markets exchange Dec. 10 and followed by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Dec. 17, have not been particularly successful for investors.

With the first futures offered due to expire later this month, City A.M. noted, investors who plowed money into bitcoin futures are currently facing hefty losses. “Soon after bitcoin futures debuted on the Chicago Board Options Exchange in December, frantic trading caused the price of the January contract to rise from around $15,000 to almost $20,000,” the report noted. “But as the first monthly future is due to expire on 17 January, the contracts’ value has plummeted … hitting a low of under $15,000 last week.”

The price of bitcoin itself continued to vacillate in trading over the weekend, creeping up briefly above $16,000 before dropping back to the $15,000 price range it has regularly hit over the last two weeks.

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