(WTIU) UBS ETRACS - ProShares - Overview

The UBS ETRACS ProShares Daily 3x Long Crude ETN (NYSE ARCA: WTIU) seeks to deliver three times the daily performance of its reference crude-oil index, after deducting the Daily Investor Fee, Daily Financing Charge, and any applicable Redemption Fee. Because the leverage is reset each trading day, cumulative returns over longer horizons can diverge sharply from a simple 3× multiple of the index’s total return.

As of 24 January 2026, West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude settled at $84.3 per barrel, while the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported a net draw of 5.2 million barrels from commercial crude inventories in the prior week-both bullish signals for oil prices. Simultaneously, OPEC+ has maintained its output-cut agreement through 2026, limiting supply growth to 1.2 million barrels per day, which underpins the sector’s price-support narrative. WTIU’s disclosed annualized expense ratio is 0.95 % (≈ 0.0026 % per day), and the Daily Financing Charge averages 0.015 % per day, factors that erode leveraged gains over time.

From a risk-management perspective, the daily reset creates path-dependency: in volatile markets, the geometric compounding effect can cause the ETN’s value to decay relative to the underlying index, especially when price swings are large and bidirectional. Investors should therefore treat WTIU as a short-term tactical tool rather than a long-haul holding, and stress-test exposure against scenarios of heightened oil-price volatility.

For a deeper quantitative breakdown of how daily compounding could affect your position, see ValueRay.