direxion Funds is schedule to release 3x leveraged funds to the market.

BE CAREFUL!  As with most of these leveraged ETFs, the literature is a bit misleading:

"Direxion Shares powerful 3x leverage (the highest in the ETF and mutual fund industry) seeks to amplify the performance (positively or negatively) of your investment capital by 300%".  So when the market is up 20% by the end of the year as the world embraces Barack Obama and Santa Claus is throwing money from the sleigh during the Santa Claus rally, you're going to be up a cool 60%, right?  Not likely.  Depending on the volatility, you could underperform unleveraged assets and I'm not talking about if it just goes straight down.  The goal is to mimic the day-to-day movement.  If the Russell 2000 is up 1% for the day, the ETF should be up around 3% for the day.  That's the extent of the following.

Is this a bad vehicle?  As most things, it depends on the situation.  I don't recommend any of these products when they have no track record.  I've yet to have someone come to me and tell me that they were pleasantly surprised that their investment product returned above and beyond what they expected.   This isn't Monopoly, so there's never a bank error in your favor.

The economy is now officially in a recession.  It finally happened.  It feels like a self fullfilling prophecy to me, but we'll truly never know how that tail wags.  The news on the personal front has shifted a bit from retirement and stock holdings to layoffs.  I've had two friends lose jobs on Friday and a few more that are uneasy.  The thing to remember is that your personal economy can crash very quickly and without warning.  Reflecting back to my windfall allocation discussion regarding buying stock vs. paying down the mortgage, this is a great example of where folks could do right by themselves to pay off the house.  If you live within your means as it is, you could probably come close to making ends meet bagging groceries if you had no debt to pay (house, car, all paid off, no stupid credit card debt).  If you can't, that should be your goal.

While it is important to keep an eye on the macro, you can't do much about economic cycles.  The president and congress cannot do much about it either (even though they like to tell you they can, or at least how the other guy messed it all up).  However, you can do a ton for your personal economy.

All of the items I blog about ... trading systems, option plays, ETF and even individual stock buys should be considered after your financial house is clean.  I take it for granted that my readers are probably well aware of this, but I think it bears the occassional repeat just in case you missed it.