Feeling Bearish? Try These ETFs That Take a Contrarian Approach

Key Points

• The most-traded ETFs taking a short strategy have one-month average trading volumes above 53 million, ensuring liquidity for active traders.
• Three notable and highly traded bearish ETFs include SOXS, ZSL, and NVD.
• These funds provide leveraged inverse exposure to semiconductor stocks, silver, and NVIDIA shares, respectively.

The S&P 500 was up about 17% in 2025, but has traded essentially flat so far in 2026, as investors wonder whether a prolonged rally may be about to give way to a major selloff—or whether a potentially overhyped AI market may collapse. For pessimists, one approach may be to focus on more stable stocks, including dividend payers, that can withstand potential upcoming volatility.

Others may opt for a more active bearish bet, banking on the market or some segment therein declining in the near future. Fortunately, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that take a short approach exist to cover a multitude of strategies and market corners. While it doesn't necessarily pay to follow the trends and buy up funds that have recently been popular among investors, it may nonetheless be telling to see which of these firms have experienced high trading volumes in recent periods. Below are three of the most aggressively bearish ETFs that have also been highly traded.

SOXS Is a Highly Leveraged Inverse Semiconductor Play

The Direxion Daily Semiconductor Bear 3x Shares NYSEARCA: SOXS is a highly leveraged (and thus highly risky) play on an index of semiconductor stocks. The fund aims to provide 3x short leverage to the NYSE Semiconductor Index, meaning that it aims to provide -300% of the index's performance each day.

This means that daily losses across the semiconductor space can translate into amplified gains for SOXS holders, but it can also magnify ETF losses if semiconductor stocks perform even modestly well over the same period.

As a daily-leveraged fund, SOXS resets each day and is therefore designed for short-term trading only, not for buy-and-hold investors. Fortunately for active investors, this fund's trading volume is very high—its one-month average volume is a sky-high 599 million. Combined with assets under management (AUM) of about $1 billion, liquidity should never be a concern for SOXS traders.

While investors pay a premium for the unique approach SOXS offers—its expense ratio is 0.97%—the potential for outsized gains on days in which semiconductor names fall may outweigh the cost for bearish traders.

A Powerful Bearish Approach to Daily Silver Price Movement

After a meteoric rise throughout much of 2025, silver prices plunged early in 2026, signaling that the rally was not going to continue forever. Still, silver is up 141% in the last year and about 14% year-to-date (YTD), crushing the performance of the S&P 500 over the same periods.

Investors expecting that silver will face another decline might look to the ProShares UltraShort Silver NYSEARCA: ZSL, which provides 2x short leveraged exposure to the price of silver on a daily basis. ZSL tracks the Bloomberg Silver Subindex, which follows the price of silver by using futures contracts. This means that it is possible that ZSL will not follow the spot price changes of silver exactly, so investors should be prepared for occasional deviation.

Further, like SOXS above, ZSL's -2x exposure resets on a daily basis.

This is a reason why it's essential for investors that ZSL be highly liquid, and with a one-month average trading volume of about 349 million, this commodity pool should leave investors without concerns on that front. Like SOXS as well, ZSL has a fairly high expense ratio for its unique double inverse leverage strategy, with an expense ratio of 0.95%.

Double Inverse Exposure to the Largest Publicly Traded Company in the World

As the largest publicly traded company in the world, NVIDIA Corp. NASDAQ: NVDA is a bellwether not only for the broader tech and AI spaces but for the market and the economy as a whole. Despite share prices rising by close to 1,200% over the last five years, NVIDIA still has the potential for significant daily downward movement. The GraniteShares 2x Short NVDA Daily ETF NASDAQ: NVD aims to benefit from these scenarios with -2x leveraged exposure.

NVD attempts to generate -200% returns relative to the daily price movement of NVIDIA's common stock, meaning that the fund excels on days in which NVDA declines. Its trading volume is not as high as the funds above, but it should still make it quite easy for investors to make the active trades that are so vital for a fund such as this—NVD has a one-month average trading volume of around 53 million.

Besides its risk level, the other trade-off for investors bearish on NVDA over the very short term is that NVD has a high expense ratio as 1.35%. However, this may not matter much if the fund has the capacity to generate significant returns when NVDA dips.