ProShare Advisors

Michael Sapir, co-founder and CEO, sets the firm's overall product and strategy direction. Edward Karpowicz serves as Chief Investment Officer, overseeing portfolio management, trading, and the indexing methodologies that underpin ProShares' leveraged, inverse, and thematic ETFs. Sapir's legal background shaped the firm's early focus on structuring novel exposures within the Investment Company Act of 1940 framework.

ProShares specializes almost exclusively in geared and convexity products — leveraged, inverse, and volatility-linked ETFs — rather than competing in the broad-market beta space dominated by Vanguard and BlackRock. The firm's ETFs are structured as '40 Act funds, not exchange-traded notes, which eliminates the issuer credit risk embedded in ETNs and provides different tax treatment. The affiliated ProFunds platform mirrors these strategies in a mutual-fund wrapper for retirement accounts that cannot hold ETFs.

ProShares launched the ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF (BITO) in October 2021, which became the first U.S.-listed bitcoin-linked ETF. The fund drew record first-day natural volume for an ETF launch and gave regulated broker-dealer platforms their first vehicle for gaining bitcoin futures exposure inside a traditional brokerage account. The firm extended this franchise into ether futures with the ProShares Short Ether Strategy ETF (SETH) in December 2023.

While the firm's primary identity is built on leveraged and inverse products, ProShares also operates a suite of long-only dividend-growth ETFs such as the ProShares S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats ETF (NOBL), which targets companies with 25 or more consecutive years of dividend increases. These products serve a different allocation function from the geared equity and crypto products, and they demonstrate the firm's willingness to compete in rule-based factor strategies alongside its signature convexity lineup.

All ProShares leveraged and inverse ETFs reset leverage daily, which means their multi-day returns can diverge significantly from the simple multiple of the benchmark's multi-day return — a phenomenon known as compounding drift or volatility decay. The firm explicitly designs these products for daily hedging and tactical trading, not for buy-and-hold positions lasting longer than a single session. The prospectuses prominently disclose this path-dependency risk, and the products are actively used by professional traders, not long-only allocators.

ProShares and ProFunds operate as affiliated entities sharing common ownership and management under Michael Sapir and Louis Mayberg. ProShares issues exchange-traded funds, and ProFunds issues open-end mutual funds. Many strategies — particularly the leveraged and inverse S&P 500, Nasdaq-100, and Dow Jones Industrial Average exposures — are offered in both wrappers. The dual structure allows the firm to serve taxable brokerage accounts via ETFs and tax-deferred retirement platforms via mutual funds.

ProShares' underlying exposures are predominantly U.S.-centric, with its flagship products tracking the S&P 500, Nasdaq-100, Dow Jones Industrial Average, and S&P 500 VIX futures. The firm also offers single-country and regional leveraged and inverse ETFs covering developed and emerging markets. Its crypto-linked ETFs reference CME-listed futures contracts and are accessible to investors globally, but the fund structures themselves are U.S.-domiciled under the Investment Company Act of 1940.