Not that I recommend it, but I noticed Latin America is only 0.69 correlated with U.S. stocks, so many months ago I bought a leveraged ETF that tracks Latin America.
Be careful with those leveraged ETF's. They are not designed to be held for long periods of time. I studied these a bit about a decade back. My memory is a little fuzzy, but I believe they are based on underlying futures contracts. These naturally decay in value over time. I recall a study of them that guaranteed if you held both the leveraged long and leveraged short ETF of the same index, you were guaranteed to lose something like 3-5% per year. It was a pretty bad deal.
I do like the idea of holding a non-levered ETF in international regions that are under-represented in the bigger indexes.
I delayed replying so I could look at some academic papers, but all of the ones I read mentioned theoretical models. They aren't modeling actual maneuvers of real leveraged ETFs. They assume fixed leverage, for example. Here's some data from UPRO and SPY that questions fixed leverage:
2019 Apr -> now : UPRO 63.6% vs SPY 34.8%
(UPRO seems to have 1.8x leverage instead of 3x leverage)
2019 Dec -> 2020 Apr : UPRO -52.2% vs SPY -14.6%
(This covers the start of the pandemic, where UPRO lost at 3.6x leverage)
2020 Apr -> 2020 Dec : UPRO 133.9% vs SPY 37.4%
(Again 3.6x leverage, but on the upside)
2020 Aug -> 2021 Feb : UPRO 38.9% vs SPY 13.0%
(During the recovery, UPRO seems to be back to 3.0x leverage again)
An LETF falling from 3.0x leverage to 1.8x leverage looks like volatility drag. But volatility drag can't explain 3.6x leverage - and neither of these fits the academic models that assume fixed leverage over time. So I don't have a good model for what happens inside LETFs, but at least I can discount other models that don't explain real world data.
I invest in real world ETFs, not models, and the real ETFs don't match the models. Still, I plan to exit several leveraged ETFs this year as the recovery takes hold.
I'm open to reading other articles and papers.