Direxion, the Newton, Mass.-based fund sponsor known for its family of leveraged and inverse-leveraged ETFs, filed registration papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday to launch 11 new funds focused primarily on commodities and currencies.

Direxion’s new fleet of ETFs consists of triple-exposure gold, silver, euro, Japanese yen and dollar funds. Ten of the funds are part of bull-and-bear pairs, which is usually how the firm introduces new products.

Commodities have been in a secular bull market over the past 10 years, largely because of growing demand from countries like China. For their part, currencies have come to be considered more important in recent years, as the increasingly international nature of investing makes focusing on exchange rates critical.

The commodities funds and their benchmarks are:

• The Direxion Daily Gold Bull 3X Shares and the Direxion Daily Gold Bear 3X Shares seek to return triple the daily performance and inverse daily performance, respectively, of COMEX gold futures and;
• The Direxion Daily Silver Bull 3X Shares and the Direxion Daily Silver Bear 3X shares will similarly track COMEX silver futures. COMEX, a division of the New York Mercantile Exchange, is the premiere U.S. market for precious metals futures trading.

The currency ETFs are:

• The Direxion Daily Japanese Yen Bull 3X Shares and the Direxion Daily Japanese Yen Bear 3X Shares will track movement of the dollar price of yen, using the 4:00 p.m. ET spot prices, provided by Bloomberg;
• The Direxion Daily Euro Bull 3X Shares and the Direxion Daily Euro Bear 3X Shares will track dollar price movement in euros, and also use the 4:00 p.m. ET spot prices, provided by Bloomberg.
• The Direxion Daily U.S. Dollar Bull 3X Shares and the Direxion Daily U.S. Dollar Bear 3X Shares will track the movement of the ICE U.S. Dollar Index futures market. The ICE U.S. Dollar Index measures the value of the greenback relative to a basket of six foreign currencies: euro, yen, British pounds, Canadian dollars, Swedish krona and Swiss francs.

A Volatility-Hedged ETF

In addition, Direxion will offer a nonleveraged fund based on the S&P 500 VEQTOR Index, an index that combines broad equity market exposure with a built-in volatility hedge by allocating assets among the S&P 500 Index, the S&P 500 Short-Term VIX Futures Index and cash.

VIX, a product of the Chicago Board Options Exchange, reflects the prices of S&P 500 futures options, and is a benchmark for measuring near-term volatility. Direxion is the first fund sponsor to build an S&P 500 VEQTOR-based ETF.

Direxion didn’t identify ticker symbols for the new funds or disclose expense ratios in the filing. The new funds will trade on the NYSE Arca platform.