Leveraged investment products have been fairly popular lately. ProFunds and Rydex Funds, and their ETF subsidiaries, have gathered huge assets with their leveraged products in recent months.

But they are not the only providers of leveraged funds on the market. Direxion Funds, which has a number of leveraged and inverse-leveraged mutual funds trading, recently filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for 12 more mutual funds covering different pieces of the BRIC region, as well as emerging markets debt. You can view the prospectus here.

Ten of the funds are linked to five indexes, and each index is tied to a pair of funds. The "Bull" fund aims to achieve 200% of the underlying index's returns, and the "Bear" fund aims to achieve the inverse (-200%) of that. The indexes include the S&P BRIC 40 Index, the MSCI Brazil Index, FTSE/Xinhua China 25 Index, MSCI India Index and the DAXglobal Russia Index.

The remaining two funds, the EM Debt Bull Fund and the EM Debt Bear Fund, will not be tied to an index. The Bull fund will seek to maximize its returns through investments in high-yield debt instruments and related derivatives tied to emerging markets, while the Bear fund will take short positions in those same types of investments.

ProFunds and its ProShares ETF already have funds tied to the Emerging Markets and FTSE/Xinhua China 25 indexes, but the India, Russia and BRIC funds are unique—and could prove interesting to traders looking to hedge those markets. 

Costs could be an issue for the new funds, though. Although net operating costs were not listed in the prospectus, the total annual operating expenses for some of the funds are quite high without the usual waivers, ranging as low as 1.48% for "Investor" shares of the BRIC Bull 2X Fund to as high as 9.64% for "Service" class shares of the EM Debt Bear Fund. The latter's net operating expenses will likely be far cheaper once the typical waivers and exemptions are applied, but annual operating expenses of nearly 10% are rather daunting, even in the preliminary stages.

Rafferty Asset Management is the advisor for the proposed funds.