As President Obama took office five years ago the markets felt colder and snowier than the weather. Selling short had gone viral. If selling short wasn’t good enough, you had a new tool: the leveraged inverse exchange traded fund (ETF). It seemed like a great idea. Don’t just hedge against further losses in your portfolio. Make extra money from the collapse. Think the market’s about to turn? Just drop the “inverse” and make back your losses even faster with a leveraged fund.

I’d been laid off from trading convertible bonds for Goldman Sachs as the firm downsized with the meltdown setting in. I was writing for another site. Some of my columns would become my first book. How, I wondered, do I get people to look at the great values I saw? After all, if you want to get someone to leave you alone at a party, tell them you trade convertible bonds. And that’s on Wall Street .

But leveraged ETF’s were hot, and inverse ones—that made two or three times what the market lost—were catching on. I had even bought one on the energy sector, thinking I would offset the money I was losing as an oil and gas permabull. I owned a variety of energy stocks and convertible bonds. Some of the names I liked were Devon Energy Devon Energy (DVN), Transocean Transocean (RIG), Hercules Offshore Hercules Offshore (HERO) and Arch Coal (ACI). To hedge part of my exposure I bought a few shares of DUG, the UltraShort Oil and Gas ProShares. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

After a couple of weeks I noticed something odd. My energy stocks had kept going down—nothing new there—but my hedge had lost money too. This couldn’t be right.

I called the fund manager. It was right. They politely took me through the math. I obviously wasn’t the first to call. As a financial professional, I felt that I’d gotten what I deserved for not doing my homework. I was not alone.

It turned out the architects of these leveraged funds had built them to deliver a multiple (negative, with the inverse funds) of each day’s return and then start over from the new closing level. This meant day-end selling on the way down and buying on the way up to maintain the necessary exposures with borrowed money. You don’t have to be Warren Buffett to know that when markets bounce around, regularly buying the rallies and selling the dips is not going to help your performance. Buying high and selling low only works in strongly trending markets, since today’s high is tomorrow’s low (or vice versa in down markets).

I saw that unless you were day-trading, these instruments could kill you. Meanwhile, convertible bonds, devastated in 2008 by forced hedged-fund selling, had never looked more attractive. You were locking in mid-teen annual returns if companies just remained solvent, but you could make a lot more than that if their stocks turned around. How could I get this story across?

Five years ago yesterday I wrote a piece called “The Anti-Leveraged ETF.” In it I explained that if the markets bumped around, up then down, then back up, and so forth, you could lose a lot of money whichever way the market ultimately went. Or if they went nowhere. Meanwhile, those same volatile, possibly trending, possibly trendless markets would be your best friends if you bought convertible bonds. You had to get things exactly right with the leveraged ETF’s, while convertibles had tons of margin for error. Time would probably erode the value of your leveraged ETF, while convertibles would pay you to wait.

Fast forward. Convertible bonds outperformed stocks in 2009’s movie “Return From The Financial Crisis.” Since then they have delivered a substantial portion of the stock market’s performance. Last year bond investors seeking refuge from climbing interest rates, but wanting principal protection, rediscovered them. Meanwhile, leveraged ETF’s have mostly gotten headlines for congressional hearings about the unsupervised and poorly informed brokers who sold them to unsuspecting clients. Some brokerage platforms no longer allow them. I had more than a few people thank me for the warning, and the suggestion of something better.

As I welcome you to my first posting here at Forbes, I can’t promise I’ll always get it right. But I will do my best to make this space worth your time.