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I believe that these four questions are all duplicates of each other:

When writing my answer for the last question (a while ago, now), I noticed that there was quite a bit of overlap with other questions, so I included links to them in my answer. But the more I look at it, the more I realize that really all of these questions should be combined or marked as duplicates or something. I'm not sure of the best approach to take, as there are a lot of good answers spread amongst the questions. I'd just start flagging some as duplicates, but I feel biased about picking one since I wrote one of the somewhat-highly-voted answers.

Should we…

  • Select one of these questions (somehow) and mark the others as duplicates?
  • Attempt to create a new canonical question/answer, maybe as a Community Wiki, and mark all four of these as duplicates of it?
  • Leave things as they are, since they are all coming at the problem from slightly different perspectives, and nobody else seems to have minded?
  • Something else?
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Peter - I agree. Last time I merged 2 tags, I was asked by members to give it time for discussion.

Consider this answer an agreement with the proposal, and I'll wait until the question has had 7 days (or more) for further discussion. Members who have any thought should share them by 5/1.

I checked, and there's a merge ability, to keep answers from all 4 questions. The question itself might need minor edit so answers all apply, but I agree, the questions are pretty much the same.

Edit - On reading Ben's linked article and concerns, I'm less motivated to make this happen. I still think there's overlap, and am willing to merge down to 2 or 3 if a case can be made. I think that we should work to quickly mark as duplicate any new leveraged ETF question, unless it's clearly a new issue regarding these.

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    Have you ever merged questions before? The last time I saw that done, it ended up being a mess. These are not exact duplicates; the details are slightly different. So if you pick one question to be the master and move all the answers from the other questions to it, they won't all make sense anymore.
    – Ben Miller
    Commented Apr 28, 2017 at 14:47
  • No. First time. Please put up an answer. You can suggest there are 2 pretty distinct questions and we can merge into the 2. Or say the 4 all different. My answer was to solicit this dialogue. And ok to push out deadline if you think 7 days from post is too soon. Totally flexible, Ben
    – JTP - Apologise to Monica Mod
    Commented Apr 28, 2017 at 14:50
  • I'm not sure what the best thing to do is. :) I just know that (in my limited experience) I haven't seen merged questions work well. It could conceivably work here, if you could come up with some question text that would fit all the answers, but that's not something we normally do on Stack Exchange; usually we try to write answers to fit the questions, not the other way around. My inclination is to leave it alone, or simply mark a few of these as duplicate if you have a favorite one of these four.
    – Ben Miller
    Commented Apr 28, 2017 at 14:56
  • So far from what I've seen there are two questions that have quite a few answers each, and there were two but only have one or two answers I was thinking of knocking off the two lesser ones and hoping that one of the two bigger ones were a good fit for the merge. I'm very open to leaving it all alone. Less work for me.
    – JTP - Apologise to Monica Mod
    Commented Apr 28, 2017 at 14:59
  • I also think merging would be fraught with difficulty. I'll try to post my own answer with some ideas once I have some!
    – Ganesh Sittampalam Mod
    Commented Apr 28, 2017 at 18:05
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I think your best option is either leave it alone, or use the community wiki.

I would suggest making the community wiki question then "moving" the accepted answers from those 4 into the community wiki question, as best you can.

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The best option that I've seen in similar cases like this is to create a new question and answer, then mark these four duplicate to that. One that is self-contained and has the entire information in it. Of course we can have a few answers if that makes sense.

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