Background: I started playing with the stock market in April-May, drawn by the huge rebound. Since then, I have made what I think is a decent return, except...

I live in the EU, and most of the dollars I poured into NASDAQ & co came from exchanging euros at what turned out to be the worst rate in years. (Oddly enough, my trading platform even makes me use $ when buying European stock from EU markets, like Airbus). The rise in the euro since spring means my ~15% stock market gains becomes a much less impressive ~5% gain when converting back. So I am looking for a way to balance the cool gains to be made on the US market against the exchange rate.

My idea is to use ~17% of my funds to buy the EURUSD index on 5x leverage, creating a position about as big as the rest. This leaves me the rest of my funds for stocks, while compensating for any fluctuations in exchange rate. I am aware this still leaves open some risks:

• missing out on possible gains if the euro falls back down: I can live with this; profit from forex is not my goal
• some possibility of a margin call: I'm ok with the risk, since the wild swings of the stock market are rarely seen on exchange rates; if my position just gradually declines toward a margin call, it's fine, since my dollars are now stronger
• cost: of course there is a fee for a leveraged position; it works out to around 175$ a year for 10k$ "protected", so less than 2% per year. Considering this year had more than 10% variation in exchange rate, it doesn't sound bad

All this considered, it sounds like a decent idea. Yet I can't escape the feeling it's dumb for some reason I can't see. Is there anything I'm missing?