Key takeaways
- As a part of our automated investing providing, we frequently replace our portfolios to make sure they replicate the most recent long-term market forecasts.
- This 12 months’s updates might be rolling out quickly and require no motion on the a part of Betterment clients.
- They embody a brand new actively-managed bond fund, small tweaks to U.S. inventory and bond allocations, and decrease crypto ETF prices.
Between tariffs, AI, and shutdowns, traders confronted all types of uncertainty in 2025.
However for those who’re invested in a Betterment-built portfolio, you do not have to fret whether or not your investing is maintaining with the instances. That’s as a result of we replace our portfolios annually primarily based on the most recent long-term forecasts.
These updates embody adjusting the weights of assorted asset courses, in addition to swapping in new funds that ship decrease prices and/or higher publicity. They’re only a few of the methods our automated investing delivers worth, and so they’ll be rolling out quickly. So with out additional ado, let’s preview what’s new for 2026:
Expanded entry to bond markets
Passive investing—monitoring preset indexes or lists of investments—continues to be the bedrock of our portfolio technique due to its low prices and robust observe report, but it surely has limitations on the planet of fastened earnings.
That’s as a result of many passively-managed bond funds replicate solely a portion of the entire market. And it’s these under-represented sectors—high-yield and securitized choices, amongst others—that may assist traders capitalize on altering market circumstances like falling rates of interest.
So to reap the benefits of these alternatives, we’re making a new actively-managed bond fund a central piece of the next portfolios’ bond allocations:
- Core
- Revolutionary Tech
- Worth Tilt
- Versatile portfolio
- US-only portfolio (unique to Betterment Premium and never out there in Betterment 401(okay)s)
Whereas the bond market is comparatively ripe for energetic administration, a lot of that edge hinges on the experience of the workforce who manages the fund. That’s why when utilizing all these funds in our portfolios, we use a strong quantitative and qualitative technique to dimension up fund managers.
Nice-tuned U.S. publicity
Just like final 12 months, we’re making minor changes to our allocation of U.S. shares. This allocation breaks down alongside three subasset courses, with every outlined by their underlying firms’ present market valuations:
- Small-cap (lower than $2 billion)
- Mid-cap (between $2 billion and $10 billion)
- Massive-cap (greater than $10 billion)
We’re dialing down publicity to mid-cap shares—bringing their allocation in step with small-cap—and in flip growing our allocation to large-cap shares. These modifications apply to the identical portfolios above, and higher align them with the relative dimension of every subasset class inside the inventory market.
Past these tweaks, some danger ranges of our portfolios (together with all three of our Socially Accountable Investing portfolios) may even see modest will increase in publicity to short-term Treasuries. This helps clean out the glide path for purchasers utilizing our auto-adjust characteristic and de-risk their investing as goal dates close to.
Decrease crypto ETF prices
Within the Betterment Crypto ETF portfolio (not out there in Betterment 401(okay)s), we’re growing our bitcoin allocation to align with its market capitalization weight. Additional modifications embody swapping in lower-cost funds, which reduces the portfolio’s weighted common expense ratio by 0.10%. As a part of our fund choice methodology, we frequently search for alternatives to decrease investing prices as new funds change into out there. For extra info on the Crypto ETF portfolio, please see the portfolio disclosure.
Sit again and benefit from the swap
Just like final 12 months’s portfolio updates, we’ll progressively implement this 12 months’s modifications within the weeks to come back, with our know-how designed to hunt probably the most tax-efficient path for taxable accounts. Tax-advantaged accounts equivalent to Betterment IRAs and Betterment 401(okay)s received’t see any tax impression because of these updates.
To search out the refreshed portfolio weights, take a look at the related portfolio pages on our web site. Prospects may see their up to date holdings within the Betterment app with just a few clicks. It’s yet one more instance of how we make it simple to be invested.
