2026 portfolio updates: What financial advisors need to know
Updates to the Betterment managed strategies are coming soon.
Key takeaways
- Betterment is implementing 2026 strategy updates across Core, Value Tilt, Innovative Technology, SRI, and Crypto ETF portfolios.
U.S. equity exposure is shifting slightly toward large-cap stocks and away from mid-caps to better align with benchmarks.
Non-SRI portfolios are adding an actively managed bond fund, with select portfolios modestly increasing short-term Treasury exposure.
The Crypto ETF portfolio is increasing bitcoin, reducing ethereum, and lowering overall fund costs.
- Updates will be transitioned automatically and tax-efficiently, with advisors able to adjust rebalancing settings in advance.
As part of Betterment’s investment oversight, our Investing team regularly reviews and updates our portfolio strategies to align with changing market conditions. In our 2026 portfolio updates, we are implementing strategic adjustments across multiple portfolios, guided by updated capital market assumptions, the expected risk and return profiles of asset classes.
Portfolios refreshed by the 2026 strategy changes:
- Core portfolio
- Value Tilt portfolio
- Innovative Technology portfolio
- All Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) portfolios: Broad, Social, and Climate Impact
- Crypto ETF portfolio
Key investment shifts: equities, bonds, and crypto
Equities: We are modestly increasing our exposure to U.S. large-caps, while reducing exposure to U.S. mid-caps, for nearly all portfolios. This better aligns our portfolios with benchmarks while maintaining strong diversification.
Fixed Income: This year, we’re introducing an additional actively managed bond fund to our non-SRI portfolios. Unlike traditional passive bond strategies, which tend to overweight U.S. Treasuries, active management gives us the ability to be more flexible and seek opportunities across broader areas of the bond market. This added flexibility helps portfolios stay aligned with shifting market conditions. In a declining interest rate environment, segments like securitized products and high-yield bonds may offer more attractive risk-adjusted return potential. At select risk levels across our portfolios (including all three of our SRI portfolios), we’re also adjusting short-term bond allocations by slightly increasing exposure to short-term Treasuries. These changes help smooth the glide path used in our auto-adjust feature, which de-risks clients as they approach their goal’s target date.
Betterment Crypto ETF portfolio: We are increasing our bitcoin and decreasing our ethereum allocation to align with its market capitalization weight. Further changes include obtaining these exposures through lower-cost funds, which reduces the portfolio’s weighted average expense ratio of the portfolio by 0.10%.
How these updates affect your clients’ portfolios
Similar to last year’s updates, we plan to update allocations for newly funded portfolios towards the end of January 2026. For existing goals, our automated rebalancing feature will transition client portfolios to the new target portfolio weights, using clients’ dividends, deposits, and withdrawals and sell/buy rebalancing to manage the transition tax-efficiently. Funds that are no longer in the target allocation may be retained to help reduce potential tax impact, while future cash flows will be directed toward the new primary holdings.
Rebalancing will respect any gains allowance, or other rebalancing settings that you’ve set for your clients’ goals. You can log into the Advisor Dashboard to review and update your client gains allowances, or disable system rebalancing if you prefer to rely on only cash flows to reduce drift in your client accounts. You’ll want to adjust settings before the end of January to ensure they're in effect before portfolio updates are made.
Learn more about Betterment’s investment approach
If you’d like to find out more about Betterment’s approach to investing, you can check out these articles: