Four. The same, plus a holding that does not move with stocks
What this adds to portfolio three, what it costs, and six things to know before holding it. This is the least settled page on the site.
What it holds
| Ticker | Fund | Weight | Fee | Cost after lending income |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RSST | Return Stacked U.S. Stocks & Managed Futures ETF | 30% | 0.99% | not audited |
| VTI | Vanguard Morningstar Total Stock Market ETF | 19% | 0.03% | 0.012% |
| VXUS | Vanguard Total International Stock ETF | 16% | 0.05% | 0.014% |
| VTV | Vanguard Value ETF | 15% | 0.03% | 0.027% |
| AVDV | Avantis International Small Cap Value ETF | 10% | 0.36% | 0.300% |
| IDMO | Invesco S&P International Developed Momentum ETF | 5% | 0.25% | 0.226% |
| AVES | Avantis Emerging Markets Value ETF | 5% | 0.36% | 0.292% |
Weighted, about 0.38% a year in fees and about 0.36% after lending income, or roughly $38 and $36 on $10,000 as an illustration. RSST’s 0.99% has no waiver, so that is both its gross and its net figure. Fund facts were read from filings on 17 August 2026.
Six things to know before you read any further
No experiment has ever run these exact seven funds at a 30% weight in RSST. Every headline number below belongs to a version holding 25%, with the other five points in VTI. The gap between the two has never been measured.
98% of this portfolio’s active risk sits in RSST alone. Not 98% of the money, which is 30%. Almost everything that makes this portfolio different from an index fund is one fund from a small firm.
Of the managed-futures exchange-traded funds filing in July 2019, 52% had stopped filing by the end of 2025. Thirteen of twenty-five, and a lower bound, because a fund that never filed at all cannot appear in the count.
RSST’s measured exposure rests on 31 months of filings, roughly one kind of market weather. The fund is under three years old.
It holds no bonds. That is a choice made here rather than an oversight, and how much you keep in bonds or cash outside it remains yours to decide.
The fund does not disclose what its borrowing costs and files 0.00% of interest expense, as does every fund in its family. That cost decides whether the whole idea is worth anything, and nobody has measured it.
Why each piece is there
The six holdings from portfolio three do the same jobs they did there. One caveat carries over: IDMO is the weakest of them and the first to drop if you want a simpler portfolio. Momentum has the widest gap on this site between what an idea pays on paper and what anyone has collected, 9.48% a year against 1.86% delivered by real funds before fees, and it turns over 105% of itself a year against 4% for the value fund beside it.
RSST is the addition. It holds about a dollar of US stocks and about a dollar of managed futures for every dollar you put in, borrowing inside the fund to do it. Managed futures follow price trends up and down across stock indexes, bonds, currencies and commodities. Because of the borrowing you never sell stocks to buy them, so the question becomes whether they add anything on top.
The record of funds that borrow inside themselves is worth knowing before you buy one. The two best-known funds that use borrowing to hold stocks and bonds together both did worse than a plain 60/40 mix in 2022, which was the one year the idea was supposed to prove itself: one lost 25.72% and the other 43.17%. The second of those advertises a 0.59% fee. Its real all-in cost is 2.94%, and its five-year return after tax was −0.57% a year.
What it is compared against, and what the comparison showed
The comparison is a cheap global index fund borrowed to the same total exposure and charged the same interest, over 427 months to May 2026. Setting this portfolio against an index fund that borrows nothing would credit the borrowing as if it were skill.
Against that borrowed index fund, the 25% version came to 2.20 points a year ahead, plausibly anywhere from 0.05 to 4.57. The smallest gap the test could see was 2.83 points, so the result sits below the resolution of the test that produced it. Separating the two would take about 59 years, and the specification said so before the test ran.
What is established is narrower. The exposure is real: the fund delivered about 0.68 of a dollar of trend per dollar of capital, in a range of 0.41 to 0.96, measured from its own filed returns.
Its relationship with stocks is thinner evidence than it looks, and this is the property you would be buying the fund for. Across the full period that relationship measures slightly negative in three separate sources built from different data. Inside crisis months one measurement puts it much more strongly negative, but those months are four episodes rather than four independent years, and a longer run of data reaching back to 1934, built differently, finds no relationship at all. Nobody has reconciled the two.
What is not established is the average return, anywhere, by anyone.
One thing this kind of holding has clearly done: through the ten years to February 2009, when US stocks lost 2.55% a year, a 30% trend holding added about 9.5 points a year above the stocks it displaced, turning that decade into roughly +0.05% a year. In ordinary decades it added 0.21 points. One decade, in one set of data, and that is the whole case.
How sure we are
We can’t tell. The measured gap is smaller than what the test could see, the fund is under three years old, and the one number that would decide it, what the borrowing costs, is not disclosed.
What it feels like when it is losing
The tested version fell 50.3% at its worst, against 64.6% for a control that borrows as much and 52.7% for a cheap control that borrows nothing. It spent 42 months under water: three and a half years of opening a statement and seeing less than you had at the peak.
The way this holding hurts in particular is worse. A borrowed trend holding has run 59.9% behind the stocks it displaced over 11.2 years, and did not recover inside the window. Eleven years of paying 0.99% a year for a fund that did nothing but cost you money, while stocks rose and everyone who owned nothing clever did better than you did.
If trend keeps paying what we guess it pays, about 17% of simulated thirty-year paths end with the holder selling. If it has stopped paying entirely, 66.7% do. Those risks do not cancel: whether you can hold it and whether it pays are a bet on the same unknown.
Since it launched in September 2023 RSST has returned 17.17% a year against 21.50% for the S&P 500. Thirty-five months settles nothing about a holding whose whole purpose is the years stocks lose. It is what the statement says, and evidence in neither direction.
What would make us drop it
The fund closing or merging, which happened to 52% of its category in six and a half years. Delivered exposure falling below what the filings claim. The financing cost being disclosed and turning out to be large. And the matched test nobody has run: these seven funds at 30% against the same seven at 25%, the only thing that would show whether the published weight is right.
The decision that matters more than this page
How much of your money is in stocks at all outweighs everything above. Moving a portfolio from 60% stocks to 90% was worth 1.27 points a year, against 4.85 points of variation from one year to the next. That is more than every lean on this site combined. Choosing 60/40 is itself a forecast: it says stocks will do better than bonds by only about 1.2 points a year. One country, 1963 to 2025, with a modelled ten-year government bond, and about 24 years of your own results before you could be 90% confident about the step.