Learn more about 2025 portfolio updates.
One of the reasons employers choose Betterment to manage their company’s 401(k) plan is because we become the investment fiduciary, which means we are responsible for keeping an eye on the investments and making changes as necessary. As a fiduciary, Betterment is required to act in your best interest. We do this in part by regularly adjusting our portfolios' asset allocations, or the specific weights of asset classes (i.e., stocks and bonds) and subasset classes (large-cap stocks, long-term bonds, etc.).
Let’s quickly walk through our approach to portfolio management, and then we’ll preview the changes coming in the weeks ahead.
It all starts with sizing up asset classes. We run a rigorous, data-driven process to form long-term expectations for both the returns and the risk levels of various classes. The aim: to maximize your expected return relative to risk and to help make sure you’re compensated appropriately for the calculated risk you take with your investing.
From there, we simulate thousands of paths for the market, and average the optimal asset allocations for each path to build more robust portfolio weights. This “Monte Carlo” technique is ideal for the areas of life where random variables are everywhere, areas like capital markets.
Lastly, it’s important to reiterate that while things like interest rate shifts and federal fiscal policy can drive short-term market volatility in the months and year ahead, we manage our portfolios based on long-term outlooks. We keep an eye on the short-term, but we don’t chase trends. Instead, we keep our heads up while helping customers reach their investment goals.
For starters, we're updating a handful of portfolios, ones we build and manage ourselves. We offer a few others managed by partners like Goldman Sachs and BlackRock—you can check out those allocations in the Betterment app or on our website.
Our updates will encompass these portfolios:
Here's what's changing.
More U.S. exposure
While we don't advise going all-in on American markets, the forecasted risk-adjusted return for the U.S. remains strong in the long run (think: decades) relative to international markets. So similar to last year’s portfolio updates, we’re dialing down the international exposure for most portfolios. Those portfolios will see:
More short-term corporate bonds
The biggest change this year will be felt by portfolios with larger bond allocations. We expect U.S. short-term, high-grade corporate bonds to offer higher yields without undue increases in long-term risk, so we’re increasing the exposure to them while decreasing the weight of short-term U.S. Treasuries. The yields on these types of treasury bonds, which mature in a year or less, tend to fall right along with interest rates, and a lower interest rate environment is still expected in the long run.
New innovation ETF
Separately, we’re diversifying the Innovative Technology portfolio by adding a new actively managed fund. This new ETF builds on themes like AI and biotech while adding more exposure to large-cap stocks and the Information Technology sector (hardware, software, etc.) as a whole. More information is available in the Innovative Tech disclosure.
Sit back and enjoy the switch
The great thing about technology like ours is that it makes implementing updated portfolios simple. Our automated rebalancing will tax-efficiently transition customers’ portfolios to the new target weights over time. It’s yet another example of how we make it easy to be invested.
Additional resources
If you’d like to learn more about our approach to investing, you might want to check out these articles: