Some people (including me) have argued that altruists often benefit from leveraging their investments. Recently, it has become easier to use leverage thanks to the emergence of return stacked funds.

This is not financial advice.

Cross-posted from my website. I originally wrote this a year ago and just made some revisions for 2026.

What is return stacking?

Return stacking is a way of getting up to leveraged exposure to multiple return streams simultaneously. For example, RSSB invests 100% into global equities and 100% into US Treasury bonds, effectively giving it 2:1 leverage on a diversified stock/bond portfolio.

A return stacked ETF is a type of leveraged ETF. But whereas traditional leveraged ETFs (such as SPXL) lever up a single index like the S&P 500, a return stacked fund holds multiple asset classes.

Return stacked ETFs have lower management fees than single-index leveraged ETFs, and (with low confidence) they appear to have lower overhead costs for reasons that are not entirely clear to me (my guess is a combination of cheaper borrowing costs + transaction costs).

An overview of return stacking funds

There are four brands of return stacking funds that I [...]

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Outline:

(00:34) What is return stacking?

(01:28) An overview of return stacking funds

(03:47) The true cost of return stacked ETFs

(09:05) 2026. update

(10:21) Pros and cons of return stacked funds

(11:32) Are bonds a good investment?

(14:42) Source code

(14:48) Acknowledgments

The original text contained 16 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

Source:

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.