Defined Duration™ ETFs ETFs designed for financial planning.

Defined Duration Investing is an asset-liability matching strategy that identifies the time horizon over which an asset may generate positive real returns over certain market cycles. For example, if stocks are measured to have a 15-year Defined Duration, that means investors can reasonably expect stocks to deliver positive real returns over roughly a 15-year period.

Defined Duration ETFs apply this methodology by quantifying the duration of stocks, bonds, and other instruments—similar to the way fixed-income duration is calculated—and then aligning them with specific time horizons. This allows financial planners and investors to select funds that match their liquidity needs across time, creating portfolios that are consistent with an individual’s financial plan.

The funds rebalance systematically and tax-efficiently, maintaining alignment with their target time horizon. This approach is designed to help investors quantify risk and align portfolios with their planning objectives, though results are not guaranteed.

We created three ETFs that any investor or financial planner can match to a specific financial plan. The three funds target 5-, 10-, and 20-year time horizons that can form the core of an entire investment portfolio. We like to think of our planning time horizons across 5 time periods that we refer to as the "5 Pillars of Financial Planning":

0-3 Year: This is for emergency funds, short-term spending needs, required minimum distributions from IRAs, etc. This may be appropriate with a custom T-Bill ladder or money market fund. Please contact us directly if you’d like help building a custom T-Bill ladder.

3-7 Years: Uncertain short-term spending plans such as a house down payment, wedding, tuition, etc. DDV (Defined Duration 5) may be appropriate for these time horizons as it will target a duration range of about 5 years on average. The Fund's goal is growth and capital preservation with an emphasis on capital preservation over growth.

7-15 Years: Intermediate-term spending plans such as college spending, near retirement planning, etc. DDX (Defined Duration 10) may be appropriate for these time horizons as it will maintain a duration of 10 years on average. DDX is a multi-asset stock/bond blend that seeks capital preservation and potential growth.

15+ Years: Long-term spending plans such as retirement, multi-generational planning, etc. DDXX (Defined Duration 20) may be appropriate for these time horizons as it will target an average duration of 20 years. It seeks to achieve this duration by maintaining an aggressive 100% stock allocation that tilts to higher beta index funds at times. DDXX is an aggressive growth allocation seeking growth of capital over long duration time horizons.

Infinite: This would include things like estate planning, insurance needs, etc. It's infinite because it's indefinite or extremely long. Investors sometimes use alternative assets, such as gold or digital assets, as potential hedges against certain risks; however, these can be highly volatile and speculative.

Investors can consider using the funds to match a financial plan using an asset/liability matching approach across an investor's different time horizons. This will not only help investors diversify across assets but also help them diversify across their lifetime horizons and create a more behaviorally robust asset allocation. Since the long duration assets will help fund the short duration assets over time investors and financial planners can create quantified plans and allocations for investors and help them better align a financial plan with an investor's goals.

The Defined Duration ETFs can help you implement a holistic financial planning based investment portfolio with a custom cash management account and as few as three ETFs.

The Defined Duration ETFs are designed to support the financial planning process by helping planners and investors implement an asset liability matching process. But the time horizon of investment returns aren't always predictable and can skew significantly depending on what the markets do. Oftentimes when valuations are very high future long-term returns are lower and vice versa. This is problematic for financial planning because high valuations can result in greater uncertainty, increased behavioral biases and a reduction in the probability of planning success. The Defined Duration ETFs seek to address this problem by structuring ETFs across various time horizons in an effort to help manage sequence of returns risk.

DDV (Defined Duration 5) is a shorter horizon fund that targets a 5 year defined duration on average and is designed to replace inefficient bond aggregate holdings in a portfolio. Most investors use something like an aggregate bond index for their short to intermediate asset allocation, but bond aggregates are inefficient over this time horizon primarily because they hold inefficient long duration instruments in the form of long-term T-Bonds. Intermediate and longer duration bonds comprise 40%+ of the total bond market portfolio thereby operating as a long duration instrument that is highly volatile and low yielding. DDV swaps out a potentially inefficient long-duration asset (T-bonds) for a potentially more effective long-duration instrument (stocks) while maintaining a similar risk profile and duration target.

DDV holds between 10-20% stocks potentially generating higher long-term returns in the component of a total bond allocation typically allocated to long maturity bonds. DDV has a benchmark of 15/85 stocks/bonds, but will tilt as far as 10% stocks or 20% stocks depending on the current defined duration of stocks and bonds. The fund rebalances using a countercyclical methodology to help better control for sequence of return risk. Therefore, when expected future risk adjusted returns are attractive the fund will own more stocks and when expected future risk adjusted returns are lower the fund will own less stocks. The bond sleeve will only hold high quality US government bonds with a shorter average maturity to better control interest rate risk and help avoid some of the long duration inefficiencies that we see in long-term bonds while also mitigating the potential volatility contribution from the long duration equity sleeve. There is no guarantee that the fund's rebalancing approach will achieve its objectives or reduce risk.

DDX (Defined Duration 10) is a blended stock/bond fund that targets a 10 year average defined duration. The Fund uses a countercyclical rebalancing approach to help reduce the volatility skew from stocks. Since a balanced 50/50 stock/bond portfolio generates 85% of its volatility from the 50% stock slice the fund rebalances using a countercyclical methodology seeking to reduce excessive stock market volatility. The fund will rebalance between 70/30 and 30/70 stocks/bonds and will be underweight stocks when expected risk adjusted returns are low and overweight stocks when expected risk adjusted returns are high. Since the stock market is so much more volatile than bonds the Fund can spend long periods underweight stocks with a goal of helping create more stable returns. There is no guarantee that the fund's rebalancing approach will achieve its objectives or reduce risk.

DDXX (Defined Duration 20) is a different animal and targets a 20 year duration profile using a 100% equity allocation. The stock market averages a 15-20 year defined duration over the long-term and DDXX rebalances to maintain an allocation consistent with these long time horizons. Because of its inherently long time horizon the fund seeks to capture higher risk and higher returns to generate higher growth and higher inflation adjusted returns. DDXX is unique, however, in that it tilts to this 20 year defined duration while also assessing the risk/reward of its defined duration contributions. For example, if the US stock market has a defined duration of 30 and foreign stocks have a defined duration of 15 then the fund would hold hold an underweight position in US stocks to balance the way the USA's longer defined duration (and lower expected returns) could contribute lower risk adjusted returns across time. Similarly, if US stocks were to fall significantly the fund would rebalance more heavily into those assets as they fall in value and become more attractive. There is no guarantee that the fund's rebalancing approach will achieve its objectives or reduce risk.

When these funds are used in tandem as the core of a portfolio they may help an investor establish a more cohesive financial plan where their asset allocation can be matched to a specific set of time-based goals that help the investor better understand the purpose of their holdings and the specific goals they correspond to.

Traditional asset-liability matching strategies and liability driven investing strategies are typically limited to quantifying bond allocations only. The strategy might build a bond ladder that is quantifiably structured and then pair it with a vaguely "long-term" equity allocation. Defined Duration ETFs seek to quantify an implied equity duration and then blend the equity instruments with the bonds to create a similar risk/return profile across a target time horizon. For example, an investor with a 10 year target time horizon could choose to match a liability to a 10 year T-Note, but with the Defined Duration 10 ETF they can seek to target a 10 year time horizon and do so offering diversification benefits and similar risk/return characteristics across 10 years.

We are big believers in the "passive" indexing movement. But passive index funds can also create problems from a financial planning perspective because they allow market changes to create a drift in underlying holdings that can make future returns more uncertain. The total US bond market has become much more concentrated in U.S. Treasury debt over time. Since 2015, the Treasury weight in the index has increased by roughly 9 percentage points and now exceeds 45% of the index.¹ Over the same period, the index’s interest-rate sensitivity (effective duration) has climbed from roughly the mid-4-year range in the 2000s to about 6 years at the end of 2024, as the index absorbed more longer-maturity government bonds. In plain English: what investors still call ‘core bonds’ has quietly become both more Treasury-heavy and more rate-sensitive. This is potentially problematic from a financial planning perspective because it's adding interest rate risk and uncertainty in the very instruments we most rely on for more certainty. To control this risk you need to throttle what the bond market takes over time rather than allowing it to simply track whatever the government is force feeding it.

Defined Duration ETFs are specifically designed to mitigate these sorts of risks in the shorter instruments where we need more certainty. As an example of this, if a portfolio has a 45/55 stock/bond benchmark and the stock market goes up by 100% in a year while bonds generate 0% returns then the portfolio will grow to 62% stocks. We might need to rebalance back to 45% stocks to maintain a certain risk profile. But there's another problem here. What if this huge boom in stocks results in a significant multiple change and lower expected future returns for stocks? This means that the stock market's defined duration will increase (because it is now expected to take longer to generate its average returns). This could result in a need to overbalance the portfolio to 40/60 stocks/bonds to maintain a similar profile target. Defined Duration ETFs don't track market cap weighting and instead quantify the underlying evolving defined durations and must therefore actively evolve in order to maintain target profiles.

In short, the Defined Duration ETFs are “active” ETFs because bond durations and stock market caps aren’t static relative to our spending needs. Actively altering the holdings to maintain a target defined duration can help potentially better alignment with underlying financial plans. And despite being labeled as "active" ETFs the Defined Duration ETFs are very passive in that they hold mostly passive ETFs and have extremely low turnover in the underlying portfolio over time.

1 - Source: Bloomberg, Morningstar data. Also, "Are You Prepared for Duration Risk?" Hartford Funds, 2025 . Also, SIFMA US Fixed Income Securities Statistics, 2025 .

The stock market is inherently procyclical which means that its market cap will often make it riskier as the markets soar in value. This is due to the fact that the value often accrues increasingly to fewer and fewer firms as bull markets go on and also because the stock market often becomes a larger relative slice of aggregate assets during a boom. The impact of this becomes exacerbated in multi-asset funds and stock heavy portfolios because the stock market is inherently more volatile than the bond market. This means that the stock market exposes an investor to increased sequence of returns risk (the risk of a large and inopportune bear market) if stocks become overvalued. Perhaps more importantly, effective bond durations aren't static. A bond only ETF will expose its investors to varying degrees of effective duration risk over time as interest rates change, but these funds typically apply a market cap weighting that doesn't control for duration risk. This can expose bond investors to higher interest rate sensitivity and lower expected returns (such as the 2022-2024 bond bear market).

Because our strategies are financial planning-based strategies they seek to mitigate duration risk and market cap skews over time and can potentially help create more stable returns, especially within our shorter time horizons where near-term predictability is more important. DDV (Defined Duration 5) seeks to target principal stability over principal growth and therefore utilizes a countercyclical rebalancing method that can potentially offset some of the excess risk that can be introduced by stocks and long duration bonds, which can skew our duration risk as they become overvalued. DDX (Defined Duration 10) implements a similarly countercyclical rebalancing methodology with an emphasis on reducing the stock market's excess volatility contribution. DDXX (Defined Duration 20) is an all equity fund that allocates to its holdings by assesssing their expected risk/return across time. For instance, if US stocks have lower expected returns than foreign stocks across the next 10 years DDXX would hold an underweight position in US stocks. This time weighted approach to rebalancing is designed to smooth returns and mitigate regional or style concentration risk that can often occur in market-cap weighted index funds.

Defined Duration ETFs are constant maturity ETFs in the sense that they maintain a consistent defined duration profile. This means they won't match perfectly for a corresponding future liability. But that doesn't mean they won't be able to potentially fund that liability at that point in the future. In fact, we constructed them specifically for that purpose.

A common criticism of asset-liability matching strategies is that you always have to refill the cash bucket in the portfolio as you draw it down. And where do you draw from? But this is true of any portfolio strategy where you're withdrawing funds! Defined Duration Investing seeks to diversify across different time horizons resulting in a potentially more temporally organized set of return streams. For example, if you held a single 60/40 stock/bond fund in 2008 when stocks fell 50% while bonds were flat, then you incurred a 30% decline. If you lost your job at the same time and needed liquidity then this diversified portfolio was insufficient for liquidity needs because you must sell the entire fund (both stocks and bonds) to access liquidity. If, on the other hand, you had held a similarly allocated 60/40 stock/bond with the bonds in their own individual bucket you had direct access to sell the bonds instead of being forced to sell both stocks and bonds. In other words, despite being the same allocation you disaggregated your portfolio into specific temporally allocated liquidity pools thereby giving you greater optionality.

By targeting specific time horizons, Defined Duration ETFs may help investors with their asset exposures across various time horizons. Although, outcomes will depend on market conditions and individual investor circumstances.