The 60/40 equity–bond portfolio remains a widely used benchmark for long-term asset allocation, despite ongoing debate about its optimality (Pham et al., 2025). For many households, however, the challenge lies not in the framework itself but in the amount of capital required to implement it. Limited investable assets, a desire to avoid explicit borrowing, significant exposure to residential real estate, and the need to maintain liquid reserves often constrain the ability to fully fund a traditional allocation.
Leveraged ETFs offer an alternative. Rather than increasing risk, they allow households to achieve a desired risk exposure with less deployed capital, improving the management of liquidity, real-estate leverage, and broader balance-sheet constraints. As illustrated below, leveraged ETFs combined with cash holdings can approximate the risk characteristics of a traditional 60/40 portfolio while avoiding margin accounts, personal credit lines, or other forms of household-level leverage.
By separating market exposure from capital commitment, this framework preserves liquidity and financial flexibility while maintaining a familiar asset allocation profile.
Motivation: Asset Allocation at the Household Level
For most retail investors, portfolio construction takes place within the constraints of the household balance sheet, where housing exposure, mortgage leverage, employment income risk, and liquidity needs shape feasible investment choices. Many households are already structurally leveraged through real estate. Over recent decades, rising home values in developed economies have increased net worth while simultaneously concentrating risk in illiquid assets. As a result, investors often find themselves overweight real assets and underweight liquid financial capital.
Traditional forms of financial leverage introduce additional risks that many retail investors are unwilling or unable to bear, including margin calls during drawdowns, fixed repayment obligations on credit lines, and behavioral pressures that can lead to poorly timed de-risking or forced liquidation during periods of heightened volatility.
In contrast, when used thoughtfully, leveraged ETFs—whose leverage is contained at the fund level rather than the household balance sheet—allow investors to separate market exposure from capital deployment, providing greater flexibility in household portfolio construction.
Methodology and Portfolio Construction
The following analysis evaluates whether a portfolio constructed from leveraged equity and bond ETFs combined with cash can approximate the return and volatility characteristics of a traditional 60/40 equity–bond portfolio, without relying on margin, personal borrowing, or other forms of household-level leverage[1].
Benchmark and Instruments
The target allocation is a conventional 60/40 portfolio consisting of:
- 60% exposure to the S&P 500
- 40% exposure to US Treasuries, represented by a duration of approximately seven years
To implement these exposures, the analysis employs the following instruments:
- A hypothetical ETF providing three times the daily return of the S&P 500
- A hypothetical ETF providing three times the daily return of long-duration US Treasuries (20+ year maturity; duration ≈16), with position size scaled to achieve the target portfolio duration
- Cash earning the overnight rate
Although the leveraged Treasury instrument has a longer underlying maturity, its portfolio weight is scaled such that the resulting effective duration of the combined portfolio approximates the seven-year target.
Cost and Financing Assumptions
To better approximate real-world performance, the following assumptions are incorporated:
- Annual management expense ratio (MER): 1%
- Fund-level borrowing cost: overnight rate + 50 basis points
- Cash earns the overnight rate
Portfolio Construction Process
Rather than fixing nominal portfolio weights, the strategy targets stable effective market exposures:
- An equity exposure equivalent to approximately 60% of the S&P 500
- A Treasury duration of approximately seven years
At each month-end, portfolio weights are adjusted to maintain these exposure targets. Equity and bond ETF allocations are scaled to achieve the desired equity exposure and portfolio duration, with residual capital allocated to cash. Monthly rebalancing is required to offset exposure drift arising from the daily reset nature of leveraged ETFs.
Due to the daily reset nature of leveraged ETFs, effective exposures drift over time, necessitating periodic rebalancing. Over the sample period, the resulting average portfolio weights are approximately 20% in the leveraged equity ETF, 15% in the leveraged Treasury ETF, and 65% in cash.
Observed Outcomes and Comparison to 60/40
The strategy is back tested using monthly data from 31 December 2022 through 31 December 2024 and evaluated against a traditional 60/40 benchmark (Table 1). Over the sample period, the leveraged ETF plus cash portfolio delivers cumulative returns broadly comparable to the benchmark. More importantly, realized volatility closely tracks that of the traditional 60/40 portfolio, indicating that the exposure-targeting framework is effective in replicating first-order risk characteristics.
Table 1 (Summary Statistics)
Tracking Differences
Periods of divergence between the two portfolios are primarily driven by:
- Daily leverage reset effects during volatile markets
- Embedded financing costs within leveraged ETFs
- Monthly rebalancing frequency
- The prevailing cash yield environment
These factors introduce tracking error but do not materially alter the portfolio’s overall risk profile.
Figure 1 (Annual Returns)
Figure 2 (Allocation %)
Distributional Effects
While mean returns and volatility are comparable, the leveraged portfolio exhibits fatter tails relative to the traditional 60/40 portfolio. This reflects the nonlinear return dynamics introduced by daily leveraged instruments, especially during periods with high volatility.
Figure 3 (Return Distribution)
Practical Risks and Limitations
While the framework illustrates a capital-efficient approach to exposure management, it involves important trade-offs that warrant careful consideration. Leveraged ETFs are designed to track multiples of daily index returns; over longer holding periods, their performance becomes path-dependent due to daily leverage resets, with volatility drag increasing nonlinearly as leverage rises (Pessina and Whaley, 2021).
In addition, the analysis relies on hypothetical leveraged ETFs, and realized performance of actual products may deviate from modeled results, particularly during periods of market stress. Finally, although average volatility may align with a traditional 60/40 portfolio, the use of leverage increases tail risk, implying a higher likelihood of extreme outcomes.
Figure 4 (Drawdown)
Capital Efficiency as Portfolio Design
Leveraged ETFs are frequently dismissed as unsuitable for long-term investors due to volatility drag and path dependency. This analysis shows that, when employed within a disciplined and exposure-managed framework, leveraged ETFs can instead function as tools for improving capital efficiency rather than increasing portfolio risk. By replicating the risk characteristics of a traditional 60/40 equity–bond portfolio with substantially less invested capital, this approach enables households to preserve liquidity and mitigate concentration arising from residential real estate exposure. While careful implementation and ongoing risk awareness remain essential, the framework highlights an underappreciated application of leveraged instruments in modern household portfolio construction.
References
All data in Tables and Figures sourced from Bloomberg
Pessina, C. J., & Whaley, R. E. (2021). Levered and Inverse Exchange-Traded Products: Blessing or Curse? Financial Analysts Journal, 77(1), 10–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/0015198X.2020.1830660
Pham, N., Cui, B., & Ruthbah, U. (2025). The performance of the 60/40 portfolio: A historical perspective (Research Report). CFA Institute Research & Policy Center. https://rpc.cfainstitute.org/research/reports/2025/performance-of-the-60-40-portfolio
[1] This framework is presented for educational purposes only and should not be interpreted as an investment recommendation.
