January 2026
To Investors:
In 2025, the S&P 500 delivered 18% and long-term Treasuries were up 4%. Combining them evenly with a small 2% allocation in cryptocurrency, the unleveraged Income and Growth investable benchmark was up 11%.
As a result, the leveraged investable benchmarks were up by 13% to 14%. This brings the trailing 10-year total return figures to a range of 107% to 301%, or 7% to 15% annualized.
At ETF PM, our active strategies accidentally exhausted our risk capacity during the extreme first half crash. Max Alpha was down 11% for the year, and Tactical 3x fell 13%. Over the past 8.2 years since Max Alpha’s inception, this strategy returned 164% versus a gain of 75% for the Income & Growth investable benchmark. Similarly, over 9.8 years since inception, Tactical 3x delivered 196% versus a gain of 104% for Income & Growth. In addition, both of our active solutions exhibited far lower risk in down markets.
Market volatility was extremely unusual this past year with gold, gold miners, and China all strongly outperforming the S&P, technology, and bitcoin. Still, certain leveraged ETFs for specific areas delivered strong trends. While we are very pleased with our active strategies long-term, the volatility this year has prompted us to make material improvements to our investment process.
Over the years ahead, we are confident that our adjustments from this year will prove to be extremely beneficial. Thank you for all of your trust and confidence. Please contact us at your convenience if you would like to plan a call or meeting to discuss.
As always, we wish you and your family a happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year!
David S. Kreinces
Founder & Chief Investment Officer
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