What are we going to do this year? The same thing we do every year: further automate the rebalancing of customized, tax-optimized portfolios.
What are we going to do this year? The same thing we do every year: further automate the rebalancing of customized, tax-optimized portfolios.1 That’s what we do. We make consistent, scalable efficient delivery of customized, tax-optimized portfolios possible. It’s what we’ve done since Smartleaf was founded in 1999. And it’s what we’ll keep doing in 2026.2
What specific projects are lined up for 2026? Well, lots of stuff. Last year, we had releases almost every week. Some were components of long-term initiatives; some were driven by emergent client needs. We expect 2026 to be similar, so while we can’t list everything, we’d like to highlight two areas of focus: householding and cash management.
Householding
We already support industry-leading automated tax-optimized householding. In 2026, we’re going to make our householding even better.
Here’s the functionality we support today: you can select a group of accounts—say, three qualified accounts and two taxable accounts—and assign them a shared household-level target asset allocation. Every day, we’ll compare the combined holdings of the five accounts to their shared target. If, for example, it turns out that the combined holdings are overweighted in US large cap and underweighted in real estate, we’ll try to get the household back on track in the most tax-efficient way possible. Specifically, we’ll seek to sell large cap and buy real estate in taxable accounts, if we can do so at a loss. If this is insufficient, we’ll do so in qualified accounts, turning them into tax-free, household-level asset-class rebalancing centers. If this is still insufficient, we’ll return to the taxable accounts, and sell US large cap and buy real estate in whatever combination of the taxable accounts minimizes realized gains.
You can also specify a preferred asset location for different security types. For example, you might specify that you prefer to hold fixed income securities in Roth IRAs.
There are a couple of other features we currently support, but only through our RIA subsidiary, Smartleaf Asset Management (SAM), which is our preferred beta test client (phrased differently, if inelegantly, we like to eat our own dog food before general release). These currently-in-beta-release features include:
That's what we do today. Here’s how we’re going to improve householding in 2026:
First, we’re going to make setting up a household simpler – the goal is that the whole process should take less than 10 minutes. We think tax-optimized householding should become routine – something that you can offer to every client, of every size. If this is to become a reality, the process has to be easy.
Second, we’re going to release our full householding functionality, some of which is currently limited to our own subadvisor, SAM, to our SaaS clients.
Beyond that, there’s a slew of candidate improvements, including support for:
Cash management
Cash management is important, but it can be tedious. You have to worry about making sure there’s enough cash to pay your fees and support regularly scheduled withdrawals; and you need to make sure there’s enough to avoid overdrafts. On the other hand, you want to make sure you’re staying maximally invested and getting the highest interest on whatever cash you do hold. None of it’s rocket science, but doing it well for every account every day is a pain and breaks down at scale.
Our goal is to make it simple. Our current cash management already handles much of the day-to-day details of cash management.. In 2026, we’re going to make it better.
Here’s what we do today. We consolidate cash across the portfolio. You can set min cash and max cash. You can request that income from dividends and interest be reserved up to some target amount. We automatically reserve cash for underweighted less liquid asset classes like individual fixed income. And we automatically prevent overdrafts when selling these less liquid asset classes to buy ordinary equities or funds.
Here’s what we’re going to add in 2026:
First, we’re going to support an automated synthetic cash sweep. Every day, we’ll sweep excess cash into money market funds – and sweep it back when you’re making purchases. Custodians can already do this for you, but some custodians are semi-disabling this function, preventing you from getting the best interest rates for your clients.
Second, we have a bunch of candidate features lined up, including:
And more!
This is only a partial list of what we plan to do (and some of these projects may give way to other priorities), but it gives you a flavor of what we’re up to. We mentioned that some of our releases are part of long-term initiatives; others are driven by emergent client needs. But all of our enhancements are driven by client demand. We’re in this for the long haul, and so are our clients – we’ve had 100% client retention over the last five years (excepting one firm that was acquired). We’re looking forward to a great 2026.
And what will we do in 2027? The same thing we do every year…
1 With apologies to Pinky and the Brain, a 1990s children’s cartoon where every episode starts with the exchange “What are we going to do tonight, Brain?" "The same thing we do every night, Pinky... try to take over the world!" We aren’t trying to take over the world. We are trying to take over automated rebalancing.
2 This may not sound glamorous. We’re the first to admit that everything we do is boring—that everything we do, good advisors already know how to do. In principle. But no advisor can do it expertly in every account of every size every day. And we can. And it makes a big difference. We entirely free advisors from having to spend time reviewing, rebalancing or trading portfolios. We empower firms to rebalance their entire book in a day, without breaking a sweat. We enable firms to manage every account as if it were their only account. We collapse dispersion of returns while greatly improving tax management (for most accounts, our clients can document that they save or defer more in taxes than they charge in fees).