Today's a special edition. No war updates. No earnings breakdowns.

Instead, we're covering something that might save you more money over your lifetime than any single stock pick ever will: the cheapest ETFs on the market and how to actually use them.

Most investors are paying 5 to 50 times more in fees than they need to. We're not exaggerating. There are ETFs right now charging literally 0.00% in fees. Zero. Others charge 0.02% or 0.03%, which on a $10,000 investment works out to about the price of a coffee per year.

…Meanwhile, plenty of people are still in funds charging 0.50% to 1.00% without realizing how much that costs them over time.

We also cover why putting Bitcoin, gold, and even real estate into your IRA through ETFs is one of the most underrated moves in personal finance right now.

Let's get into it.

On a $10,000 investment earning 10% annually, the difference between a 0.03% expense ratio and a 1.00% expense ratio is more than $40,000 in lost wealth over 30 years. On $100,000, that becomes (you guessed it) $400,000 lost.

That's not a typo! You could lose four hundred thousand US Dollars just to fees. The reason is compounding: every dollar you lose to fees also loses decades of growth on top of it. The fee gets taken every year, which means you lose the fee itself plus all the future returns that money would have generated.

This is why expense ratios are the one thing in investing you can actually control. You can't control the market. You can't control interest rates. But you can absolutely refuse to pay 1% when a 0.02% option exists.

Now here's where cheap ETFs go from "nice to have" to genuinely life-changing.

You can't put a house in your IRA. You can't put a gold bar in your IRA. And if you buy Bitcoin on Coinbase, those gains are taxed every time you sell.

But you can put ETFs that hold all of those things into a Roth IRA. And inside a Roth, those gains grow completely tax-free. Forever.

Think about what that means:

Bitcoin in a Roth IRA means if your $7,500 contribution turns into $500,000 over the next few decades, you pay zero taxes on the withdrawal. Buy Bitcoin on an exchange and you're looking at $175,000+ in capital gains taxes on that same gain.

Gold in a Roth IRA through a gold ETF means you get inflation protection without the storage costs, insurance headaches, or the collectibles tax rate of 28% that applies to physical gold.

Real estate in a Roth IRA through a REIT ETF means you get diversified exposure to the US real estate market, with dividends reinvested tax-free, no tenants calling you at 2am, and no property management fees eating 8 to 10% of your rental income.

Ethereum and Solana with staking rewards in a Roth means you earn ~5% staking yields inside a tax-sheltered account. On an exchange, every staking reward is a taxable event. In a Roth, it compounds silently.

The 2026 Roth IRA contribution limit is $7,500 under age 50 and $8,600 for 50+. That's the most tax-advantaged money you'll deploy all year. Make it count.

So which ETFs do you actually use? Here's every category, ranked by cost.

A couple notes on the 0.00% funds. BKLC is genuinely free and has actually beaten the S&P 500 over five years. EDGX and FCLO have fee waivers that currently make them free but will eventually charge 0.50% and 0.45% respectively. Same goes for the crypto staking ETFs, where ETHV and SOEZ have promotional waivers in place. Still, free is free while it lasts, and even when the waivers expire, these are among the cheapest in their categories.

And on MSBT: Morgan Stanley just filed at 0.14%, undercutting BlackRock's IBIT by 11 basis points. It's expected to launch in early April.

Now let's put it all together. These are starting frameworks, not prescriptions. Adjust to your own risk tolerance.

For someone who wants regular distributions and yield.

EDGX targets a 9% annualized distribution. SCHH gives you REIT dividends. FCLO provides floating-rate income from collateralized loans. This portfolio is designed to pay you while you hold it.

For someone who wants a low-cost core but also wants to swing on their own picks.

This one's for people who read this newsletter because they actually enjoy picking stocks. The 80% ETF core keeps your costs absurdly low and gives you diversified exposure across equities, crypto, and commodities. The 20% individual stock allocation is your playground to act on conviction, whether that's a SpaceX IPO play, a dividend compounder, or a small cap you found before anyone else.

The key: your core does the heavy lifting cheaply. Your stock picks are where you try to beat the market. If your picks don't work out, you've still got a low-cost diversified portfolio doing its thing underneath.

Expense ratios are the silent killer of long-term wealth. The difference between 0.03% and 1.00% is not a rounding error. It's a house.

The ETF fee war has given retail investors access to tools that didn't exist five years ago: zero-fee stock funds, staking crypto ETFs, covered call income strategies, and gold exposure that fits inside a Roth IRA. The hard part isn't finding them. It's actually switching from whatever higher-fee funds you're currently in.

If you do one thing this week, open your brokerage account, look up the expense ratios on every fund you own, and ask yourself: is there a cheaper version of this?

If you haven’t done it before, the answer is almost certainly yes for at least a few of them.

That’s all for today’s special edition. We hope you got value from it. Reply and let us know if you did. 

Until next week,

— Brandon & Blake