7 Best ETFs to invest in ROTH IRA Forever (Updated for 2026)

Investing within your Roth IRA is no joke. This is the most powerful investing account that you own. So, you need to take it very seriously. Now, at the end of this video, I'm going to give you the exact breakdown with these seven ETFs and exactly percentages that make sense for you and your life stage. And right up front, spoiler alert, I actually ran a back test. Had you had this exact buildout for your Roth IRA over the last 10 years versus that of the S&P 500 or even that of what Vanguard suggests, which is a 6040 portfolio, this thing absolutely blows it out of the water. Had you put $10,000 in 10 years ago, the traditional 6040 portfolio would barely have doubled. The S&P 500 would be at $39,225 and my allocation would be at $66,59 which is outstanding in just 10 years. Even more impressive for you though, the annualized returns here show that my allocation would crush the rest and would have hid an average of 22% per year over those last 10 years. Now, past performance does not equal future performance, but the difference between my allocation getting you 22% per year and the traditional 6040 portfolio getting 9.91% is crazy. Watch this. If you were to start at $10,000 and invest just $250 every month for 20 years in the 6040 portfolio, getting you 9.91%. In 20 years, you'd be at $236,261. If you were to start at $10,000 and invest just $250 every month for 20 years in my allocation portfolio, getting you 22.2%. In 20 years, you'd be at $1,282,894. What a difference. And I hope that got your attention. Let's get right into it. My name is Nolan Goa. My students call me Professor G. and I made this channel to make investing simplified. Remember that all investing carries risk, so do your own research. This is not financial advice and I'm not a financial adviser. So, in this video, I'm going to give you the exact seven ETFs with one bonus ETF. I'll also give you exact percentages of each based on where you are in your investing cycle. So 20 plus years from retirement, five years from retirement, or in retirement, and why every single fund is intentional for the most powerful investing vehicle on the planet, the Roth IRA. Now, I do an annual refresh on the Roth allocations each year because each year things change big time, and this past year is no different. The S&P 500 is now 35% concentrated in just seven stocks. The Buffett indicator is sitting at around 230%, the highest reading in US market history. AI capex is at peak intensity and the Fed is in the middle of a leadership transition. The picks that I gave you last year were for a different market and right now we need to update and some things are going to be very similar because a lot of these are buy and hold and you should be holding them probably forever depending on your situation. But there's definitely a couple new ones that are helping grow the portfolio like crazy. Your Roth IRA is literally the most powerful investing vehicle that you have. Everything inside of it grows totally tax-free forever. That means your Roth is where you put assets with the highest growth potential. Pay special attention to number four and number six because those two have grown my Roth IRA over 100% in just two years. So, let's start with number one, and that's going to be the foundational ETF that I'm probably going to say in every video, and that's VU VO, the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF. Three basis points, expense ratio, almost a trillion dollars in assets, and it tracks the 500 largest US companies. If you're building a Roth from scratch, VU is the first ticker that goes into any account. Now, here's the catch. In 2026, your VU is not what it was 5 years ago. The same S&P 500 you bought in 2020 is now 35% concentrated in just seven names. Apple, Microsoft Nvidia Alphabet Amazon Meta, Tesla. Higher concentration than the dot peak in 1999. Now, that doesn't mean that you need to dump VU or that VU is a bad thing in any way, shape, or form. But what you do need to do is understand what you're actually invested into. Now, all in all, VU is the core of this portfolio. It's the foundation. Now, literally when people say the stock market's up or the stock market's down, they're basically saying the S&P 500 is up or the S&P 500 is down. That's basically the benchmark for the entire market. And for me, that's the benchmark or foundation of my portfolio. The 10-year return is 15.61% per year. And over the past 50 years, the S&P 500 has returned an average of over 11% per year with dividends reinvested. So, this is just a solid fund that lasts the test of time and is always going to be my core. All right. So, if VU is the core, then the new addition, one that I hadn't had in the portfolio last year or early last year, is number two. And this one is SPMO, which is the Momentum ETF, and it's amazing. This thing's up almost 30% year to date. It takes the S&P 500 universe, ranks the stocks by 12 month price momentum minus the most recent month, and weights toward the top momentum names. There's a mountain of academic research on momentum as a factor. Decades of evidence that the momentum premium is one of the most persistent factors in equity markets. And in environments where the broad index is stretched on valuation, the momentum tilt has historically outperformed the cap weighted index. Now, the 10-year return on SPMO is outstanding at 19.5% per year. Looking at this chart, you can see the difference between VU and SPMO, the total return over the last 10 years. And then even more important is this one. You can easily see that most years, the dark blue does better and goes higher. The dark blue is SPMO and green is S&P 500. But look here at when the market was negative. You can see that SPMO was less negative than the S&P 500. Goes up higher and goes less negative in a bad year. Sign me up. I've been getting flooded with comments from viewers that started adding SPMO to their Roth last year when I started talking about it in a couple of videos. And I myself have been adding like crazy to SPMO, especially at the end of last year and beginning of this year. And like I said, it's been up like crazy already, just halfway through 2026. So, let's move on to something that's going to be even more growth tilted. And this is ETF number three. And this would be QQQM, the Invesco NASDAQ 100 ETF. QQQM is the cheaper sister of QQQ. Same NASDAQ 100 exposure, expense ratio 15 basis points versus QQQ at 18. It's got the lower fee, but the identical index. If you're buying and holding, I'd buy QQQM. The role this plays in the lineup is that it's concentrated growth exposure. These are the top 100 non-financial companies on the NASDAQ. It's heavy in tech, communication services, and consumer discretionary. QQQM itself only launched in October of 2020, so trailing returns under 5 years are clean. But for the full 10-year picture, you look at QQQ as the proxy. QQQ's trailing 10-year annualized has historically run several percentage points above VU with meaningfully higher volatility. The 10-year return for the NASDAQ 100 is 21.1%. Knowing that you're putting these types of things inside of the Roth IRA, you can handle the volatility because the hope is that you're holding this for many, many years, hopefully a decade, hopefully longer. And so any volatility year after year isn't necessarily going to hurt anything. If you can let it ride it out, as you saw, the 10-year return of 21% per year, that's pretty legit. Now, here's the thing, though. There is some overlap between VU and QQQM. The MAG 7 sits in both. You also have a heavy amount of Micron and AMD here. So, you're doubling down on tech and large cap growth when you hold both. But this is intentional in the Roth. The whole point of the Roth is to lean into growth. Also, just so you know, I see QQQM and QQQ and VUG and SCG all kind of as interchangeable. So, if you have one of those, then great. That's exactly what this portion of the Roth is for. But speaking of growth, let's lean even deeper into growth. Something that's going to grow even more than just this ETF. And this is where we lean into just directly technology. If you believe that we're going to be more technologically advanced next year, 5 years from now, 10 years from now, just like we have over the last 5 years, 10 years, then why not invest in something that's pure technology? And my favorite by far on this one is VGT, which is the Vanguard Technology ETF. This one has 300 plus US tech companies. The expense ratio super low at nine basis points. The top holdings are all names that drove the AI capex cycle in the cloud buildout and will dominate for years to come. If VU is the S&P 500 and QQQM is the NASDAQ 100, VGT is a step further. It's pure conviction tech. No financials, no consumer staples, no utilities, just technology. Now, VGT is obviously going to be much more volatility than that of something like the S&P 500 or QQQM, but also have crazy higher upside as well. The consistent returns on this one are just too good to ignore. The 10-year return is at 25.43% per year. This is insane. If one were to put $100,000 in the stock market and get a 25% return per year versus 10%, the ending result is ridiculous. $100,000 investing getting 10% return for 30 years ends at $1,744,940. But $100,000 invested in getting 25% return for 30 years ends at $80,779,356. Absolutely crazy. The top 10 companies here show a lot of the MAG 7, but also newer technology like Micron, Lamb Research, and Applied Materials. It also has some quantum computing and other technology I've been researching. So, like I said, this is the high octane growth in the portfolio. It's one that has a lot of history. It's been around for a while and has proved itself and so that's why I have it in my Roth IRA. Let's talk about this next ETF that's the diversifier for the portfolio. Number five is VXUS, which is the international ETF. Yes, VXUS has lagged VU over the last decade. That's the cost of diversification. But since this is a long-term hold and since the US dollar is trending negatively and we're starting to see a lot more about this ddollarization and some countries wanting to move off of the dollar standard, we may want to start stacking some international exposure sooner rather than later. VXUS is everything outside the United States around 8,500 international stocks across developed and emerging markets. the expense ratio is very low at just five basis points. Now, if we just look at this recent period over the last 10 or maybe even 15 years, US stocks have absolutely crushed international. And so, a lot of people have pushed those off to the side. Even I about 3 years ago said that I don't even like anything international because we don't need that type of exposure. We already have it through our globalized companies. And that still remains true. But the whole reason why I think that it's a smart idea to have a little bit of diversification in there is more about all the things happening geopolitically, things that are outside of pure business alone and looking at things like currency debasement and lots of different things in that regard. For that reason alone, I personally have started a smaller position in some VXUS. Also, in your Roth IRA, when you stack VU plus SPMO plus QQQM plus VGT, you're running an almost 100% US concentrated tech heavy portfolio. Right now is a great moment to add real diversification, and VXUS is the answer. The 10-year return isn't great, but it's also not bad. It's at 9.88%. Last year alone, though, VXUS actually beat the American market and posted a total return of over 32%. It did that in 2017 as well, beating the US market. Now, let's move on to ETF number six. This one's going to be the highest risk, but also highest possible reward. This is really the fun one, but let's not go overboard. Like I said before, the Roth is the most powerful investing vehicle that you have. We don't want to go too conservative because we want to be able to let this thing grow as far as possible, but we also don't want to go so risky that we lose any money. So, be very careful. But this next category here is where you're going to see probably the most amount of possible growth. And this category is for the moonshot bets. The ETFs that you believe that are kind of undervalued now that could go crazy because of new technology happening or new things happening in the next 5 to 10 years. Right now in 2026, we have a lot of these AI, quantum computing crypto space robotics and more. A couple examples here for you to research would be SMH AR TY or AIQ for AI, WQTM or QTUM for quantum computing, IBIT for Bitcoin, BOTZ for robotics, and UFO or NASA for space. Most of these have had some epic years with returns shooting straight up to the moon. We don't expect this every year, but like I said earlier, the Roth is definitely one where you do want to weigh in or lean into those heavier growing assets because the whole point is that anything that grows in there is totally tax-free. So, take advantage of that. And now, after talking about all the crazy upside you can get, we definitely want to make sure and keep the Roth a little bit safer and put some balance into this portfolio. And so, this is for ETF number seven. But this ETF does depend on where you're at in your investing journey. There's a very conservative option and then there's a slightly less conservative option, but still gives you some upside. And then after showing you these two here, I'll show you exactly the percentages of each one of these ETFs that make sense in your Roth portfolio. For more growth potential and higher upside in this category, I'd go with SCHD. This is the Schwab US Dividend Equity ETF, and it's delivered strong-term performance with roughly 12.9% annualized returns over the last 10 years with dividends reinvested. And SCHD's dividend growth has been crazy at about 8.9 to 10% per year, meaning the income stream has historically grown much faster than inflation. That's powerful inside a Roth IRA because all future dividend growth and withdrawals can potentially be tax-free. So, if your goal down the road is to have passive income, specifically tax-free passive income, CHD is a great position to start as soon as possible because those dividends grow. And so, growth within the Roth IRA is just like a absolute cheat code. But for those of you that are closer to retirement who want a little bit more safety or just in general if you want overall safety at all, you're going to want something closer to cash like a cash equivalent or short-term Treasury, which is the ETF SGOV. This one holds US Treasury bills with maturities under 3 months. The expense ratio is really low at nine basis points. The current 30-day SEC yield is around 3.5% and almost no duration risk or credit risk. As you approach retirement, your Roth allocation will shift. SGOV is the safety floor inside the account when you start to need stability. It's better than BND ETF in this rate environment, which has duration risk. Better than cash, which earns nothing. Plus, look at the return of BND over the past 5 years. Pitiful. This is the position you'll scale up over time as your other positions compound. All right, so six or seven tickers here. How would I weight them within a portfolio? If you're 20 plus years from retirement, you have a lot of time to let this thing grow. So, we want to be a little bit more aggressive. I personally would go VU 25%, SPMO 15%, QQQM 20%, VGT 10%, some special sector ETFs such as WQTM 10%, VXUS at 5%, and then SCHD for some safety at 15%. Now, if you're closer to retirement, like you're 5 years away or so, VU would be at 20%, SPMO 10%, QQQM 15%, VGT 10%, that special sector ETF at 10%, VXUS increased to 10%, SCHD increased to 20%, and now you have a smaller position of SGOV for that cash equivalent or treasuries safety. Now in retirement the portfolio would look something like VU at 20%, SPMO at 10%, QQQM at 10%, VGT at just 5%. Now we increase the international exposure with VXUS at 15%, SCHD is much higher at 25% and SGOV at 15%. So really that last 40% of the portfolio is a lot more safe specifically in retirement. But that Roth IRA is your tax-free growth engine. Let that thing do the work for you. Especially if you're further away from retirement. If you want me to look through your Roth and walk through all of your accounts and we can look through your numbers and specifics, I do limited one-on-one coaching applications where we can meet on Zoom. And the link is down in my description. So, you can go ahead and click on that and get on my calendar and we can do a meeting as soon as you'd like. Now, if you like that passive income idea of possibly being able to live off of dividends, this video here shows you how you could live off of just $300,000 total, and you'd be able to live off passive income and dividends forever. I break it down fully there. Or watch this video I just did earlier this week.