Stop trying to time the crash. Install a written exit rule instead.

In 2022, something broke that wasn’t supposed to break.

You watched your statement bleed red. Stocks were down. That made sense. But then you looked at the bond column—the part meant to be the shock absorber, the safe harbor—and it was down too. The 60/40 agreement broke. There was no place to hide.

If you are within five years of retirement, that memory isn’t just a bad month on a chart. It is a specific, cold fear: What if I have to sell shares at these prices to pay my bills?

This is sequence-of-returns risk. It is the arithmetic reason why a 20% drop at age 63 does more damage than a 20% drop at age 43. When you are accumulating, a crash is a sale. When you are withdrawing, a crash is a liquidation. You are selling shares at low prices to buy groceries, leaving fewer shares left to participate in the recovery.

Most advisors tell you to “stay the course.” But staying the course through a 30% drop while writing monthly checks feels less like discipline and more like watching the plan come apart.

You don’t need another prediction. You don’t need a guru who claims to know what the Fed will do next Tuesday. You need a mechanism that removes the decision from your hands entirely. You need a written exit rule.

The difference between a guess and a rule

Human beings are terrible at timing exits. We hesitate. We hope. We tell ourselves, “I’ll sell when it gets back to even,” while the account drills lower. By the time we capitulate, the damage is done.

Kairos does not have hopes, fears, or a gut feeling. It is a piece of software that lives inside your existing brokerage account, in your name, executing a single, rigid instruction set every day at 3:50 PM ET.

It asks five questions about the market’s health:

1. What are credit spreads doing?
2. What is the VIX term structure saying?
3. How broad is market breadth?
4. Is index momentum intact?
5. How are technology stocks doing against utilities?

If the score reads healthy, the system holds an 83% position in TQQQ, a leveraged fund that moves roughly 2.5 times the daily direction of the Nasdaq. If it reads fragile, the system sells everything and moves 100% into short-term U.S. Treasury bills.

That is the entire job. It is binary. It is boring. And crucially, it happens whether you are sleeping, working, or paralyzed by fear.

This is not market timing in the sense of guessing tops and bottoms. It is a written exit rule paired with a written re-entry rule. It accepts that it will never sell at the exact top. It accepts that it will sometimes be wrong. But it refuses to ride a bear market all the way to the bottom.

What this looks like in reality (and what it costs)

Let’s look at the numbers, stripped of the marketing gloss.

From 2020 through 2026, in a hypothetical out-of-sample test where the rules were fixed before the period began, this approach returned an annualized 40.6%. SPY returned 15.5%. More importantly for your sleep, the worst peak-to-trough drop was -24.5%, compared to -33.7% for SPY. These are model results: not audited, not live, not client accounts.

In 2022, when the “diversified” portfolio failed, the model gained 8%.

But here is the part most sales pages won’t tell you, and you need to hear it before you wire a dime: This system will make you look foolish sometimes.

In 2025, the model returned 3%. SPY returned about 18%. The source deck calls the year a “steady no-pullback grind.” If your neighbor asks what you did last year, you will have to admit you lagged significantly.

Furthermore, a -24.5% drop is still a lot of money. If you have $200,000 in this sleeve, a repeat of the worst-case scenario means watching $49,000 vanish. The software cannot prevent losses; it can only attempt to truncate them. Signals can whipsaw, triggering a sell right before a bounce, or buying back in right before a dip. Leveraged ETFs decay in flat markets.

This is not a crystal ball. It is a filter. It gives up some upside in exchange for a written plan for the downside.

Where this fits in your portfolio

Do not make the mistake of thinking Kairos replaces your entire strategy. It is not a nest egg. It is a sleeve.

Think of your portfolio like a baseball team. You need pitchers, catchers, and fielders.

• Your Cash/T-Bill Ladder: This is your catcher. It handles the immediate income needs. It never strikes out, but it never hits home runs.
• Your Core Equity: This is your outfield. It provides long-term growth but fields errors poorly during storms.
• The Kairos Sleeve: This is your relief pitcher. You bring it in specifically when the game gets dangerous. Its job is to get out of the inning without giving up the grand slam.

If you move your entire net worth into this system, you are asking a relief pitcher to play every position. That is reckless.

The sweet spot is a slice large enough that the results matter to your total return, but small enough that a -24.5% drawdown doesn’t force you to change your lifestyle.

There is no magic number, only a math problem you can solve tonight:

Take your total portfolio value. Multiply it by the percentage you are considering for this sleeve. Now multiply that result by 0.25.

That final number is roughly the model record’s worst drop in dollars. A future drop could be deeper. Look at that dollar figure.

• Does seeing this number disappear make you sweat?
• Would losing this amount delay your retirement date?
• Would it force you to cut expenses?

If the answer to any of those is “yes,” the slice is too big. Reduce it until the answer is “no.” That is your size.

Who this is not for

Be honest with yourself. This system is not for everyone.

Do not use Kairos if:

• You need the money for living expenses in the next 12 months. Put that in a money market fund or direct T-bills.
• You cannot tolerate seeing your account underperform the news headlines for a full calendar year.
• You believe anyone who guarantees returns or claims to predict the future.
• You want a “set it and forget it” solution where you never log in. You should log in. You should understand the rules.

And let’s address the elephant in the room: Will this company be around in ten years?

Kairos is software, not a bank. We do not hold your money. The assets stay in your brokerage account in your name. If Kairos ceased to exist tomorrow, your holdings would remain exactly where they are. You could simply turn the software off. The risks are the rules being wrong, late or switched off, not your money going missing.

Maxwell Hines, who designed the system after co-managing a $90B book in portfolio management at AllianceBernstein and trading his own capital, runs roughly 80% of his personal liquid equity through this same logic. He didn’t build this to sell a newsletter. He built it because he saw the wall between institutional protection and individual exposure, and he wanted to climb over it.

As Max says: “When you’re inside an institution that size, you see exactly how the best money in the world is managed. You also see the wall, the one that keeps all of that away from everybody else who isn’t a pension fund or an endowment. I got tired of being inside of that wall.”

The conversation you need to have

We cannot tell you what to do. Kairos is not personalized advice. We do not know your tax situation, your health, or your other liabilities.

Take the track record data to your current advisor. Show them the 2020–2026 out-of-sample model performance. Point out the -24.5% max drawdown. Ask them: “If I allocate X% of my portfolio to a rules-based sleeve that cuts exposure when credit spreads widen, does that improve my probability of success given my withdrawal rate?”

If they dismiss it because “time in the market beats timing the market,” ask them how that advice worked out for clients who retired in January 2008 or January 2022.

Retirement isn’t about maximizing returns. It’s about surviving the order in which they arrive.

For a deeper dive into the five specific market checks we run every afternoon, read how the signal works. To see exactly what the trade notifications look like in your inbox, view what you’ll actually see in your account.

The short version

• It’s a sleeve, not the whole meal. Kairos is a growth component with a mechanical exit rule, designed to sit alongside your cash reserves and core holdings.
• Sequence risk hits retirees hardest. A major drop early in retirement can force you to sell shares at lows, leaving fewer shares for the recovery.
• Rules beat emotions. The system checks five market health metrics daily at 3:50 PM ET, switching between leveraged Nasdaq exposure and T-bills automatically.
• The cost of safety is lag. In strong bull markets (like 2025), the system will likely underperform. In crashes (like 2022), it aims to preserve capital.
• Size for survival. Calculate 25% of your proposed allocation, and remember a future drop could be deeper. If losing that dollar amount changes your life, the position is too large.
• Not personalized advice. Settle the size with your own fiduciary before deploying capital.