From other sides I heard that indeed the market capitalisation of some companies could actually be in some sort of bubble as index funds just blindly pump them further.
My question to all you experts:
What do you think of this article. Is this just fear mongering or do you agree?
Are there some useful non-cap-weighted index funds you are aware of? And if yes, should they be a part of a mustachian portfolio?
Iâm really curious as of what you think about thatâŠ
I cannot predict if it is right or not, I cannot predict the future
I am not able to determine when a most certain correction will occur (it will occur, I do not know when)
Through index funds, I am owning companies, these companies are generating revenue. So I will be better off investing than just doing nothing. I might overpay them right now, during a correction (or for instance during the pandemic, I got them cheap.
BTW dividends where rather stable the last y compared to the previous oneâŠ
The index funds strategy (for private) has one goal : generate a quasi certain revenue over the long term at a minimum of cost, be it TER and time. I am expecting 5 +x% after inflation and tax, that is fine for me and ensure that I wonât die poor. The rest is irrelavant.
My 2 cents.
If you speak German, I can recommend you the âegalâ series from the Finanzwesir. If your investment goal differs, the relevancy of it differs. Das Ziel: Nicht arm sterben! - YouTube
S&P500 is a bad index fund because only large caps are selected. It could even be considered as an active fund due to a committee choosing which stock is in the S&P500. To avoid the issue a total stock index is better.
I completely agree. My point is not about doing (2) market timing or (3) not owning companies.
My only point is to discuss the arguments in the article. Namely that creating an index fund using the âmarket-capâ criteria may not be optimal and whether there are alternatives approaches that allow passive and low-cost investing but with another weighting.
Question is :
Nestle is participating in the GDP nearly all countries in the world. Where would you put it ?
And now you have to redo it with every international company.
In the end : nothing beats the market cap one or two ETF in terms of cost ratio/return.
And btw, there is a large chunk of the world economy which is not included in the ETFs. Just take all the companies which are actually not listed on the stock market, and actually there are some big ones (Dell for instance, which unlisted some time ago) or some other where there is no free floating capital
Itâs true to a degree. Fundsmith, for instance, would subscribe to that notion. That said, companies and whole industries have lost relative to their former market cap. Stock indices arenât dominated by steel or car companies anymore. And Iâd argue that change wasnât entirely unpredictable.
The biggest constituent of MSCI World today is Apple at around 5%, followed by Microsoft at almost 4%. If I deviate from that by lowering their share by 2 percentage points each in my portfolio and invest that into other (much) smaller companies instead, how is that concentration? That would be additional diversification!
Oh you can do direct indexing if you really want, otherwise there is EUSA for example, that would simplify this task already significantly. This is not the point. Your data clearly shows that MSCI World Equal Weighted underperforms MSCI World during last 29 years. Market cap weighting is a natural one and it reflects earnings expectations of the whole market.
What is the rationale behind overweighing CH compared to market cap weights? The concentration into the top three is frankly insane, and using the SPI over SMI doesnât really alleviate the issue either. Plus, your 2nd pillar is also required by law to hold most of its equity exposure in CH. And then on otp of that, your human capital is likely also dependent on the performance of the Swiss stock market.
Interesting points, thanks for the detailed elaboration. You do raise an interesting point of view that I hadnât considered before.
Personally I keep my CH exposure to MCW (not quite MCW actually as I overweigh small cap value) as 1) I work for a top 3 CH company so my human capital is directly linked to the SMI/SPI performance and 2) I know how batshit insane the leadership in this company is lol.
If I wanted to lower the US exposure, I would frankenstein a portfolio of EU/APAC/EM (or use a US-domiciled ex-US fund like VXUS), but IMO the issue with the US market isnât single country risk, but how overvalued it is compared to ex-US (CAPE of 19.6 vs 12.9 ex-US). This can be counteracted by tilting to value, for exmaple with products from Avantis.
Standard MSCI indices cover 85% of the total market capitalization in every country. Small caps are next 14%, the remaining 1% are micro and nano caps . Standard FTSE indices cover a bit more, like 87%. I personally prefer total market, but if it is not available, I donât bother to add small caps on purpose.
The S&P 500Âź Equal Weight Index has outperformed the S&P 500Âź over more than two decades of live history, with a similar long-term rate of excess returns observed over a hypothetical back-tested history extending back to 1970 (see Exhibit 1). These observations are not new, but an equal weight approach to large-cap U.S. equities may be of particular interest in times such as the present, when the equity markets are at high levels of market concentration relative to history.
This paper is probably nothing extraordinary for the field, but as an outsider, I find it refreshing to have a discussion about the stock market with a straightforward scientific approach. It somehow highlights many fundamental properties that we tend to forget in the daily routine.
⊠and because actively managed strategies often rebalance regularly like equal weight indices, the latter can sometimes be a useful benchmark for judging the performance of active and âstock-pickingâ strategies. As a result, we might expect the relative returns of Equal Weight to echo that of actively managed mutual funds. As it happens, in aggregate, they doâat least in the short term. But the long-term statistics are different. Indeed, given Equal Weightâs long-term outperformance and parallels to active performance, the fact that over 90% of large-cap active funds underperformed the S&P 500 over the past 20 years may be surprising. But when we compare active funds to the S&P 500 Equal Weight Index as a benchmark, the results show that few active funds were able to outperform the equal weight index in most years (see Exhibit 14).
In a recent study conducted to accompany the 20th anniversary of the launch of the S&P 500 Equal Weight Index, this figure rose to nearly all (99%) of actively managed funds underperforming over a 20-year period.
I think it would better if some further information is provided to clarify. I understand equal weight ETF is not equal to Market weight. But why would it not make sense ?
Equal weight ETF is as diversified as Market weight ETF. So itâs important to clarify the problems you foresee with this kind of approach. This would help the OP and me too
There was some research shared sometime back. Worth a read Here
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. Standard FTSE indices cover a bit more, like 87%. I personally prefer total market, but if it is not available, I donât bother to add small caps on purpose.
