A more appropriate one for today
(PLTR keeping my ptf afloat)
That‘s by design, I‘m very confident about that.
The ucits regulators were fully aware of that. This was done to purposefully exclude EU citizens from buying US funds to prop up the local finance industry.
Right, fair enough, then why don’t they provide the exact same funds just with an IE UCITS wrapper? It’s odd not to have VTI for instance. Anyway, off topic.
I think it’s because S&P 500 is most popular and most demanded ETF in Europe
VTI is an American thing and of course for bogleheads too 
Because of scaling and cost. VTI also includes all the small illiquid stocks. Like over 3000.
If your fund has many billions in size, that‘s not a problem.
But if you are in ucits land and set up a fund, you will not gather close to as much aum and then having these small illiquid stocks will cause unreasonably high costs for the fund.
That‘s basically why all of the ucits funds mostly only include large to mid-caps.
For example VWRL is only large and mid caps, mirroring the ftse all world index with about 3500 stocks. While VT has about 10K and mirrors the ftse all world all cap.
Although VWRL is probably big enough at this point to be able to include them without causing too much cost.
SPYI for example tracks the acwi imi with ~9K stocks, but still uses sampling and has effectively about 3.5K in it. Same reason.
It may stop sampling when it gets bigger.
I am not sure it is 100% so. Vanguard offers VEVE and VFEM that collectively can be made to track FTSE All World with all 4000+ stocks, without any sampling, while VWRL makes the choice to sample out mid/small caps.
iShares EMIM now does a full replication of emerging markets, including small caps, which is apparently more difficult to trade than small caps in DM. They do it for 18 bps. Vanguard has mutual funds tracking MSCI World Small Caps without sampling for 24 bps.
I think Vanguard in Europe does not get any interest from the management; moreover, Vanguard UCITS offerings do not have the cooperative structure of U.S. Vanguard, making it just a cash cow for Vanguard. It looks like they want to take profits and not to grow.
A bigger question is whether investing in VT, which is much better than anything on offer in Europe, still makes sense given the geopolitical risks you expose yourself to to save a couple dozen bps.
That’s a question for another topic, but is it “much” better, or is it psychological? Yes VT has “everything” (actually VTI+VXUS has even more!) but does the inclusion of obscure small caps make any material difference? Looking at VT vs SSAC the difference is laughably small, and likely attributed to their cost difference rather than their contents.
I agree, that’s my impression too. Blackrock seems more interested to offer more of an up-to-date offering.
There is no quality UCITS ETF that implement ACWI IMI or FTSE all world all cap, which is my benchmark. The fact that you did not include small caps (10% market weight) created lots of tailwind for you, as they lagged large caps enormously, like 5% on average annually . That’s why including them presents real diveresification without going into tilts.
I’d say State Street. They are actively cutting fees.
Just to warn you guys. I’ll drop around 30k into the market later this month and probably another 100-110k in March/April (I’m in the selling process of my apartment). Some of it will be invested into UPRO aswell. So my stock allocation will increase from 120k to 250k.
This might trigger something 
It triggers my bitcoin maxi soul 
Brace for impact
“Excluding the Cortana and PhilMongoose effects, the market seems to be soft landing Amazon, Microsoft, Alfabet beating but not humiliating earnings. Keep looking out for nVidia earnings and Meta regulatory woes in ye olde world. Tesla will soon be relegated to a pink sheet, but we expect a bounce when Wall Street veteran and convicted felon Jordan Belfort turns his sights on it.
Our outlook remains hold” said an analyst at Mirager Capital Management’s quarterly letter to shareholders.
Wow. a >100% increase! That’s a ballsy move!
My takeaway is that most of the stock market in US is driven by momentum and not by conviction
A moment of uncertainty causes big drawdowns on big tech stocks. GOOG, MSFT, Qualcomm, AMD, AMZN all had big drop post earnings. It clearly shows most investors don’t really believe in the fundamentals story but they hope that momentum continues
I wouldn’t be surprised that market slowly moves from producers of AI to users of AI. AI might just become commodity like internet which is great for consumers. Good tech at low price is very democratic
We remain underweight on US equities for risk management purposes
How does this not apply to all markets anywhere?
Somary Talks About This
It applies to most markets I think but the euphoria can vary.
Just to be clear . US underweight is not due to euphoria or over valuation concerns. I just don’t like 63% exposure to one country. So for now I only like 50% US exposure for my portfolio
This is a great and inspirational book! Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a full copy of Hetty’s story, but the Wiki article about her is enlightening.
Benchmark update:
As a benchmark of the global stocks market I use “MSCI ACWI IMI Net Total Return in CHF” as calculated by MSCI. These data can be downloaded from MSCI website using a non-obvious procedure presented before.
Besides the nominal value, I also look at the inflation-adjusted data. To do the inflation adjustment, I divide the value in nominal CHF by the last known value of “Landesindex der Konsumentenpreise (LIK)” (“Swiss CPI”). That means, to allow “real-time” analysis of data, during a running month I use LIK for the previous month. For the last (week)day of a month, I use LIK for that month. Usually it takes few days to be calculated and published, but this procedure is more consistent with the historical analysis of inflation-adjusted stock market returns. So I effectively do both “real-time” and “historical” analysis in one table. The exact reference date of LIK that I use is not relevant, because for inflation-adjusted data I only look at relative changes.
This time LIK for January 2025 took longer than usual to release, so I was also waiting for it.
LIK status:
LIK for January 2025 went down -0.053% vs. the value for December 2024 and -0.85% below the peak value for June 2024. The 12m change was +0.4%. This is the lowest 12m change of LIK after April 2021!!!
Market Benchmark status:
The latest ATH of 2278.7 CHF nominal was reached yesterday, 13.02.2025. The YTD gains are +4.6% in nominal and +4.7% in inflation-adjusted CHF.
Despite what you might have read, the benchmark movements since the beginning of the year were rather subdued. The YTD change in 2025 was never negative. I noticed that in fact strong movements of the benchmark (or VT) value in USD were countered by USDCHF movements: when stocks were going up, USDCHF was going down and vice versa. Since the beginning of November 2024 there were never significant drawdowns, the strongest was -2.8% from December 16 to 19, 2024.
Furthermore, since March 2024 we had 9 new ATHs in nominal terms, and I am not counting occasions when they were clustered next to each other! They occurred on 27.03.2024, 22.05.2024, 16.07.2024, 11.11.2024, 22.11.2024, 04.12.2024, 16.12.2024, 23.01.2025 and 13.02.2025.
In a broader context, on February 19th will be a 5 year anniversary of the pre-COVID ATH (according to the benchmark employed). As per 13.02.2025, the benchmark is +49.4% in nominal and +40.7% in inflation-adjusted CHF from it.
You will probably hear from me next month.
元博士
This is an important observation. Since I paid attention to the movements of my benchmark (VT) in Euros, it seems that the exchange rate movements dampened volatility of the Dollar-denominated benchmark a lot, when in Euros. The Euro and stocks have been moving in the same direction.
I think it is likely not to persist forever, but for now there is a huge positive effect.