I do not really know much about the Daubasses but I am interested in the debate it sparked and the new insights I get from it. Currently thinking about adding VIOV to my current VT-only portfolio to tilt a bit towards small cap value…
Doing value investing myself (stock picking) would take way too much time for me and I feel more comfortable doing this via an ETF even if it means getting slightly lower returns.
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Daubasses are investing gods, but they try to make 119 Euro on investing advice from you and me, rather than managing their own hedge fund 
The problem I think is mathematically rational investing is too boring and passive, especially for people that are interested with investing. They cannot just not do anything.
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I wouldn’t draw parallels to 1999. Much of growth stocks are IT/tech and there’s a radical difference between their fundamentals in 1999 and today. Only Uber/Lyft and maybe Tesla have valuations reminiscent of dot com era, but the rest of tech is much more healthy. Expensive, yes (for good reasons - those margins and growth!), but not dot com crazy expensive when people were paying insane money for companies with no profits in sight.
Returns are aggregated using products, not sums
Total return index doesn’t consider dividend taxation at all and so is not practically obtainable by buying its basket of stocks.
Are you sure? On MSCI website you have charts for price, gross and net indexes (net = after paying withholding tax). And I heard that ETFs like to take the net index as a benchmark, because then they can hide their operating costs and still hug the index.
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Did you just say that “this time is different” ? 
Two sectors performed over S&P500 last year, the tech surged 50% and the financials gained 32% , all others trailed the broader market.
The most popular dividend focused ETF-s returned between 20-27% vs the s&P500 31.5%
There were a lot of dividend cuts, what I managed to awoid.
All in all I have a very deffensive approach to the investing and my target is to keeping pace with the broader market return in the long term and outperforming in downturns preserving capital.
Good point, but not considering dividends at all is plainly wrong.
Really? Last year? Dividend cuts in Telecom sector & some banks, certainly not what I would describe as “a lot”. I would say dividends went up “a lot” actually.
That dividend cut was meant to be split from the previous sentence, sorry for bad writing…
It’s always a different time. Market’s unlikely to crash twice for same reason. Stop trying to time it and look at fundamentals, tech 2020 != tech 1999.
I’d argue cloud/SaaS/PaaS/subscriptions business model of many (though definitely not all) tech companies today is more defensive than it used to be the case in the past. Although certainly they are no consumer staples. But we’re no longer living in the world where people buy software in a box. Big businesses are built on AWS/Azure/Office365/GCP and they can’t stop paying Amazon/Microsoft/Google/… or they won’t exist. Ease of switching between cloud providers is an illusion, in reality it can be an enormous burden.
Correct. Gross aka Total return index is without any consideration for dividend taxes.
Yes, typically, net return index is used as benchmark, and these typically come with pessimistic tax assumptions such as US at 30%. But the guy I replied to said specifically, I quote, “Total return”.
While it’s probably not something you’d want to directly benchmark your portfolio to (except as an upper bound), it’s still very useful for running calculations like how much of dividends did the index companies give on a given day. Different investors have different tax situations, there’s no single one-size-fits-all after-tax index. Official net return indexes as mentioned above are also “wrong”.
What’s FuW and why should I invest in it?
Crappy 0.8% management fee, some extra no-name intermediary between my and my stocks - no thanks
If this is them, then they didn’t seem to have managed to beat S&P500. Why should I not just buy a much safer S&P500 for 0.03% fee from highly respected Vanguard instead?
Looking strictly at their performance chart, no, I wouldn’t invest with their strategy. They don’t show any consistent patterns of beating S&P 500. I see on the chart they outperformed it in 2008-2009 - could be luck, and then it looks like they just kept hugging the index and in the end underperformed/matched it.
Compare with https://www.fundsmith.co.uk/fund-factsheet for an example of an active fund which may be worth your while and its 1% fee. They don’t have as nice and simple chart to show comparison with S&P500, but believe me they outperformed it a lot and pretty consistently. They’re also rather open about key principles of their strategy. Of course, beware past performance is not indicative of future results and that they run a much much bigger fund today than when they started, which is a negative thing for returns.
Um, I wouldn’t say they are value, at least not in the sense than index companies (S&P, MSCI, et al) understand value (low P/E, P/B…) so it’s not really appropriate to just compare them with S&P 500 Value or a similar global index
Google, Apple, Microsoft - these are growth companies
There is value - mostly meaning low P/E, which is what index companies’ value indexes are tracking. They are not it.
And then there’s value investing - buying companies for a good price. This is a much broader and less formalized concept, which could involve a good deal of qualitative analysis. High P/E companies with a great earnings growth potential like Google or Microsoft can still be great value from this perspective, but not from the POV of S&P/MSCI which are more focused on shallow and easily quantifiable characteristics like P/E in their value indexes.
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Finally a video from Ben Felix about this fund.
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The stat arb funds must have made a fortune with last weeks’ volatility!..
I hope some of you guys are able to read German:
Everybody is only talking about the few winners out there. But nobody is talking about the losers, that make up 90% of the market participators.
If I understand well, this guy sold his good “diversified” fund to buy a single stock with his life savings and then took consumer credits (at 9%+ probably) to buy more as it continued to go to zero?
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That’s correct. Now he sold everything and has 60k in debt left (at 9% interest).
Twist: As a self-branded “TradingCoach” he has been offering paid seminars, personal coaching and advice to other wannabe traders.
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