So do you put money into VT every month and do you convert to usd first?
Actually I am using a mixed approach because I don’t want to be completely using US domiciled ETFs
So I am buying VT or WEBG on IBKR
And I don’t convert upfront. I just use Auto FX.
Did you know they told me at ibkr that the red on my USD is because that auto convert can’t be used in a margin cash account
What is a ‘margin cash’ account ? 
Ahh I see.
Didn’t know because I don’t have margin account
That’s standard behaviour if you have a margin account. Do you really need a margin account? If not, better switch it to a standard account.
About WEBG: AUM already reached $1.5B, quite impressive. But I’m still hesitating as I want to see how they are tracking the index. Another thing that bothers me is that according to the top comment on this reddit post they hiked fees and changed the underlying index for some of their products. Well at least on IBKR switching the ETF in that case would be cheap.
I already started using WEBG for my new contributions on IBKR.
I understand the topic of tracking error etc, but in my view if a fund buy global stocks as per index, and have low fees, then overtime they would be very close to their index. It takes time to get there because they need to buy so many stocks. And even if they are not tracking well , they still meet the conditions
- diversified
- Low fees
Point I am trying to make is that my reason to buy index funds is not necessarily based on the fact that they track an index. It’s because they let me buy a big number of stocks at very low cost. As long as they are close to market beta, it’s fine.
I read those comments about Amundi, but I am not really worried. CH residents don’t have capital gains tax , so I don’t think much can go wrong. In worst case we sell the ETF if we feel disappointed
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I generally agree with you on this point, but the quality of a fund is important because you switch to a cheaper fund to save a couple of bps (compounding over time), while bad quality can more than negate these savings. It would be also good to have equal UCITS and US portfolios to make them interchangeable.
Coincidentally, I made a post in the Rational Reminder about MCW UCITS investing: https://community.rationalreminder.ca/t/ucits-mcw-implementations-simple-and-low-cost-solutions-in-the-ucits-land/31781
In my opinion there two good choices to go in the UCITS land:
- Vanguard Developed + Vanguard EM
- MSCI universe. State Street MSCI World + iShares EM IMI + iShares SC.
The drawbacks of the Vanguard option is no SC and EM fund is not very good. The SPPW has strangely good tracking difference, which is suspicious.
I didn’t have access to the community . Most likely need to sign up.
But just to get the highlight, you believe WEBG is not good in terms of quality? Or you do not have enough data to judge it yet?
I am just wondering if an ETF buys 3500 companies . How does it matter if it 100% tracks it’s underlying index or not. The result can also be viewed as performance of those 3500 stocks. Isn’t it?
WEBG is too soon to judge. Againts WEBG work 2 factors: it’s Amundi, and it has a lot of sampling. The Solactive’s track record is not known to me either.
In principle if they do it more or less good, the result should be OK. But if you try to save 5-6 bps comparec to Vanguard, at this level of performance you are more likely to be disappointed.
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Does it really a lot of sampling? WEBG has 3497 holdings vs VWRL’s 3718 holdings. Should be negligible?
WEBG does a lot of sampling. From the 3500 stocks in the index, they have now around 1800 in the fund https://www.justetf.com/en/etf-profile.html?isin=IE0009HF1MK9#holdings
Sampling is likely to reduce their costs, but i don’t see good reasons to do sampling for a fund of 1+ bln investing in large stocks.
Can I ask one naive question?
Is there a way to compare % overlap between VWRL and WEBG? I tried to find an online tool but I don’t see any portal for UCITS funds. Only American ones are there
I think your point is that WEBG is buying only 1800 stocks while they should have bought 3500. I was under impression that the stocks WEBG doesn’t buy are the small ones which wouldn’t move the needle.
But perhaps I am mistaken and they also choose to not buy higher market cap stocks simply because they might be correlated. Which wouldn’t be that great.
I don’t know any other way to compare the constituents than to download the holding lists from the two etfs and compare them in Excel.
You are likely right that they sample out the smallish stocks. And hence the tracking difference will not be huge. But it will be there, most likely much larger than a few bps. Good news is that it may be positive. But I would personally wait and see before jumping into this fund.
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Thanks for insights anyways.
Always good to hear different opinions
I will have a look.
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Just update
#of stocks in WEBG as per Holdings details is 2210. Bottom 337 stocks contribute 1% of the Fund value. I tried to compare with VWRL and SSAC but because these two don’t provide ISIN info, the vlookup does not work for lot of stocks. My feeling is that this fund (WEBG) is growing very fast, so in few months it would have even more stocks.
I do understand that sampling might lead to deviation from index, but I do not think we have a way to know if it would be meaningful, positive or negative. So for now, I will use it and observe how it performs.
I think Justetf data might be a bit older (as of 24 July)
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Anyway, WEBG is good because they shook up the sleepy market. State Street is also on the offensive, let the pricing war expand!
I hope one of the fund houses put on the market a Dutch-domiciled tax efficient non-ESG fund…
Yeah. That’s why I am supporting them
We need European providers to grow and excel 
All my other ETFs have been from American providers.
justetf is outdated. I downloaded the holdings excel from Amundi. They currently (28/8/2024) hold 2210 holdings.
But your are right. I got the 3497 from the factsheet where they say “number of holdings” which is actually the composition of the index. They could write that more clearly.
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