Mainstream index funds have a flaw. The bigger a company gets, the more of your money goes into it. The top ten S&P names are around 40% of the index right now. You are not buying 500 companies. You are buying ten, with 490 along for the ride.
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Factor ETFs like the Dimensional funds (DFAC, DFAX, DFIC, AVUV) weight differently. They tilt toward small cap, value, and high profitability companies.
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Comes from Eugene Fama, who won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics. He and Kenneth French showed that small, value, and profitable companies have earned a premium over the broad market over the long run, separate from just being in the market. Fama's earlier work is also the reason passive indexing exists. Indexing and factor tilts come from the same source.
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Case for:
Diversification beyond mega cap tech
A premium backed by Nobel winning research
Quality screens, so you are not just buying cheap junk
Lower correlation to the S&P than people assume
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Case against:
Higher fees than VTI, usually 0.20 to 0.40 percent
Years long stretches of underperformance
Hard to hold when it lags the index everyone quotes at you
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Has anyone held DFAC or AVUV through a market crash. Did they recover better than plain index funds, or did you cave and switch back to VT?