Stock price when the opinion was issued
Structured nicely, low cost. Total market includes not just the top 500, but also the Russell 1000 of smaller stocks. He'd prefer it over the S&P 500. He doesn't like the crowded trades, such as Microsoft. He wants to avoid market cap at this point in the cycle.
Vanguard is a premier ETF provider. The pricing is right around 13 basis points. It's the total U.S. index (including big tech like Amazon, Microsoft and Google) which is free-float market capitalization where blocks are held by insiders, which is a good sign. However, to create the capacity for these ETFs to accept a lot of capital the index calculations used these free-flow capitalizations, which under-represents companies with large insider holdings.
With VUN, you get pretty much the entire US market; not too expensive at 16 bps. Keep in mind that the USD version, VTI, has a MER of 3 bps; be mindful, too, of foreign currency and US estate issues.
Over 3700 positions, market-cap weighted. Top 10 names represent about 20% of the portfolio. Lots of exposure to the tech space. Not all that different from the S&P 500.
Sell this and Buy the hedged version? He just took off of his Canadian hedges today. The Cdn$ has had a strong run up, and there are built-in expectations by the Bank of Canada that the Cd$ is going to go higher. Thinks Bank of Canada has gotten a little ahead of itself and the inflation and growth forecasts for next year are a little too robust. He wouldn’t be worried about the Cdn$ going up further. If you want to be long the US market, you want to stay with the unhedged version.