Daniel Straus Vanguard US Total Mkt Ind ETF VUN-T BUY Aug 21, 2024

US exposure, total US market. There is no currency hedge. The US dollar has been relatively strong relative to the Canadian. The US market is the most expensive in the world and over the next 10 years it may underperform emerging markets. He would look at ZPW-T instead.

(A Top Pick Mar 29/18, Up 18%) There are almost 4000 securities. It has some small and mid-cap juice to it. This is the way to enter the US market.

Do you prefer this one over VV? Either one is fine. The VV has 120 stocks more than the S&P 500 so it goes a little more into the mid-cap space and VUN is the total market.

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.

XQLT considers quality; it looks at the balance sheet of the companies it holds. Charges a 31-point MER. VUN charges only 16 points in the MER, but XQLT is worth paying more for, because it holds quality stocks and will outperform, whereas VUN is based on market-cap.

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.