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Doom scrolling and the next financial crash!
Comments
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These are worth reading about AVSG. The second is Monevator members only.
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I read the public article. The author does not want to invest in AVSG himself, because of the risk it seems. It only takes a tiny percentage of the market to invest in AVSG's underlying stocks to raise their price to a level where outperformance is very unlikely. As always, half the market thinks that small cap value is undervalued and the other half thinks that it is overvalued. I do not know who is right. I do not feel any need to divert from sitting on my market weighted trackers.
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They don't know how I'm invested, but I did make the changes in my ROTH IRA which they will inherit tax free if I stay in the USA.
And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.0 -
It launched in 2024 and performance since inception has been better than VWRP (around +10% YTD or since inception), so not sure where the comment about "longer term" performance has come from.
If it were around longer, the expectation would be that it would underperform during the period large-cap growth outperformed, otherwise that would be deeply suspicious. It seems to be behaving like a small-cap value fund should, and replaces some UK-only small-cap investment trusts I had previously held at greater cost and poorer diversification.
It's a means to mitigate mega-cap blowouts, but is obviously sensitive to recession and fiscal tightening, whereas the rest of my portfolio should hold up better to the latter.
It was a fair bit smaller when I bought in initially, so nice to see it approaching £1bn. It seems to be growing only a little slower than other, now popular, vanilla ETFs like FWRG, so I've no concerns for its survivability.
Agree it doesn't look a good fit for you as your preference seems to be taking on a home bias, which gets you a sector-based tilt without the small cap risk.
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I read the public article. The author does not want to invest in AVSG himself, because of the risk it seems.
The article says "The Avantis Global Small Cap Value ETF (AVSG) checks [all the boxes]. So much so that I invested in it before finishing this review!"
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Yes you have to look at the contents of the fund/index. The US Vanguard fund I chose, VVIAX, tracks the Morningstar US Large Cap Value Index which has around 12% tech, although 5% of that is Micron, but it's far less than the 40% tech of US Vanguard Total Stock Market Index, VTSAX, which has 40% tech. I could get even lower tech exposure with the US Mid-Cap Value Index. My overall portfolio tech exposure is now less than 20% and I feel better about that.
And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.0 -
Yes, I was not accurate. I was in a hurry when I looked at the the FT comparison. I have had another look. VWRP outperformed AVSG slightly until January of this year, but AVSG has moved ahead since then. Has that made AVSG overpriced? Is that outperformance a blip or the start of a trend?
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I only scanned through the article. I did not spot that. His concluding remarks were:
Pros
Excellent example of a small cap value fund
The only globally-diversified iteration available to UK investors without jumping through DFA hoops
Metrics look good
Well conceived and clearly documented investment process
Cons
There’s no guarantee small cap value will outperform the market. In fact it hasn’t for over a decade.
It’s risky!
The Pros make sense only if you want to invest in a fund like that. He evidently does. The Cons are more important to me. AVSG is a risky speculation. You could say that the same is true of the market as whole. I could not disagree, but the market as whole has a wider spread of risk. I could invest a few percent of my roughly 60/40 portfolio in AVSG, but is unlikely to make much difference.
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I didn't buy AVSG because of strong conviction about small cap value. Although we are told it is the only sector to outperform the index over long timeframes, we might have to wait many decades to see it come through. I bought it partly for diversification in the toppy/AI-driven market, and also because I had just sold my last three actively managed equity funds and wanted a little bit of non-index interest.
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Diversification is the key word. Moving away from total market indexes right now might be prudent because they have become so tech concentrated. When one sector is so dominant it erodes diversity. I might be focussing on the wrong factor and missing out on lots of market growth, but I'll trade some potential growth for a good night's sleep at this point. I'm definitely doing what I've always avoided ie. market timing because I look at the level of debt in tech and don't see a convincing path to the revenue required to pay it off. Also the rhetoric surrounding AI is just too full of unsubstantiated promises. I don't feel that tilting towards some Large Cap Value is radical, my 25% Cash allocation is the position that's more debatable.
And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.0
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