ETF conundrum

Voyager2002 wrote: »

Thanks, but why are the figures for 3-year return 11.83% for the London one but only 8.58% in the USA? Is that simply the difference between mean return and trailing return? Similarly the volatility: 16.19% versus 15.88%.

Surely your difference is just that when you are visiting the Morningstar UK site as a UK based investor, the Morningstar.co.uk graph of "growth of £1000" and associated percentage performance figures in the tables, are in pounds, because that's how UK investors like to view the returns of one fund compared to another, on that site.

Whereas the morningstar.com one, set up for the American market, gives returns always displayed in USD.

As mentioned by others, if you view both funds through the same front-end and display them in the same manner, you should get something comparable.

The difference between dollars and pounds is always going to be striking because of movements in FX rate. For example in the UK Morningstar site, returns for calendar year 2015, 2016, 2017 for the UK one was -9.9%, 31.4%, 25.9%, while from the Morningstar US site it said the returns were -14.31%, 10.29%, 37.4%.

So when you are sitting in the US looking at how your emerging markets investments performed in 2016, you get a nice reasonable 10% ish in dollars. But dollars became worth a lot more pounds part way through that year, as a result of Brexit vote, and to a UK person measuring the return in pounds he got 31%.

Situation reversed a bit as sterling recovered in 2017, so when the Americans got a 37% return in dollars, our return in sterling was 'only' 26% that year.

So, you might be thinking of buying the USD class (or maybe USD class is the only one available) but if you are looking at it on the Morningstar UK site they will conveniently rebase performance charts and tables to GBP so you can compare with the various rival investment trusts and global or emerging funds that are priced in GBP or Euro.