The Vanguard Blog has an article Is price everything for ETFs? that reminds us that while low costs may be the most important factor in ETF selection, it is not the only factor. When there are multiple ETFs covering similar asset classes, the DIY investor should dig a bit deeper to get the complete picture.

For example, here is a comparison chart of the Vanguard Emerging Markets ETF (VWO), iShares Core MSCI Emerging Markets ETF (IEMG), and the Schwab Emerging Markets Equity ETF (SCHE). If you compare only with expense ratio, they are all pretty much the same with Schwab being the cheapest by a thin margin.

What’s actually inside? Underneath the ETF wrapper, you’ll see that VWO holds a larger number of companies and the average market cap is smaller at $15 billion. This means that Vanguard’s ETF holds many more of the smaller companies, if that additional diversification interests you. iShares still holds South Korean stocks, whereas Vanguard and Schwab has South Korea as a developed market.

Trade commissions. Transaction costs affect your personal return. You can trade Vanguard ETFs for free with an account direct at Vanguard.com. You can trade Schwab ETFs for free with an account direct at Schwab.com. iShares doesn’t have their own self-directed brokerage arm, but you can trade many iShares ETFs for free at Fidelity.com. You could also go through a broker that offers free trades on everything like Robinhood (no minimum) or Merrill Edge ($50,000+ in assets).

Average bid/ask spread. In addition to commissions, there is also a buy/sell gap where you can lose money. This is less important for gradual buy-and-hold investors, but you still want this gap to be as small as possible. The article doesn’t share this information, but you can look it up at sites like ETF.com, where the respective 45-day historical bid/ask spreads were VWO (0.02%), IEMG (0.02%), and SCHE (0.04%). Schwab has the lowest assets under management and lowest daily volume, making their bid/ask spread wider by a thin margin.

There appears to be a trend of everyone is getting their “stocks are highly-valued” calls on record in so that when the next drawdown occurs, they’ll have their “I told you so” ready to go. I should probably do that too. Example: Goldman Warns That Market Valuations Are at Their Highest Since 1900.

Here’s the boom/bust cycle chart you may recall from the Housing Bubble era. Instead, this ValueWalk article places us very close to the top point of the cycle for the stock market:

The more valid point of the article is that sooner-or-later, there will be some fear and pain. We should be prepared for another opportunity like 2008/2009 to be “greedy when others are fearful”.

In hot pink, I decided to throw in my own bit of speculation. The other half of the Buffett quote is to be “fearful when others are greedy”. My opinion is that I am not hearing enough greed. Many people are more anxious than euphoric. I think we are actually closer to the “Thrill” point. In terms of the big picture, it’s not that different. We should still be careful. What do you think?

One major question in portfolio construction is how to allocate between US stocks and non-US stocks. Over the last 10 years, US stocks have outperformed International stocks significantly. However, as the following chart shows, they tend to take turns outperforming each other in cycles:

Chart is from Factor Investor, found via Abnormal Returns.

This is not a recommendation for market timing, as for starters you don’t know how long each cycle will last. For me, it is more of a visual reminder of why you might choose to diversify between US and non-US stocks. You don’t need as much as I do, but I think some is prudent. Things may not look great internationally right now, but that’s why valuations are also much lower, which in turns sows the seeds for a future bull market. Are you okay with your portfolio if the cycle shifts again?

There seems to be a lot of angst about the stock market these days. It’s been going up, up, up. Is it too high? Will there be a crash? Accordingly, I just caught up on the most recent Howard Marks memos – There They Go Again… Again [pdf] and the follow-up Yet Again?. Everyone from Warren Buffett on down reads these memos to Oaktree Capital clients.

The first memo contains mostly cautionary advice about how asset prices are high, prospective returns are low, and high-risk behavior is commonplace. We are in the midst of high uncertainty in terms of central banks, politics, technology, future jobs, and more. Yet stocks are at historically high-valuations and risky bonds (junk corporate, emerging markets) are priced at historically-tiny premiums to Treasury bonds.

A common explanation for these thing is that interest rates are low, so the prices of stocks and bonds are justifiable. Therefore, I found this quote interesting:

The bottom line is that while the prices and prospective returns on many things are justifiable today relative to other things, you can’t eat (or spend) relative returns.

In other words, just because you can justify it doesn’t mean you should buy it.

The second memo tries to respond to criticisms and also provide additional guidance. It’s easy to point out flaws. It’s harder to lay out clear and actionable advice. Investing in low-cost index funds is not perfect and has many drawbacks. But what is better?

What should an investor actually DO with high asset values everywhere? Marks offers the following choices:

1. Invest as you always have and expect your historic returns.
2. Invest as you always have and settle for today’s low returns.
3. Reduce risk to prepare for a correction and accept still-lower returns.
4. Go to cash at a near-zero return and wait for a better environment.
5. Increase risk in pursuit of higher returns.
6. Put more into special niches and special investment managers.

For the most part, he dismisses #1, #4, and #5. This leaves:

For me the answer lies in a combination of numbers 2, 3 and 6.

After digesting these Howard Marks memos, here are my personal takeaways and opinions:

• Adjust your future return expectations to be lower than historical averages.
• Make sure your portfolio is stress-tested. If a 50% drop in your stocks would freak you out, then reduce your risk slightly by selling a bit of stocks and buying a bit of short-term, high-quality bonds (or cash). Don’t go 100% cash, but do take some risk off the table if necessary.
• You might simply keep your portfolio the same. I’m sticking with 2/3rd stocks (globally-diversified) and 1/3rd bonds (on the shorter-term, higher-quality side).
• If you are Howard Marks, you might look for “special niches and special investment managers”. If you are not Howard Marks, ignore this option because you’re most likely to do harm than good. If anything take 5% of your portfolio, manage it however you like, and compare your return honestly with your index funds.

Here’s a good quote from a 2007 memo as to the consequences of being cautious:

If you refuse to fall into line in carefree markets like today’s, it’s likely that, for a while, you’ll (a) lag in terms of return and (b) look like an old fogey. But neither of those is much of a price to pay if it means keeping your head (and capital) when others eventually lose theirs. In my experience, times of laxness have always been followed eventually by corrections in which penalties are imposed. It may not happen this time, but I’ll take that risk. In the meantime, Oaktree and its people will continue to apply the standards that have served us so well over the last [thirty] years.

Risk-taking in the capital markets is becoming widely accepted again. Therefore, the contrarian thing is to not increase your risk right now. You may have to give up some possible return, but it is wiser to be prepared. Marks is not a “perma-bear” that always call for an impending crash. If you read the Barron’s cover above it quotes Marks as saying “stocks are cheap” back in March 2013 (paywalled article). Not a bad call in hindsight. Bookmark this article for another hindsight check in 2021/2022.

You can read previous Howard Marks Memos online for free, or as a book with extra commentary in The Most Important Thing.

The Vanguard Blog has an interesting scatter plot of annual stock and bond returns from 1926-2016. The vertical axis is bond returns (broad US bond indexes), with the blue shaded areas indicating bond returns between 3% and 7%. The horizontal axis is stock returns (broad US stock indexes), with the purple shaded areas indicating stock returns between 8% and 12%. Click to enlarge.

I don’t remember seeing this data presented in such a manner before. I think this is a good chart to keep in your head. Here’s why:

While we often keep an idea of “average” in our heads, the actual return in any given year could be all over the place. You could also have low stock returns and low bond returns, or high stock returns and high bond returns. It’s much more common to be “not” average than average.

Stock returns are much wilder than bond returns. Bond returns were in the 3% to 7% band only 30% of the time (27 out of 91 years). However, stock returns were in the 8% to 12% band only 7% of the time (6 out of 91 years). Also, the bond scale only goes from -5% to +35%. The stock scale goes from -50% to +60%.

While I liked the graphic, I didn’t really agree with the text of the linked post. Neither “desired return” nor “required return” would seem to be good benchmarks. The market doesn’t care what you want or need. You take what you get and you deal with it. I think using an appropriate Vanguard Target Retirement or LifeCycle all-in-one fund as a benchmark is reasonable because it is a real-world alternative to whatever custom mix of investments you decide to hold. Such a benchmark can help keep you honest with yourself.

You’ve decided that low-cost index funds are the way to go. Which index fund company do you pick? Morningstar has a new research paper titled Partnering With Passive Fund Sponsors That Have Your Back:

Successful investing hinges on putting yourself in the best position to maximize favorable outcomes. Beyond selecting a fund that tracks a well-constructed index and charges a low fee, choosing a fund sponsor that aligns its interests with its fundholders’ increases the odds of a positive investor outcome. Our research found that purveyors of passive funds that align their incentives with those of their fundholders have generated better category-relative risk-adjusted performance on average than funds from firms that seem to prioritize their own interests over investors’.

Here are the characteristics that they felt showed “alignment”:

• Charging low expense ratios
• Sharing a greater portion of generated securities-lending revenue
• Maintaining a disciplined approach to product development
• Investing in portfolio management infrastructure

After finishing the entire paper, my primary takeaway is that most of the big companies are doing a pretty good job. Vanguard, Fidelity, and Schwab are probably the most aligned. DFA is good in many areas but they do charge higher expense ratios for their factor-tilted passive funds (though past performance has also been higher). Blackrock has some good characteristics but also does a few questionable things like creating a cheap version of a successful ETF, which still charging as much as they can on the old ETF.

Index tracking quality. Here’s a chart of how well each firm tracked their underlying indexes over the past 5 years. Tracking errors are now very low across the board.

For the most part, competition is working and industry practices are converging. The paper notes that State Street has historically been the worst at lowering expense ratios over the last 10 years. The next thing I see? State Street announces their new suite of low-cost SPDR Portfolio ETFs.

TIAA is NOT a non-profit. The Morningstar paper states that TIAA is a nonprofit. However, according to this recent NY Times article, TIAA stopped being a non-profit in 1997 and has been accused of touting its “nonprofit heritage” while pushing higher-cost investment products:

Even though TIAA stopped being a nonprofit organization in 1997, many of its customers might think it remains one. The company’s website ends in a .org rather than a .com and TIAA repeatedly refers to its “nonprofit heritage.”

Most of TIAA is for-profit. Teachers Advisors, for example, is an investment advisory firm that receives compensation from each in-house mutual fund it manages. Nuveen, a mutual fund company purchased by TIAA in 2014, is also run on a for-profit basis. So is EverBank, a Florida banking institution TIAA acquired in June.

Bottom line. Morningstar did not provide final rankings, but my interpretation of Morningstar data is that these firms show the most investor-aligned practices: Vanguard, Fidelity, and Schwab. Based on my own observations, I would be most comfortable having my money held with these firms as well. DFA and Blackrock are not that far behind.