I was browsing a list of ETFs the other day, as you do, when I stumbled upon something I’ve been waiting a very long time for: a global small cap value ETF.

Value stocks are the subset of risky stocks that are deemed ‘undervalued’ by investors.

According to the value thesis, these ugly ducklings are excessively shunned, lowering their price relative to their potential.

Hence, you can pick them up for a song, Moneyball style, and wait for them to outperform the market over time as their true worth is realised.

But the risk premium associated with value – the performance bonus potentially available beyond the market return – is overwhelmingly concentrated in the small cap corner of the stock universe.

This means you can only really expect value to pay off when you invest in firms that are both smaller and cheaper on balance.

We can verify this using long-run data going back to 1927. The record shows that long-only US small cap value beat the US market by 2% per year on average.

Value works in other world markets too. I’ll post some charts in a follow-up post.

For now, I’ll just comment that there’s no reason to think the value premium is dead, though it’s underperformed in the US since 2013.

The data also confirms that large cap value does not deliver – at least not in the long-only form we can invest in.

Small bargains

Ideally then, to capitalise on the value premium we’d invest in:

• A small cap value fund
• That’s globally diversified
• With an investing approach backed by credible independent research
• Including techniques to mitigate the drawbacks of real-world value strategies
• That’s accessible to anyone for a reasonable fee

It’s always been impossible for UK DIY investors to tick all those boxes – until now.

The Avantis Global Small Cap Value ETF (AVSG) checks them all. So much so that I invested in it before finishing this review!

Hopefully by the time your patience runs out I’ll have explained why I’m so impressed.

What makes for a strong small cap value fund?

We want a fund that:

• Captures size and value traits as purely and consistently as possible, using sound definitions of the factors.
• Incorporates mechanisms such as a profitability screen to try to filter out undesirable value stocks.
• Combats style drift – that is, the tendency for stocks to move out of the small cap value part of the spectrum as they rise in price.
• Diversifies your overall portfolio. (If your chosen value ETF is full of Cisco Systems, Toyota, HSBC, and Shell, then it probably overlaps significantly with your global tracker fund, and so offers a diluted version of the factor.)
• Clearly articulates a transparent investment process for reliably doing all this.
• Keeps costs down.

We should also be able to use widely accepted valuation metrics to check that the fund is doing its job.

The AVSG ETF delivers on all of those points. I’ll show you how with some data in a sec.

What about track record?

Track record is the glaring omission from my criteria above.

Aren’t returns important?

Yes, once we have five years worth of results (and ideally much more) we can test a fund against its direct competitors.

But AVSG only launched in September 2024. Hence there’s no way to pit it against rivals in a worthwhile apples-to-apples performance contest.

Moreover, the UK’s Soviet-style supermarket of small value funds means we’d be comparing an apple with a turnip, one mouldy potato, and a suspicious-looking purple thing.

Happily though Avantis has been operating in the US since 2019. The consensus from the critics has generally been a big thumbs-up, and investors have rewarded the brand by moving billions into Avantis ETFs.

What’s more, we can try to reassure ourselves that AVSG specifically won’t prove to be a lemon in the UK by checking how its US-domiciled equivalents have fared since their launch in September 2019.

That’s possible because AVSG covers the same territory as two US ETF stablemates:

• Avantis International Small Cap Value (AVDV)
• Avantis US Small Cap Value (AVUV)

Let’s match those two ETFs against their competitors using the amazing Portfolio Visualizer tool to see how they’ve performed.

International small cap value face-off

Avantis’ main rival in this category is Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA):

It’s a dead heat! The annualised nominal USD returns for the two funds over the longest comparable time frame (October 2019 to end of April 2025) were:

• Avantis’ AVDV: 10.17%
• DFA’s DISVX: 10.25%

DFA has been the acknowledged master of the investible value factor since the early 1990s. Matching the DFA fund from launch is no mean feat.

And while DFA funds are available in the UK, that’s only via financial advisors.

This frustrating situation may be changing – the firm is advertising for ETF roles in Europe. Previously DFA has made its funds available to the wider American public in ETF form, too.

But for now the DFA funds are no-go in the UK if you’re going it alone.

US small cap value face-off

Focusing specifically on the US, Avantis bossed a wider field of contenders in this category:

Again these annualised returns hail from the longest time period available, October 2019 until end of April 2025:1

• Avantis’ AVUV: 11.1%
• DFA’s DFSVX: 10.0%
• Vanguard’s VBR: 8.3%
• iShares’ IJS: 5.3%

These results, plus the products’ underlying metrics and the analysis of Avantis’ ETFs by noted US commentators such as Allan Roth and Larry Swedroe – not to mention the well-informed Bogleheads community running a slide rule over them, too – dispels any concern I have about Avantis being an unknown quantity.

The Avantis funds are doing an excellent job in the US and I have no reason to think they won’t do the same in Europe.

Is AVSG a good small cap value ETF?

I believe AVSG is the real deal, and I think we can independently verify its small cap value credentials using data aggregator Morningstar.

Morningstar provides the only way I know of to compare the factor exposures of funds available to UK investors.

First, go to the Portfolio page of AVSG’s Morningstar profile.

Then check out the Stock Style section:

The bulk of AVSG is found in the small value square of the grid.

Excellent!

That’s better than DFA’s Global Targeted Value fund:

You can see that DFA’s fund isn’t as small value-y as AVSG.

ZPRV, the SPDR MSCI USA Small Cap Value ETF, does contain more small value exposure:

However it’s 100% US and hence less diversified. (You can pair ZPRV with ZPRX for the European dimension, but you’re still not covering as much of the planet and with twice as much hassle.)

Finally, here’s the iShares Edge MSCI World Value Factor ETF (IWVL):

IWVL is globally diversified. But its stock style reveals it to be a large value ETF. Historical returns tell us we can’t expect large value to deliver a significant risk premium.

All told, I think the Stock Style survey shows that AVSG’s small value chops are worthy of further investigation.

AVSG’s fundamental valuation metrics

I also want to check that AVSG scores well on a range of commonly accepted value metrics.

Morningstar does the honours once more:

The lower the scores in the green box, the more value-y the fund is. And AVSG does well again – outranking ZPRV and DFA’s fund, though I won’t trouble you with their screenshots.

Remember, we’re not looking for absolute numbers or particular thresholds. The metrics are useful insofar as they enable us to assess AVSG versus comparable choices.

Ignore the category and index numbers if they’re inappropriate. In this case, Morningstar has served up off-point small / mid cap benchmarks, skipping the value side of the coin.

Hit the Market Cap button in the Style Measures section to see the average market cap of the fund’s holdings.

We want this number to be teenier than thou to confirm the fund’s small cap credentials:

Fund	Av market cap ($bil)
AVSG	2.09
DFA Glb Targ Val	5.37
ZPRV	4.07

As the picture builds, AVSG looks bang on the small value money.

So shall we call it a day?

Unfortunately the value trap lies in wait.

Avoiding the value trap

A value trap is an investment that looks like an absolute bargain. It lights up the valuation metrics because it’s cheap.

But it’s cheap for a reason. The reason is it’s junk.

Good value funds and indexes sieve the rubbish with a profitability screen.

We can get some sense of how well AVSG does this via the quality measure in Morningstar’s Factor Profile:

Quality is a variant of profitability. AVSG’s quality score is higher than DFA’s comparable fund, and DFA is well-respected for using profitability screens to enhance value funds.

Ignore the fact that the quality score looks objectively low and is below the category average.

You wouldn’t expect a small value fund to score highly for quality, and the category benchmark is off as previously mentioned.

All I’m looking for is evidence that AVSG’s stocks aren’t scraped off the bottom of the bargain bin. Its quality score of 77 (the 77th percentile for quality in Morningstar’s stock universe) offers some comfort on that front.

DFA’s fund lies in the 85th decile for quality. It holds even less in the way of profitable companies – yet DFA’s value funds set the standard for the industry.

Morningstar doesn’t score ZPRV but IWVL (iShares’ large value effort) also floats around the 85th decile. So in comparison to other value funds, AVSG looks, well, quality.

Negative momentum

Momentum exposure is also worth an eyeball.

Team Avantis describes how value funds can be adversely affected by negative momentum. (Monevator articles can also suffer from this phenomenon.)

Picture a stock dropping in price. This price slashing can place a stock firmly in the value zone per traditional measures such as price/earnings, price/book, and so on.

But the chief insight of the momentum thesis is that stock price declines (and gains) typically continue for some time.

Why rush into catching a falling knife when it’s probably got further to go? Better to buy it closer to the bottom and then hope to cash in if and when it finally ascends.

Avantis attempts to harness momentum by delaying purchases with large negative six-month returns and, conversely, the sale of stocks with large six-month gains.

You would expect a value vehicle to score quite poorly for momentum. DFA’s fund is 84th decile.

But AVSG is 60th decile, which suggests it’s succeeding in dampening down negative momentum.

The light blue shading in AVSG’s Factor Profile above reveals each exposure’s historical range. You can see its momentum score is swingy.

But the lack of shade in the style2 and size categories shows the fund has remained firmly rooted in its target factors. It has not been afflicted by style drift since its launch.

Taken together, AVSG’s metrics suggest it’s a top-notch small value ETF.

What on Earth are they up to?

The Avantis team has written an excellent guide to its methodology called Our Scientific Approach To Investing.

ETF providers rarely write such a clear explanation of their investing process.

The major firms pump out scanty marketing gloss that typically leaves me wondering if they think their customers are idiots.

Or they produce indecipherable exercises in obfuscation, designed to make you think you are an idiot.

In comparison to those poles of customer disservice, the Avantis paper is a masterclass in transparency.

Granted, they’re not telling you where all the bodies lie. But they do explain what they’re doing and why.

It makes sense relative to my grasp of the academic literature, and you can follow the citations to sanity check any aspect of the strategy.

I won’t regurgitate the paper but it’s well worth a read if you’re interested in this ETF. It reinforced my sense that AVSG is a good choice for a world small cap value fund.

(Not to mention the only one!)

Closing remarks on AVSG

Avantis is a sub-brand of global asset manager, American Century. American Century appears to be reasonably well-regarded, while Avantis was spun-up by ex-DFA executives – no doubt explaining the impressive value fund execution.

AVSG’s 0.39% OCF is not cheap, but it’s not expensive for what it is either. I wouldn’t think twice about that price tag if I wanted small value exposure.

It’s an actively-managed ETF so it doesn’t track an index. That’s how DFA funds work too, and it appears to be an advantage in this category.

The ‘global’ moniker means developed world really. Emerging markets are excluded.

Still, AVSG is amply diversified with 1,300 stocks. Check out the holdings and you’ll quickly see there’s no danger here of replicating your global tracker positions.

Scan the sectors and you’ll also see useful differences. For example, AVSG is just 5% tech versus 25% in Vanguard’s Developed World ETF (VEVE).

The Avantis fund won’t reduce your US exposure – but it may help if AI-driven large caps falter.

Diversifying your sources of return like this paid off handsomely when tech stocks imploded during the Dotcom bust. The S&P 500 dived -38% in those years. Meanwhile US small cap value advanced 19%.3

Still, who knows whether that will happen again? Or if small value will outpace the wider market in the future?

Moreover AVSG is liable to give you a rough ride along the way. Check out the volatility measure above.

Indeed the reason small value is expected to earn market-beating returns is because it loads up on very risky stocks. Thus AVSG is not for the faint-hearted or anyone who doesn’t know how they react to stock market reversals.

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!

Take it steady,

The Accumulator

1. Portfolio Visualizer only seems to measure returns in units of complete months. AVUV was launched on 24 September 2019. [↩]
2. Value versus growth. [↩]
3. Annual nominal USD returns. [↩]

What caught my eye this week.

I was delighted to hear from Monevator reader Elizabeth Wong a few months ago, when she sent me a copy of her new short story and said it might be of interest to people around here.

It was! The Landless is a thought provoking tale that takes many of the themes we discuss in these Weekend Readings and the comments to their dark conclusion.

I didn’t have a way to share the full story then, but I do now.

Here’s a slice of the extract published by Wasafiri:

She told Poppy, ‘If you say “refugee”, I think of someone who fled their country because of war, and it’s not their fault. And if you say “migrant”, I think of someone who has moved for better opportunities. But these people are neither refugees nor migrants. They are just … landless.’

Poppy tried to argue. ‘Surely these words are two sides of the same coin. Surely these people are refugees as well, escaping places that are now too hot to live in. People like her aunt and cousins who used to live in Malaysia, but left when the country got too hot, and the Chinese and Indian minorities persecuted for not being Muslim — are they not refugees? Surely the price of land is too expensive, hoarded by a few landowners —.’

Louise cut her off. ‘My family took out a multi-generational sixty-year mortgage to buy our chalet. The debt was finally paid off last year. That is why I got to come to Monte Carlo this season. I am here not because of privilege. This is several lifetimes of hard work — my father, my mother, my grandfather, working into their eighties with two jobs. Why should the price of land be lower? Our family has sacrificed so much.’ Louise took a breath. Poppy made a small sound, a signal to add to the conversation but Louise ignored it. ‘And it’s not like the landless are homeless. The government has built the new villages for them to live in.’

‘But the new villages … ’ Poppy read a report, she had seen the documentaries, it was like living in hell. The heat, the dust —

‘The new villages have water, food, jobs, shelter. And it was their choice to come. If they don’t like it, then they can go back to their own country.’

For the rest of May you can read Wong’s The Landless in its entirety.

Enjoy, and have a great weekend.

[continue reading…]

A lament regularly heard in school playgrounds across the land goes something like this:

“Eeeeeuuugggh! Shuuuttttt up!”

…followed by:

“Girls are gross!”

So proclaims generation after generation of little boys – only a few years before the hormones kick in and they spend the rest of their lives obsessing over women.

As goes the birds and bees, so goes home ownership.

People love to debate renting versus buying a home, the imminent collapse of house prices, or the stupidity of tying themselves to a mortgage when they could be travelling the world.

If they’re young and politically-aware, they may even decry the whole thing as a capitalist con. (Been there, probably still have the T-shirt).

But in practice nearly everyone buys their own home as soon they’re able to. And if they can’t then they aspire to.

What’s more, most of us buy our homes with little more thought than went into that five-minute mumbled lecture from your parents that they hoped would pass for sex education.

We simply buy our homes like our parents did – and their grandparents did before them.

Other ways to think about home ownership and mortgages

I’m not going to argue for a big change in the mechanics of how to buy a home.

Innovation in home ownership is usually cancerous – mostly doing local damage (timeshares, endowment mortgages) but sometimes metastasising (think Great Financial Crisis).

But I would like to remind you of some different ways to think about home ownership and having a mortgage, and how both can fit into your overall investment posture.

If you don’t own your own home then you’re ‘short’ one house

We all need somewhere to keep us and our stuff dry. Somewhere safe to sleep at night. You can either own this home or rent it.

If you don’t own a home then you’re effectively ‘short’ one, in financial terms. You have to borrow a home off someone else who owns it, and you pay the going rate to do so (the rent).

Shorting residential property is risky. In the UK house prices and rents have risen inexorably for many generations.

You close this housing short when you buy. If house prices fell while you rented then you benefitted from being short. If they rose you lost out. (Ignoring transaction costs).

Once you’re a homeowner you have a market neutral position. If you choose to buy more homes – via buy-to-let say – then you become overweight residential property.

Repaying a mortgage is the same as saving more cash

People tend to think of a repayment mortgage as a monthly expense.

They know they will own their home outright at the end of the mortgage term.

But they see the regular repayments as an expense that they mentally bucket exactly the same way as they would rent.

They usually don’t think of their repayment mortgage as contributing to their savings rate.

However repaying a mortgage on your own home is a very different financial move compared to paying rent.

Your monthly repayment mortgage direct debit consists of two parts:

• You pay the interest you owe to the bank in return for it lending you the money you need to buy your home.
• The other part pays down the outstanding loan. These payments will eventually reduce your mortgage debt to zero. Then you’ll own your property outright.

This graphic from our mortgage calculator shows these two parts for a repayment mortgage:

Here we see a £100,000 repayment mortgage that costs 3% being paid down over 25 years.

In the early years you can see you’re paying interest more than paying down capital.

But towards the end, capital repayment – effectively savings – makes up most of the money sent to your bank.

• The interest payments are an expense. They are the cost of having a mortgage.
• The capital repayments that reduce your outstanding mortgage are savings. They reduce your debt and increase your net worth.

You might think of an outstanding mortgage as a savings account that starts deeply in the red.

As you save money by repaying your mortgage, you move this ‘negative savings account’ towards a breakeven £0 balance.

Paying off your mortgage does not reduce your exposure to property

The market value of your home as house prices fluctuate has no bearing on your mortgage being effectively a savings account.

And the balance of that savings account does not affect your exposure to property.

Your house is an asset and an investment that is worth whatever someone will pay for it.

This is true however you financed buying it – whether with cash, an interest-only mortgage, a repayment mortgage, or some other less legal arrangement.

Separately from this, your repayment mortgage is a debt that you’re paying off over time.

True, this debt is secured on your home. But unless something goes very wrong – you lose your job at the same time that house prices crash and your bank decides to foreclose – house price fluctuations don’t impact your existing mortgage.

By the same token, paying off a mortgage doesn’t change your exposure to property one jot.

Having a smaller mortgage will make your finances more secure (because you have less debt).

But the affect house price moves have on your portfolio and your net worth is independent from how you happened to finance your home, and of the balance on your mortgage.

A mortgage is money rented from a bank

When you buy a house with a mortgage, the bank gives you money to make the purchase.

Let’s say it gives you £200,000.

Party time! You’ve swapped ‘wasting money on rent’ for owning a home of your own.

Well, yes, but you might want to turn down the music – because it turns out the bank didn’t give you that £200,000 for nothing.

No, it wants interest on the mortgage.

It’s as if the bank leased you the money. You’re paying to rent the money off the bank.

• At 5% over 25 years, borrowing £200,000 will cost you £833 a month in ‘money rent’

You have swapped rent payments to your landlord for rent payments to your bank.

Note that if you only ever pay your money rent and nothing else (like with an interest-only mortgage) then you must give back the £200,000 borrowed at the end of the mortgage term.

Just the same way as you hand back a rented house to your landlord when your lease is up.

To avoid this, you must repay the bank’s capital, too.

Seen another way, with a repayment mortgage you’re effectively buying £200,000 in cash from the bank, in monthly instalments, with interest.

A landlord is someone who rents money on your behalf

Instead of thinking of your landlord as someone who owns the house or flat they rent to you, you might think of a landlord as someone who borrows £250,000 or £500,000 or whatever to buy the property on your behalf.

They borrow the money required, and as a result you don’t need to do so.

You pay them rent in return for them borrowing this money. The cost is usually marked up for their trouble, so your rent is higher than if you’d rented the money from the bank yourself.

In addition, your renting hands the option on any rise in the property’s price to your landlord.

Then again, you’re also insulated from the risk of falling house prices.

You can go quite far down this rabbit hole.

You can also think of a fixed-rate mortgage as like a bond

A fixed-rate mortgage is like a bond.

From the point of view of the lender it’s an asset which pays an income, secured against an asset to reduce the risks of default.

Hence when you take out a fixed-rate mortgage – which is for you a liability, not an asset – it’s as if you’re shorting bonds.

Of course you might also own bonds in your portfolio. Maybe you have a typical 60/40 asset allocation, for instance.

Factor in your sort-of short bond position as represented by your mortgage, and your bond exposure will go down. Your overall posture may be riskier than you thought.

You can get very cute and calculate the money-weighted duration and interest rate exposure represented by your mortgage and your bond portfolio.

That’s probably not worth it though. Bonds are typically in a portfolio to dampen risk from equities, not to express a view on interest rates. And you got a mortgage to buy a house!

I’ve seen people do it though.

The Bank of England does not set mortgage rates

Unless you have a tracker mortgage that is explicitly linked to the Bank of England’s Bank Rate, your mortgage rate is not set by the UK’s central bank.

Rather, mortgage rates are based on swap rates – effectively the clearing price of debt of various durations in the open market.

Of course, the Bank of England is a player in this game. But we’ll leave debating whether it’s a leader or a follower for another day.

It’s also worth noting that mortgage lenders make their return via fees as well as the interest rate they charge.

And given that nearly all mortgages are two-year or five-year fixes – so they’re renewed several times over any mortgage term – these fees add up.

Indeed researchers have shown that lenders often explicitly lower mortgage rates but jack-up fees to appear more competitive in the market.

Your own home is an investment and an asset

Lots of people don’t think their home is an investment or asset.

I’ve burned thousands of words trying to explain why this is wrong. Please read them if you still don’t get it.

No, your home being an investment and an asset doesn’t mean it’s exactly like shares, or that you’re explicitly speculating on house price gains, or that you thought of it as an investment when you bought it, or that house prices can’t go down, or that you don’t need to repair the roof – or any of the other handwaving people do when they’re busy being wrong about this.

It means your house is an investment and an asset.

Nothing more, nothing less.

Running a mortgage while investing is like leveraging your portfolio

A big advantage of looking at all your assets as being part of your investment portfolio is that it enables you to see where you stand in the round.

For example, you’ve secured a mortgage against your house. But when you choose to invest in shares instead of paying off your mortgage, you’re effectively leveraging up your portfolio because you’re not paying down the debt.

Congratulations! You’re running a DIY hedge fund!

Personally I think this is not a bad idea for young people with strong earning prospects, tax shelters to fill, and a long investing time horizon ahead.

But it is a risk – and one many people don’t appreciate when they do it blindly.

Indeed many times I’ve been chided for running my interest-only mortgage while investing, only for it to transpire that my critic is saving in a pension while they too have a mortgage.

Nothing wrong with that, but it’s more or less the same thing.

• More: should you pay off your mortgage or invest?

A mortgage is a hedge against inflation

Investors spend a lot of time fretting about how to hedge their portfolio against inflation.

It’s time well spent. Keeping ahead of inflation is a prime mover when it comes to investing.

However I seldom see home ownership mentioned in these discussions. Perhaps that’s because as we’ve just covered, many people think of their home as something other than an asset. (What, we might wonder? A daydream? A mirage? A poem?)

As a result they put the mortgage in a separate mental bucket to the rest of their portfolio, too.

However a house is typically the biggest asset most people own for most of their lives.

And happily, property prices have outpaced inflation for many, many decades.

Better still, you typically buy a home with a mortgage. This debt is partly paid off – in real terms – by inflation. The nominal money you owe is worth less in the future as inflation erodes the real value of each pound.

In my view a mortgage is such a great inflation hedge that it seems worth continuing to run my big interest-only mortgage indefinitely, despite the extra risks from doing so.

Most people’s own home is their best investment

I’ve previously explained why for most people their own home is their best investment.

This has nothing to do with the prospect for house prices today, or whether shares are cheap or the stock market is about to crash.

Rather it’s that buying your own home closes a risky short position, as we discussed above, and then imposes the toughest saving and investing regime most people will ever muster.

Still, it’s interesting to think about how well your grandparents who made a fortune buying a ‘cheap’ property a gazillion years ago might have done from the stock market if they’d treated shares the same way as home buying:

• Save into the stock market each and every month, like they did with their mortgage
• Invest sensibly after researching the best options
• Ignore price fluctuations for years at a stretch
• Hold on for the long-term because selling is a hassle
• Leverage up their portfolio 5-to-1
• Not calculate their gains for 25-50 years, and even then ignore inflation
• Get all the returns tax-free, like you do with your own home

You’ll notice of course that Monevator readers who invest in index funds within ISAs and SIPPs and ignore the market noise are actually doing most of this – just absent the leverage. (Because you can’t get a mortgage to buy shares).

And global equities have delivered far higher returns than UK property prices after costs over the long-term.

Perhaps even with the lack of explicit gearing for share portfolios, choosing the ‘best investment’ crown will be a tougher call in the future?

Bringing it all back home

To be clear I don’t think you should walk into Nationwide and ask for a bond-like mortgage so you can leverage your portfolio by renting money, instead of having your landlord do it for you.

Not least because it’ll see them asking you to please leave the premises.

These are simply different ways to think about money, investments, and mortgages, which can help you see where you stand in interesting new ways.

That said though, more flexible thinking can deliver concrete real-world outcomes.

When I struggled to get a traditional mortgage based on my pretty unimpressive annual earnings, thinking differently saw me borrowing backed by my portfolio.

Applying the principles

Today my portfolio is far bigger than when I took out the mortgage and I’m earning more, too.

If I was assessing myself like a public company, then my debt-to-equity ratio is lower and my interest cover ratio is improved.

I do own some bonds as well as having a mortgage. As we’ve seen above the bonds are effectively negated by the debt, but they enable me to keep my ISAs fully-loaded and they might deliver a rebalancing bonus now and then.

In the meantime inflation continues to erode the real terms value of my mortgage.

Hopefully my active investing returns will outpace my own home as an investment though!