What caught my eye this week.

Nobody asked for it and now it’s here – the new Monevator shop is open, offering in-joke themed investing T-shirts and vaguely punny sweatshirts to all.

Perhaps you’ve already spotted Monevator members striding about town sporting fancy wares like this:

Yes, those cool cats got early access. Thanks to everyone who bought something and so beta-tested the new store for us.

Now to repeat what I said to them, being a Monevator member is by far the best way to support the site. The margins on digital products are unbeatable – after the taxman has taken his share most of the money goes to us. This helps to keep the lights on and us publishing, week after week.

In particular, please don’t buy anything from the shop if you think there’s a chance you’ll return it. The margins are terrible and returns will wipe them out. We’re only really doing this for strategic brand-building mindshare capture mutual fun.

There’s an FAQ. Our merch is made by print-on-demand giant Printful, and all payments are securely handled by the globe-spanning Shopify.

Finally, you’ll also find a digital bookshop (it links to Amazon) of our 24 favourite investing books.

• Go check out the shop

Hope to see you at an investing conference or under a Canary Wharf skyscraper – or failing that at the gym – in a Monevator hoodie soon!

Have a great weekend.

[continue reading…]

By their own admission, today’s interviewee is straight from the high-earner IT professional FIRE central casting department. But as we’ll be reminded once again, everyone faces obstacles and Rich has had to overcome an early property debacle and some very difficult family planning challenges in their journey to financial independence.

A place by the FIRE

Hello Rich! How do you feel about taking stock of your financial life today?

Thanks for having me, Monevator team!

How old are you?

My wife and I are in our early 50s.

Whereabouts do you live and what’s it like there?

We moved north of London a few years back mainly because we wanted space for a kitchen garden.

My wife is a keen gardener, growing loads of vegetables and fruit especially during the summer. I’m a keen cook, so it all works out!

When do you consider you achieved Financial Independence and why?

I’m afraid this is going to be one of those stories of “how on earth can someone in IT earning six-figures become Financially Independent and Retire Early? It’s a mystery!”

I consider that I became FI some time in 2020. I haven’t retired yet, but may do so in the near future.

My wife is also working, but she enjoys her job more. We expect her to continue to do it part-time even after we both nominally retire.

Assets: a millionaire next door 

What is your current net worth?

Total net worth excluding our house is £1.7 million. Of that, the pension is just under a million, ISA is about £300,000, and our general investing account (GIA) is about £350,000. It’s almost all invested in whole market funds and ETFs.

I favour Vanguard VWRL/VWRP and VAFTGAG in the ISA and GIA. For my pension – which doesn’t offer Vanguard funds – I have some Blackrock iShares ETFs, chosen to reflect roughly a whole market index.

We have about £50,000 in cash or equivalents. That’s in savings accounts and premium bonds. I’m trying to build up the cash position to the point where we will have three years of spending, and to have something to invest when there’s a downturn in the market.

Those figures are from 1 February 2025. I may look back on these numbers with nostalgia. The man in the White House and his Nazty little sidekick are running round the factory stripping out the wires and copper pipes for scrap. I fear they’re going to break something important soon.

Approximately 80% of our net worth – including the house – is in tax-sheltered accounts like the ISA, pension, and primary residence. The other 20% pays low thousands per year in dividend tax, and one day will pay only 18% or 24% capital gains tax. I’ll only pay the basic rate on my pension when I draw it down.

I call these ‘middle-class benefits’.

Some people claim our welfare state is in trouble, and sure it is if you’re poor, disabled or ill.

But isn’t it great that the NHS is World Class, our Army is Fighting Fit ready for the war in Europe, our roads and railways are immaculate, and we still have money left over to help a middle-aged man on a six-figure salary?

What’s your main residence like? Do you own or rent it?

Before I was married I bought my first flat, a leasehold, at the beginning of the 2000s. It was a disaster from the very start. I made every mistake you can make!

I bought it with a mortgage from my bank without considering the mortgage market or even knowing that was a thing. I locked myself into a fixed interest rate – 8.5% – for three years as interest rates were falling. I bought expensive monthly payment protection cover. I used the solicitor that the estate agent recommended. I bid the full asking price. Then after I moved in, I found the flat had noisy neighbours so it was barely habitable.

And those weren’t even the worst things that happened!

A few months after I moved in, the leasehold (‘fleecehold’) for the property was sold to an outright conman. He immediately started increasing the ground rent and piling on demands for bills to repair this and that. Needless to say, no builder was ever seen.

I lived there about a year, rented it out for a bit, and then after a couple of years I tried to sell. Every mistake I’d made when buying now came back to bite me. The original solicitor hadn’t bothered with any of the council searches you’re supposed to do, and had missed that there was some kind of dangerous structure order on the whole building. Even without that, the flat wasn’t worth the full price I’d paid and the estate agent advised me to knock £10,000 off. It ended up selling for even less – it was quite an achievement to lose money on London property at that time.

But the biggest problem was the new leasehold landlord who wouldn’t provide the documentation buyers need to prove that I’d paid all the baseless demands for money. Instead he tried to use this as leverage to force me to sell the flat to him. All perfectly legal apparently.

I was very, very lucky in the end. The buyer was as naive as me and instructed his solicitor to buy my flat anyway without the documentation from the landlord and ignoring the council order. So I got rid of it, probably £25,000 down in the end.

Checking now – that flat’s a rental and has not been sold since. At least the building hasn’t collapsed.

This put me off home ownership for quite a long time. But after I got married and we moved out of London, we finally got sick of renting and moving every year and we bought again.

A house! Freehold! Arranged using an independent mortgage broker!

Given that this is an interview with someone who has achieved Financial Independence, it sounds like we’ve hit a turning point in the story…

Yes, I was starting to educate myself about money and freedom at this point and I was determined to pay the mortgage off.

As well as my unjustified but hopefully understandable fear of owning a house, I have a much larger horror at being in debt to anyone.

Our garden is one of those very long and quite narrow ones which are so common in the UK. The plot of the house and garden is actually a 7:1 rectangle.

In the first few months of living there I calculated how much of the garden was notionally mine. Just the deposit I’d put down on the house to start with. I marked it out on the fence. And saw I owned the sun deck and a small shed at the bottom of the garden.

Everything else felt like a big black hole of debt. I suppose if all else failed I could live in the shed, but I’m not sure my wife – or the bank – would go along with it.

I wasn’t able to overpay the mortgage for the first year – more on this later – and what you pay in the beginning is almost all eaten by interest, so the mark on the garden fence moved only a little at first.

But with determination, working very hard in a better paying job, living modestly, and putting every spare pound into overpaying the mortgage, I willed that mark on the fence to move along. I ended up paying off the whole mortgage in a snip under eight years.

My bank couldn’t transfer the final payment to the mortgage company online so I had to go into the branch. The woman who was helping me to do it asked me what it was for. When she found out I was paying off my mortgage, she straight-up asked me when I was going to buy a second house, since obviously I should do that now. I think my gurning face told her that wasn’t something I was considering.

With the house paid off and no debts at all, I was now free to go for FIRE for real. We still live modestly and every spare pound goes into the stock market.

Do you consider your home an asset, an investment, or something else?

Why isn’t ‘problem’ one of the options?!

It’s somewhere to live, and that should always be the most important thing. It’s always trouble, this and that breaking down and needing to be fixed.

But with my financial head on, the answer is it’s neither an asset nor an investment. Unless you own two of them in which case my advice would be to sell the one you’re not living in and invest the money into the stock market.

Nvidia have bathrooms in their offices, but as far as I recall they’ve never tried to call me up to fix a toilet that started leaking.

Earning: well-paid but not so rewarding

What’s your job?

I work in IT and earn about £150,000.

Does my job spark joy? No.

If you type my father’s 1980s salary into one of those online inflation calculators, then it was similar to mine at the same age. (Of course not including his gold-plated Defined Benefit pension.)

My father drove his company car to a large private office every day. His secretary, who had an office of her own, kept his diary, dealt with interoffice memos, and typed up his letters. He was responsible for factory safety across the whole UK in a particularly dangerous heavy industry. He had a budget, but otherwise management stayed out of his way and he did his job as a respected professional, setting his own direction, with a medium-sized department of other professionals working under him.

At the end of an eight-hour day he went home to a five-bed house in the countryside.

No one will be crushed under hundreds of tons of steel roller if I don’t do my job well, but it’s still important for The Company, being a vital link that enables sales in the hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

Yet I sit in the second bedroom of my two-bed semi.

‘IT’ can sound a bit nebulous. What do you actually do?

The first thing in the morning is to check if customers raised new tickets and firefight those. Then, after triaging hundreds of emails and replying to what I can, there’s a ‘gamified’ ticketing system that sorts issues into ones that must be completed in this ‘sprint’.

The other guy who was working on this resigned and I only got the budget to hire his replacement last month so I’m training someone up in my spare time. If the training works out, we might have two-thirds of the staff needed to provide round the clock customer cover, assuming neither of us goes on holiday, ever.

The latest wheeze is The Company threatening to introduce ‘stand-up’ meetings to make us more ‘agile’. Each day we’ll have to appear on a video call at a certain time and discuss which tickets we’ll work on that day.

The job effectively doesn’t have fixed hours. It’s very often the case that I’m answering emails or chat messages at both 9am and 10pm on the same day. It’s not full-time 13-plus hours a day – there are often times when I’m waiting for hours with nothing much to do. But I need to be ready to jump in when whatever was blocking me gets unblocked.

I do realise that I don’t have it so bad. I have a job, I work at home, I have a house and a lovely wife, a big salary, and I’m well off. Many people work much harder for less money. Those factory workers would probably be Deliveroo drivers today, with no job security at all and working for a fraction of the wage.

I worry a lot for the younger generation as things seem to be headed only in one direction.

Not to be rude, but if it’s such a grind and you’re FI then why don’t you leave?

I’ve been asking myself that. Part of it is that I’ll miss the people I work with, who are all great. By leaving I’d be making them do the work, since you can be sure The Company will panic but won’t hire anyone to replace me.

Part of it is a severe case of OMY – that’s ‘One More Year’.

Another year of work means I could save another £80,000, along with compounding my existing investments. That’s a few thousand extra every year in retirement.

Writing it down makes staying seem even less compelling.

Do you have any sources of income besides your main job?

Back in the day I used to own some niche community websites, running Google AdWords to generate income. They earned altogether probably £2,000-£4,000 each year, but it was hardly passive income as you have to deal with spammers and all kinds of malign actors.

After paying half of the income in tax, you’re making so little that it’s not worth the trouble. I closed them all down in the early 2010s.

Did pursuing FIRE get in the way of your career?

I found that becoming Financially Independent while working has a downside that no one talks about…

…you can become an asshole.

I’ve struggled a little bit with this. The reality is that when The Company does something stupid – and it’s a big company, so it does something stupid almost every day – you can tell everyone it is stupid without serious consequences. But doing that frequently makes you an asshole, and a bore.

I’m trying to make sure that if I’m going to be an asshole, it’s only to senior management, only very infrequently for the few things that really matter, and only if doing so will practically help others. And it should go without saying, but never to act like an asshole with juniors, peers, or immediate managers.

Spending and saving: putting it into perspective

What’s your annual spending? How has this changed over time?

In 2023 we together spent under £40,000. That was up a lot on 2022, which was under £30,000.

I haven’t done the sums for 2024 yet but I expect it’s under £40,000 again.

We don’t live frugally or have a budget, but we’re not big spenders. We have one rather old small car. We’re both fantastic cooks, and find it’s more fun to cook than going to a restaurant. When we go on holiday, which we do several times a year, it’s always to places where we know people and can stay at their houses.

That is a lot more fun than going somewhere you don’t know anyone and have to stay in a hotel. Or a beach resort, which I absolutely hate.

I don’t believe it’s ever come up before in a FIRE-side chat, but there was one large obstacle we faced, in life as well as financially. We had IVF to try to have children.

IVF is a grubby experience for the man. If you’ve never ‘donated’ from a single bed in a dimly-lit side room off a hospital corridor, you’re lucky. It has little to recommend it.

But it’s much worse for the woman, weeks of pain and indignity. Starting with self-administered daily injections to swell your ovaries with an unnatural harvest of eggs. Then you’re off to hospital for the first time. A large needle is inserted into your ovaries under general anaesthetic. A week or two later you return for the doctor to manually insert the embryos. Repeat the whole thing for four cycles.

Usually these IVF stories end with “but it was all worth it for our rosy-cheeked baby girls”. But I have to tell you the actual statistics are not so rosy. The chances of IVF succeeding are less than fifty/fifty for a 35-40 year old woman, and they drop precipitously after that.

Ours didn’t succeed.

So what now? We are happily blessed with many nephews and nieces, and one grand-niece. It’s a joy when we visit them or they visit us. And – to bring this back on financial track – their aunt and uncle will be helping them out with ISAs and house deposits as they get older. One day – hopefully in the very distant future – they’ll get to split whatever remains when we’ve shuffled off.

Financially IVF is challenging. The all-in cost including the drugs was roughly £8,000 – £10,000 per cycle (probably more now), with one cycle free on the NHS.

We did it in our thirties when our careers were ramping up but we weren’t earning a lot just yet. These are years when you should be investing and letting the magic of compounding do its thing, but for three years every spare penny was spent on IVF.

Thank you for sharing. You’re right that IVF is not something that ever gets talked about in FIRE circles. But in the spirit of getting back to the clichés that are, what’s the secret to saving money?

Both when I was paying off the mortgage, and after that when I was properly investing, I invested everything that I didn’t spend. It was for sure over 50% of my pay after tax. My wife also invests regularly.

There’s no great secret to this. If you have a lump of money left over, you simply don’t spend it. If you have debt, it’s used to pay that off first. If you’re not in debt, you put it straight into your ISA, pension or GIA, and forget about it.

Do you have any other hints about spending less?

I don’t sweat the small stuff. I’m paid very well so I shop in Waitrose. If I buy a bottle of wine, it’s going to be something nice. My wife rolls her eyes at my collection of guitars. Is four really too many?

What counted most for us was the big stuff: not driving a clown car, not living in an enormous house, never getting into debt, and making sure every spare pound was invested in low fee, whole market funds.

Do you have any passions or hobbies or vices that eat up your income?

I suppose I’m fortunate that I don’t have expensive hobbies. Did that happen because I’m trying to save or did having inexpensive tastes allow me to become free?

Cooking, preserving, brewing, playing musical instruments, visiting friends, reading books, and going for long walks. They are all fun, healthy, and not expensive.

A favourite walk can be a good step towards financial freedom.

Investing: passive less aggro

What kind of investor are you?

Nowadays I’m passive all the way.

One change that happened in 2024 was getting out of single shares entirely. For a long time I spent pin money buying shares on ‘feels’.

We’re talking £500-£1000 a go, so I suppose I had expensive pins! But never more than a few percent of my net worth.

I sometimes made money. Investing in Shell, Rolls Royce, and Carnival – back when the general opinion was no one would ever fly in a plane or go on a cruise again – wasn’t too bad. And sometimes I lost money – oh hey there Purple Bricks, William Hill, and many more. Never very much money in either direction.

But I had to deal with the bother of corporate actions. Or more to the point, my wife would have to deal with it if I died. So I chose to simplify down to whole market funds and ETFs of the kind she already invests in.

Did you make any big mistakes on your investing journey?

All the usual! Starting my investment journey too late. Not having a pension at all until I was about 30. Dithering in badly-paid jobs at dubious start-up companies early in my career. Not educating myself about money earlier.

What has been your overall return, as best you can tell?

My broker account is saying 40%, and my pension account says I’ve doubled the money I’ve paid in over the years, but the truth is it’s not something I track or think about.

The stock market goes up. The stock market goes down. More up than down recently and I’m expecting that to change soon.

What matters to me is am I FI? Do I have enough to RE? How much will I have to live on in retirement? Is that more than me and my wife are likely to need?

At the moment I believe the answer to all of those is yes – although I wait to hear what the good folk reading Monevator think about it.

How much have you been able to fill your ISA and pension contributions?

We’ve been able to fill both of our ISA allowances every year since 2018. I wasn’t very good about filling my pension allowance in previous years, but since last year I’ve been trying to add £40,000 – the old limit before it was raised – every year.

I could fill the pension to £60,000. But it would involve realising gains in the GIA and doing complicated capital gains tax calculations so I put that in the ‘too hard’ bucket.

To what extent did tax incentives and shelters influence your strategy?

I’ve been cynical about what I call our middle-class benefits system, but that hasn’t stopped me from using it.

What I especially like about ISAs is how they get rid of the tedious, needless complexity of calculating dividend and capital gains taxes.

How often do you check or tweak your portfolio or other investments?

I calculate our net worth every month, and add money every two or three months. But I only review our investment choices annually, and I tweak them even less. The last time I moved any investments between funds was two years ago. I don’t expect to have to do it again, possibly ever.

That said, I am mindful of where I add new money. Recently I’ve been trying to increase our cash allocation, in anticipation of retirement and to weather falls in the stock market.

What would you say to Monevator readers pursuing financial freedom?

The easiest way to accumulate wealth is to not spend any money that you’ve invested, so if that’s a strategy, then I guess it’s our strategy!

This is easy as we don’t have expensive tastes so we really don’t feel the need to spend very much. It’s not as if our combined £40,000 annual spending is in any way frugal.

In the weeds

Can you recommend some favourite resources for anyone chasing the FIRE dream?

I think I was turned on to FIRE by reading the Mr Money Moustache blog. I don’t exactly remember when that was but perhaps around 2012-2014.

There are some posts there which still stand up as classics and resonate with me. I’m thinking about Your Debt is an Emergency and Curing your Clown-Like Car Habit.

As for websites and YouTube, obviously Monevator is going to be top of the list but I also watch James Shack and Meaningful Money.

For books, JL Collins The Simple Path to Wealth is a classic, but I’d like to mention one book that really opened my eyes which is When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson. It’s about hyperinflation in Germany in the 1920s.

What makes it interesting to FIRE readers is who failed and who survived. Those on fixed pensions or annuities and those who kept their savings in cash were all wiped out. Those who saved abroad – the Swiss franc was popular – or invested in companies survived. As did landlords since they could screw over their tenants by increasing the rent. But landlords can come to sticky ends in these kinds of situations.

What will your finances ideally look like towards the end of your life?

We are helping our nieces and nephews, and expect to continue doing this. Lump sums for house deposits are on the cards, assuming the stock market does well enough in future.

I don’t intend to die with zero, as we want to leave a legacy and there are so many of them to split it between.

For the same reason I don’t think an annuity suits our plans. The State Pension will be a kind of annuity if we both manage to live that long.

My thanks to Rich for a very thoughtful interview. When I began these FIRE-side chats, I wondered if they’d quickly get repetitive. I’m much less worried about that now. Every story has its unique chapters, and different interviewees see the path to financial freedom through varied lenses. Please remember that constructive feedback is welcome, but anything bad-tempered or nasty will be deleted. Rich is a regular commentator on Monevator, but because of the particularly personal nature of elements of today’s interview he’s chosen not to reply to comments under his usual guise. Perhaps I’ll try to scare up a reply from him and post it under my own name in a few days.

If you want a white T-shirt, someone is always prepared to sell you a ‘better’ white T-shirt. For you sir / madam, may I suggest a Loro Piana white jobbie for a mere £1,795?1

How superior can this seventh wonder of capitalism be? Is Loro Piana’s T-shirt really 32,536% better than Next’s Basic Crew Neck, currently yours for just £5.50?

We grizzly frugalists may scoff – but we face a similar face-off whenever we’re tempted by smooth marketing sirens who insinuate that a plain market cap-weighted index tracker may not be all that…as they slide a reassuringly expensive alternative across the table.

If the market cap fits

Market capitalisation-weighted indexes provide the motive power that drives the majority of index funds and ETFs.

The S&P 500, MSCI, World and FTSE All-Share are all good examples of market cap indexes.

For ‘market cap-weighted’ read ‘weights its holdings by market value’.

Essentially, a market cap index ranks its constituents by the value of their tradable shares.

For example, the S&P 500 is an index composed of 500 leading US-listed companies.

The total market value of Apple’s shares as a percentage of the S&P 500 is currently 7.2%.2 So a market cap-weighted S&P 500 ETF allocates around 7.2% to Apple at the time of writing.

In contrast, Apple’s percentage share would be just 0.2% in an S&P 500 ETF that weighted each holding equally.

As it is, one of the smallest holdings in the S&P 500 is the FMC Corporation. That ‘if you know, you know’ chemicals manufacturer is worth 0.01% of the entire index.

The point is that the market has decided Apple is about 71,900% more valuable than FMC Corp right now. And that’s probably a better bet than any designer white T-shirt.

Accepting that the wisdom of the crowd is the informed choice is a bit like overcoming a Jedi trial en-route to investing enlightenment.

As real-life investing Yoda Warren Buffett puts it:

By periodically investing in an index fund, for example, the know-nothing investor can actually out-perform most investment professionals.

Paradoxically, when ‘dumb’ money acknowledges its limitations, it ceases to be dumb.

By “index fund”, Buffett is talking about any broadly diversified tracker driven by a standard-issue market cap-weighted index.

Ex-hedge fund manager Lars Kroijer expands on the theme:

A [market cap weighted] world index tracker enables you to let the global capital markets do the hard work of figuring out where your money will earn the best return – because that is what is reflected in the various regional weightings in a world tracker fund.

International capital has spoken. You can just enjoy the ride.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is it’s hard to believe there isn’t something better out there.

After all, market cap index trackers are the plainest, bog standardest, cheapest products you can buy.

They are that Next £5.50 Crew Neck T-Shirt.

They’re Aldi’s Everyday Essentials Baked Beans In Tomato Sauce. RRP: 60p per kg.

But surely Mr Organic’s Made in Italy Organic Low Sugar Baked Beans, Certified Non GMO & Preservative Free, Gluten Free & Vegan, Made With White Beans, Natural Herbs & Spices in a BPA-Free Tin (RRP: £49.88 per kg) are much better for you?

Okay, maybe that is insane, but Waitrose’s Duchy Organic Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce sure have a nice label. And likely a royal seal of approval. And they’re only £2.39 a kg. Or 298% more expensive than Aldi’s beans. Anyone for a blind taste test?

Alright, that’s a lot of talk about baked beans. But the reason I keep water-boarding this metaphor is because, like beans and tees, market cap index trackers are commodity products.

That is, such trackers are largely indistinguishable from others of the same type. They primarily compete on price rather than features. Many suppliers offer nearly identical products, leading to intense competition. And buyers can easily switch brands without significant consequence:

Spot the difference: MSCI World ETF 1-year returns – market cap weighted

Data from JustETF. 28 February 2025.

This is a great situation for us, the buyers. We’ve got oodles of cheap and well-made products to choose from.

But it’s far from ideal for the embattled investment firms bidding for our money.

If everyone’s happy with the market cap product then the suppliers can’t differentiate.

Instead they’re doomed to ever-eroding profit margins in the worst of all business worlds: eternal price war!

Trading up?

Cold logic dictates the financial services industry will instead try to upsell to us.

Hence, for a little extra, you can buy flashier trackers powered by:

• Fundamental / smart beta / risk factor indexes – which trim their sails to capture additional sources of return beyond traditional market beta.

• Equal-weighted indexes – designed to hold each stock in equal measure. The idea is to avoid the concentration risk that emerges when a market cap index is dominated by a very few companies. For example, the maker of Ozempic, Novo Nordisk, comprises 19% of the MSCI Denmark index.

• Other variants – for instance, ESG/SRI screened indexes. The sell being an index that’s ‘morally superior’ to those louche market cap benchmarks, up to their necks in sin stocks.

A taste of luxury

The alternatively-weighted index trackers are beautifully packaged.

You get a story – sorry, thesis – which explains why they may outclass the standard market cap solution.

Or perhaps solve some flaw that may – or may not – be inherent to market cap index design.

In the best case, the narrative is rooted in independent research that details why the alternative weighting has succeeded in the past and could do so again. Though that still doesn’t guarantee the resultant product is a good real-world solution.

A glossy back-test will also be included. This simulation always demonstrates the efficacy of the product – in an alternate historical universe where it actually existed.

But sadly many strategies that glitter in the data mine lose their lustre in the cold light of day.

Which brings us to the forward test…

How did alternatively-weighted indices perform in the wild?

A wide range of alternatively-weighted developed market indices have been available for many years now. Time enough that we can field test their potency versus our market cap baked beans.

Below’s a sweep of alternatively-weighted ETFs in the developed market equities category, benchmarked against an MSCI World market-cap driven ETF:

I’ve chosen the longest possible comparison period for this ETF selection: 4 September 2015 – 28 February 2025. Indices are based on the MSCI World stock universe where available.

The market cap product came third out of a field of 12.

Only Momentum and Quality did better over this period. The SRI-screened version of the MSCI World came close. The rest trailed by a considerable margin.

Quality beat the Market Cap ETF by less than 0.2% annualised. Neither here nor there.

Momentum won by almost 2% a year though. I’d definitely take that!

But we’re back to the old dilemma. Could you have predicted the winners of this race some ten years ago?

Indeed if you were investing at the time, did you predict it?

I didn’t. I was invested in Quality and Momentum via a Multi-factor ETF. However, that product also invested in Value and Small Cap, and it lagged the market by 2% annualised overall.

There’s no guarantee that Momentum will dominate the next ten years.

None at all.

Risk curious

There’s another way of looking at investment performance: through the lens of risk-adjusted returns.

Risk-adjusted returns measure an investment’s performance relative to the amount of risk taken to achieve it. A high return investment might seem very attractive versus a lower return option – until you consider their respective volatility.

To account for this, a metric like the Sharpe ratio helps you determine if an investment is delivering superior returns for the level of risk taken.

Rational investors are meant to prefer the investment with the best risk-adjusted returns. As opposed to just the investment with the highest return, irrespective of the psychological torture it may inflict along the way.

Happily, the website justETF enables us to calculate the Sharpe ratio for each ETF by comparing annualised returns against volatility.

The higher the Sharpe ratio, the better the risk-adjusted returns. In other words, the more return you get per unit of risk, as measured by volatility.

justETF presents the information as a pretty but hard-to-read heat map:

Really, we just need a table of Sharpe ratios. The highest number scoops the best risk-adjusted return.

Here then is the ranking for the top five ETFs in risk-adjusted terms:

Underlying index	Sharpe ratio
Equal Weight	0.88
Market Cap	0.87
Quality	0.87
Momentum	0.86
SRI	0.84

From this perspective we see the equal-weighted index is a nose ahead. Market cap comes in joint 2nd.

Momentum causes a teeny bit of unjustifiable pain in exchange for its extra 2% annualised return.

And once again, the simple market cap commodity product proved more than a match for the majority of its designer rivals.

Doubtless if we come back in ten years, the field will have reordered itself.

It could even be that the market cap ETF comes in last by that point.

You could hedge against that outcome by allocating some of your portfolio to the alternatively-weighted indexes – say if you’re worried about seemingly very high US valuations.

But remember that every pound you invest this way is a bet against the wisdom of the market.

The pros of market cap index tracking

Here are some additional reasons to retain your faith in market cap-weighted indexes:

• Simplicity – Market cap indices are easy to understand. The bigger a company is relative to the rest, the greater its presence in the index. That’s it, bar common sense rules to guard against over-concentration in the event we all go bananas and back SnakeOilSystems Inc to take over the world.

• Low costs – Broad market cap indices contain the most liquid equities and have low turnover. That’s why they cost so little. Alternatively-weighted indices are more expensive but promise superior returns. However while the costs are nailed on, the potentially higher returns aren’t.

• Performance chasing – Different strategies work best in different time periods. Something will be declared ‘hot’ based on recent performance. This reduces the likelihood of it outperforming in the future. Johnny-come-latelys swarm in, only to dump the funds when they fail to make ‘em rich. It’s always best to resist the temptation to jump on a bandwagon.

• Tracking error regret – How will you feel when your alternative strategy eats the market’s dust for five years straight? When returns soar we take it as confirmation that we’re as brilliant and blessed as we always suspected. But how happy will we be when our high-cost strategy is left billowing black smoke? That’s not a pain you have to feel if you simply invest in the market.

• Hard evidence – Twenty years is a reasonable amount of time to judge a strategy’s performance. Ten will do, five is barely acceptable. Anything less is irrelevant.

• No guarantees – The risk factors that power alternatively-weighted strategies are typically based on academic simulations that ignore real-world frictions. The excess returns discovered in theory are typically diminished in reality by:

– Diluted implementation: For example, long-only portfolios instead of long-short constructions.

– Overcrowded trades: There’s evidence that factor returns decline by about a third after discovery as investors bid up prices on newly sought-after stocks.

Or as John Bogle put it in The Little Book of Common Sense Investing:

I’m skeptical that any kind of superior performance will endure forever. Nothing does!

– High costs and taxes: Chunkier expenses have a greater impact on your returns, as we discussed.

Tried and tested

I say all of the above as someone who actually does invest in alternatively- and market-cap weighted trackers.

I’ve stuck with both for nearly 20 years but – as you can deduce from the graphs above – I’m very glad I didn’t abandon market cap investing.

I’ve no idea how the next decade will play out. Hence I’m content to maintain a position in both camps.

I still buy into the argument that alternatively-weighted indexes diversify my sources of reward, but I know it’s a risk.

And sometimes you just can’t beat plain and simple.

Take it steady,

The Accumulator

1. Note: Not an affiliate link. Unfortunately. [↩]
2. Source:  iShares Core S&P 500 ETF literature. [↩]