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Comment by pja | Hacker News Reader

Dimensional runs a bunch of ETFs which are effectively US & world equity index trackers that don’t slavishly follow the indices & can therefore avoid being forced to buy into IPOs or index updates. E.g. DFUS is effectively VTI (IIRC) without the requirement to immediately buy into IPOs that are added to the index:

  https://www.dimensional.com/us-en/funds/dfus/us-equity-market-etf

I don’t think they have a QQQ equivalent but I haven’t looked at their entire ETF list.

(I have no relationship with Dimensional, nor do I invest in these funds - I just saw them mentioned in a YT video on this topic a few months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqIHa6URUPk )

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I knew that would be a Ben Felix vid. He's awesome.

It's important to note, that whether it's intentional (doubt) or genuine mistake, he's misleading viewers when he says that Dimensional has outperformed other funds or indexes. In fact most of the Dimensional funds have underperformed markets, and they do so at higher (albeit approachable) TERs of 0.25.

There's a (rather short for his standards) video made by Paolo Coletti, professor of financial economy at Trento about dimensional performances.

It's in Italian, but both subtitles and Youtube's auto audio translation works fine.

He always includes data and google colabs so people can run tests and verify numbers themselves if they disagree.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_tBfYHh1J4

Most of the Dimensional ETFs seem to be following some kind of value investment strategy where they take an index but nudge it a bit by some value factor which is claimed to be based on long standing research. It wouldn’t be surprising if this value factor has underperformed in recent years which have been dominated by the rise of growth stocks. The video you link to seems to be talking about these ETFs, although I haven’t dived into the numbers.

As far as I can tell the straightforward US & world equity ETFs I’m referring to above don’t have this value bias.

The value ones mentioned by Felix do.

In the video I linked Felix only talks about DFUS, which has no value tilt.

He may talk about their other funds in other videos, but not this one.

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