How I Break Down Index Funds for My Portfolio

Transcript:

On this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, how I analyze index funds to choose my investments.

What's up everybody, and welcome to the Personal Finance Podcast. I'm your host Andrew, founder of Master money.co. And today on the Personal Finance podcast, we're gonna be talking about how I analyze index funds. If you guys have any questions, make sure you join the Master Money Newsletter by going to master money.co/.

Newsletter. And don't forget to follow us on Spotify, apple Podcasts, YouTube, or whatever your favorite podcast player is. And if you wanna, how about the show? Consider leaving a five star rating and review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite. Podcast player. Now, today I'm gonna dive into how I analyze index funds, and I go through a very specific process when I am looking at a new fund that I may want to invest in.

And so today we're gonna go through the nine different steps that I go through to try to factor in what are the big things that I want to know. And so I wanna make this as easy as possible for you as well. And so we're gonna go through some of these metrics that you may think that you already go through, and some of these you may not go through yet, and it's going to be a great lesson for you in order to learn how to analyze index funds.

So I have a ton of stuff to go through here in this episode. So without further ado, let's get into it. Alright, so to start off this episode, we are gonna get as basic as we possibly can for those who are brand new to Index Fund Investing. And so if you are brand new to Index Fund Investing, there is something that you need to search for when you are looking for this specific investment called a ticker symbol.

I. Now a ticker symbol is just going to be a bunch of various letters that identifies that specific fund. And so when we are looking at index funds and ETFs, you may be looking for an s and p 500 index fund, for example, and Vanguard has a bunch of 'em. Well, Vanguard's ticker symbol is VF. X. Now I'm gonna use V-F-I-A-X as an example throughout this entire episode.

So you'll see me talking about V-F-I-A-X throughout this episode. So if you're listening at home and you wanna pull up and kinda look at what I'm looking at, you can go to Vanguard's website and pull up V-F-I-A-X. Just a simple way to have an example here, but the ticker symbol, all it is, it's just the fund name essentially broken down.

And so you need to understand what that ticker symbol is. As you start to look through some of these investments, so say for example, you look up a list of s and p 500 index funds, well, you'll see all these different fund names, and then in addition, you'll see these ticker symbols listed up and down on that fund.

Next we wanna look at inception date. Now these are just some of the other fund basics that I want to know, but inception date means when was this? Fun started. When did this begin? Because the longer the history, the better for me. I like older funds. I like funds that have a long-term history because I can see how they performed throughout different economic cycles.

We have had a ton of different things happen over the course of the last. 50 years. And if I can find funds who have been through, for example, the tech bubble in the late nineties and early two thousands, well that's a great indicator of what would happen based on something really surging way too high and how that fund performs.

But even more importantly, is what I really want to know is are their funds that were available back during the 2007. 2008 recession. Why? 'cause I wanna see the worst case scenario, what would happen to this fund in the worst case scenario. And so I look that far back to see if these funds have that history.

Now, if there's a newer fund, there's nothing wrong with that. You can still invest in newer funds. But I like older funds because I can look back historically. And see what happened. 2007 and 2008 is a really important time for me because that is when the great recession happened, the stock market collapsed and most of these investments dropped 50%, and I wanna see exactly how that happened and when it happened on some of these charts.

Now, does charting some of this stuff truly, truly matter? Not always. It doesn't. Always matter when you're looking at this, but I wanna see that inception date so I can understand what happened in the past. In addition, I also wanna see how a fund performed over the course of 2009 through 2015. I wanna see how it recovered from 2008 and 2009 and what happened during that big economic surge all the way up until 2020.

Because when you look at 2020. What happened in 2020 COVID-19 where we had some pullbacks in 2020? Did it weather that storm? Was it resistant against some of these pullbacks, or was it something that had a much larger impact? If it had a much larger impact, it may be too heavily weighted in certain assets.

We'll talk more about that as time goes on here. So that's the first thing is I'm just looking at those two fund basics. Hey, what is the ticker symbol? We're talking about that just for people who are brand new to index fund investing, and then secondly, the inception date. Okay, so now we're gonna dive into some deeper dive stuff here.

Now, if you are brand new to Index Fund Investing, we have a course called Index Fund Pro and Index Fund Pro is the investing for Beginners course that is gonna teach you step by step. All of this stuff, but we're also gonna dive deeper into this. So if you're interested in Index Fund Pro, you can go to master money.co/courses and check out Index Fund Pro.

Let's go to the second step, which is fees and efficiency. Alright, next we are gonna be looking at fees and efficiency. And what we wanna really be looking at first is the expense. Ratio. Now the expense ratio is going to be the percentage of assets deducted annually for fund management. What does that mean?

What does that jargon even talk about? What this means is how much you're paying outta your pocket to the fund manager in order to manage this fund. These are the fees that are coming outta your pocket, and we wanna keep this. As low as possible, especially when we are investing in funds. If you are getting nothing out of this fund, outside of just being invested in this fund, you do not wanna be paying a high expense ratio.

You want to keep those fees as low as possible. In fact, the lower the better. Now there are a lot of. Fantastic index funds out there now that have 0% expense ratios. So if you're out there and you have a financial advisor who is putting you in a really high fee mutual fund or a really high fee expense ratio, you wanna make sure that you have a conversation about that because there are a lot of low fee expense ratios out there, for example.

Fidelity has zero fee expense ratio. Index funds, they're absolutely amazing. I invest in some of them and they are something that I think a lot of people can look into where you pay 0% fee. Now, what is a good expense ratio? That's gonna be the big question a lot of people ask, and really a very good expense ratio is anything below 0.1% or 10 basis points is what a lot of people will call that.

So anything below 10 basis points or 0.1%. Is a very, very good expense ratio. Acceptable is anything between 0.10 and 0.30 because in that range, most likely some of those funds are at least low enough, and you'll see how impactful this is. In a second, I'm gonna do the math for you. But you're gonna see that that's low enough to see a not as big of a difference as some of these other expense ratios will be.

Now, as we get above 0.40 and 0.5% expense ratio, those fees are gonna really impact your portfolio unless you're getting help from someone. If someone is helping you with your money, you should not be paying that high of an expense ratio for a fund. So if you're investing in index funds and all you're doing is buying an index and you have that high expense ratio, then that is gonna be something you really want to avoid.

That's what advisors should be charging you. That shouldn't be something where you are paying that much in an expense ratio and having to worry about paying all these costs upfront. Now, here's one thing I want you to note When it comes to expense ratios. You wanna get them as low as possible, but sometimes in things like your 401k, you only have so many options.

It is so much better to get your money at least invested than it is to not invest at all because of the expense ratio. So if you are looking in your 401k and. All of the options are just terrible. And the lowest expense ratio you can find is some sort of s and p 500 index fund that has a 0.5% expense ratio.

Then you know more power to you. At least you have something to invest in, especially if you're getting a 401k match. But when it comes to your own investments where you can go out and choose your investments, you need to keep them at least below 0.3% when it comes to the funds themselves. If you can.

That's the goal is if you can, now, sometimes you have no options. Maybe your advisors have no options. It just depends on the specific scenario, but you want to try to keep it as low as possible, especially if you're the one choosing. If you're going out to Vanguard or Fidelity or Charles Schwab, then you should not have a problem finding expense ratios lower than that.

Now, let me show you the impact of these expense ratios and why this is so incredibly important. So we ran the numbers to see what would happen if you invested $10,000 every single year and you got a. 7% rate of return. Now, this is over the course of 30 years, and I think a 7% rate of return is something that is a conservative rate of return over the course of the next few decades.

But if you looked at this and you got a 7% rate of return and you had a 0.05% expense ratio, which is very normal for Vanguard Index funds. It is very normal for ETFs to get a 0.05 expense ratio. If that happened, the total amount you would've paid over the course of 30 years is $8,455, and your portfolio value would be $936,000.

Now, let's say you spent a 0.15% expense ratio. Well, your portfolio is gonna have. Paid $25,113 and the future value would be $919,000. But as we start to jump this up, let's say for example, you paid a 0.35 expense ratio. Well that a 0.35 expense ratio is $887,000 is what your portfolio would be worth, and you would've paid $57,445 out of pocket.

That's a huge, huge difference. But what I want you to note here. Is as I start to talk about the total fees paid, you're also missing out on the opportunity cost of that money. That money could be compounding to a much greater number if you were not paying those fees. So you gotta remember that that's a huge, huge impact when it comes to your money.

I. If I'm paying $57,000 out of pocket going forward, I wanna make sure I'm paying somebody to help me invest my money instead of paying it to some sort of mutual fund manager or something like that. You can find a fee only advisor or something along those lines. It's gonna actually help you with your money if you're gonna pay that much in fees.

Anyways. Next we have a 0.65% expense ratio. I'm just gonna jump it up here. Each time your total portfolio value would be $841,000. So now we're looking at a hundred thousand dollars difference, and you would've paid out to that index fund $103,000. Now let's look at the major impact of a 1% fee. A 1% fee would take your entire portfolio down to 783,000, and you would've paid 160.

Thousand dollars over the course of 30 years in fees, and then a 1.15% is $770,000 and you would've paid $174,000 in fees. Fees really, really matter. And what this analysis I just did does not factor in is also the opportunity cost, because the opportunity cost is going to shift to millions of dollars.

'cause if you do the math on what you invested there. Say for example, you were thinking through $10,000 per year over the course of 30 years. Well, you invested $300,000 into those fund. Well, if you're paying $174,000 in fees, imagine how much more that fund would grow if you actually had those dollars to reinvest over that timeframe.

So that's how impactful fees can be. It is a million dollar decision to make sure you lower your assets. Fees, meaning your index funds or your mutual funds, they need to have very low fees because there are some fantastic funds out there with great returns that have low fees. Next was what I look at is turnover ratio.

So when we're looking at fees and cost, efficiency, fees are first. Then I look at the turnover ratio. Now the turnover ratio is something that measures how frequently the fund buys and sells stock. A lower turnover ratio under 10% is way, way better for tax efficiency. So what I really look at here. I first, if a fund has a turnover ratio higher than 50%, if that turnover ratio is above 50% A, it's most likely a mutual fund.

B. If it's an index fund, I am not looking at it. Why? Because that means they are buying and selling way too many securities. What is the purpose of an index fund? The purpose of an index fund is to mirror the. Index, you must be able to mirror the index. If you cannot mirror the index and you're just buying and selling securities left and right, that means you're doing way too much out here.

You're doing too much, and so you need to make sure that if you have an index fund, you are keeping that turnover ratio lower. Why? Because you pay less taxes, the lower the turnover ratio, and so we need to make sure that that turnover ratio is low. So for broad market index funds, typically the turnover ratio is going to be very, very low.

You want it to be like right around five, 10%, somewhere in that range. That's gonna give you a great indicator as to how much they are buying and selling investments. Now, mutual funds, for example. They're gonna have really high turnover ratios because they have a professional money manager. They have a whole team of Harvard and Yale graduates who are sitting in some sort of high-rise out there, which is why you are paying them 1% expense ratio.

You are paying for the high rise. You are paying for the Harvard graduate salary. You are paying for the fund managers salary, and so that's why mutual funds have such high. Expense ratios, which is why I want you to avoid a lot of these mutual funds because the expense ratios are so high. So we wanna make sure that when we look at some of these turnover ratios, we wanna make sure that they're below 50% as the first benchmark.

But secondly, you really want it below 20%. Uh, if you're going to invest in something like that. And so really the sector funds are gonna be right around that 20% range. And then actively managed funds are often 50% plus. For example, V-F-I-A-X who are u we are using in this example, has a turnover ratio of 2%, which means it's very tax efficient.

It's a very, very tax efficient investments Now ETFs. Tend to be even more tax efficient than mutual funds due to their structure. And so funds with those lower turnover ratios and capital gains distributions tend to be more tax friendly. ETFs also do that, which is great. So index funds, ETFs, I'm using 'em interchangeably here.

They are different, but I'm using 'em interchangeably here just because the purpose of both of them is to mirror an index. So if you like VOO or VTI more than the index fund, then that is great too. Next we're gonna get into performance and risk metrics. Alright, so the next thing I look at is how has this fund performed over the last few decades?

And this is gonna be a very important metric for you to look at as well and measure this up with other funds in that sector. And so what I mean by that is what is the rate of return this fund has had? Over the course of the last couple of years. So first I'll look at the one year rate of return just to make sure it measures up with all the other funds in the industry.

So if I am looking at an s and p 500 index fund, I wanna make sure if the fund returned 10% last year, I want to make sure that this fund also returned 10%. Because the purpose of index funds and ETFs, again, is to mirror the. If it is not mirroring the index, then all of a sudden that rate of return is going to be off.

I have seen funds where they're off one, two, or 3%, and that can be a massive difference in your rate of return in the long run. If you are trying to mirror an index, you wanna make sure that they are not too far off on the one year. The one year though does not matter in the long run, meaning that I do not want you to rely on one year rate of return in order to make your decision the stock market in the short run.

A voting machine in the long run, it is a weighing machine. We don't care what happens over the course of year over year. We don't care what happens every five years. What we care about is decades when we are long-term investors, and we as wealth builders are long-term investors. And so we care what happens over the course of 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50.

Years. So secondarily, I will look at that five year return to see what happens. And I, all I'm doing with the one year and the five year is just comparing against other funds to make sure they are all equaled out. And then I look at the actual s and p 500. For example, if I'm investing in an s and p 500 index fund, I'll look at the actual s and p 500 and make sure they are as close as possible.

Now, if they're slightly off, that's completely fine. It is very normal to be slightly off, but if they gotta be as close as possible, uh, in order to make sure that they're mirroring that index properly, then we're gonna look at the 10 year plus return. So the 10 year plus return is gonna help you gauge long-term reliability.

Now, if it's a newer fund, for example, then it may only have one year and five year returns. I don't love investing in newer funds because this, a great example of this is QQQ. So QQQ is a newer fund and typically if you look at QQQ, it's one of the most popular funds out there because they invest a lot of money into advertising.

I think they do Super Bowl commercials all the time, and somewhere I read that they do like hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising at QQQ. Now if you look at QQQ, it doesn't have as long of a time horizon as some of these other funds, and so you wanna make sure you have the history to be able to go and look back as far back as you possibly can.

And so what I really like to look at is I look to like look at the 10 year, the 20 year, and the 30 year to give more insight on full performance in the economic cycles. Again, I go back to 2007 and 2008. I go back to the tech bubble. If it goes that far back, I will go back to the early nineties when bonds were surging.

There's a lot of different things that happened over the course of the last few decades that you can look and see what happened during some. Uncertain times and how does that impact my money going forward? And so that's how I like to think about some of this stuff when it comes to looking at the past.

And so you can go back and look and for example, if you look at V-F-I-A-X or FX A IX, and you can kind of compare the two and see what the differential is over the course of one year. You know, they had the same rate of return at 10.2% over the last five years. They had the same rate of return over the last 10 years and over the last 20 years, that should be very normal.

That should be something where if they are mirroring the index, they should be very close in their rate of return. And the standard deviation should not be much off. A slight standard deviation should be what these returns can fluctuate, but outside of that, it should not be anything crazy whatsoever.

And then the other thing that I look at, and this is more of an advanced. Thing that you don't have to look at, but this is just gonna be the max drawdown. So with the max drawdown, I look at the worst peak to trough decline, meaning the peak is obviously the top of the market cycle. When did this index fund peak last, and then when was the last time that it actually bottomed out?

And what is that difference right there? If you measure that difference with each and every single index fund, it should be very close to the s and p 500. For example, if you are measuring against the s and p 500. And so if it is way, way off, why did it decline so much? Or why did it peak so much more than what the s and p 500 did?

You don't really want it to be that far off. 'cause again, we're trying to mirror the index. Now let's get into number four, which is the yield. Alright, so with number four, we are trying to look at the yield or the dividend yield, which measures the annual dividend payments as a percentage of the fund price.

So if you're looking at broad market index funds, a typical yield is gonna be like 1.3% to 2.5%. And if you're looking at high dividend. Funds, which SCHD is an example of that. They're really right around 3% to 5%. And so, for example, V-F-I-A-X has a 1.5% yield. Well, SCHD has a 3.7% yield. So if your play is to go out there and you want high dividend funds, then looking for a higher yield when you're looking at that index fund is going to be really, really important.

To you. In addition, you wanna look at the dividend growth rate. So the rate at which the dividends will increase over time is a very important metric for dividend investor. And if you're investing in these funds so that you can have an income coming in based on whatever that dividend yield is, then you wanna make sure that you're looking at that growth rate as well.

Now, the s and p five hundred's dividend over the course of the last few decades has grown about 6% every single year. And so that's just another number that you wanna make sure that you were looking at and in the payout consistently of the fund. You wanna make sure that that fund is paying out that dividend when it is supposed to.

And so you wanna look at historically when those dividends were paid out and whether it has a full fund history of cutting dividends during downturns. That's why I like to see 2007 and 2008. I wanna see who cut their dividends because dividends and reinvesting those dividends is a very important metric when you wanna look at the total rate of return.

And so you wanna make sure that you are looking at that for sure. Now, number five, the next thing I look at. Is I do portfolio comparison with the top holdings, and what you wanna know is what are the top holdings and how are they weighted specifically the top 10 holdings. The top 10 holdings are very important when it comes to index fund and ETF investing.

And so you can go and look up some of these funds and say to yourself, well, what are the top 10 holdings of this fund? So first I'm gonna look at V-F-I-A-X, to give you an example. Of some of the top 10 holdings here at the time I'm recording this. Okay, so the top 10 holdings in V-F-I-A-X, which is the s and p 500 Index fund, are Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Facebook, class A shares, alphabet, which is Google Class A shares.

Tesla, Broadcom alphabet, class C shares, and then Berkshire Hathaway, which is Warren Buffett's company. Those are the top 10 holdings in the s and p 500. Now these will shift over time and if you can go look at a stock market chart of 2000, you can go look at one of 2010 of 2020. And now at the time I'm recording this and you will see there are gonna be very different companies in those top 10 holdings over time.

The beautiful thing about index funds and ETFs is when companies start to struggle, a better company comes into play, and you are still invested in that fund, which is why I love index funds and ETFs. But I like to compare the top 10 holdings to make sure they are weighted properly. A, and in addition, they're also very close to the s and p 500 because this really matters.

The top 10 holdings, especially in something like an s and p 500, are going to be the majority of the fund, and so you wanna make sure that those are weighted properly. And so I always look at the top 10 holdings to see what those companies are, but I really like to even. Stretch it out to the top 25 holdings, because when you look at the top 25 holdings, you can see what else is heavily weighted in this fund.

So you can go beyond that and see, you know, Tesla, home Depot, Lowe's, there's gonna be a bunch of other companies in that top 25 holding, for example, in the s and p 500. Then I look at the sector allocation. What is the sector allocation? This make sure that your fund is actually diversified. So when I look at V-F-I-A-X, for example, I'll see that 10% of it is in communication services, 11% is in consumer discretionary.

5.5% is in consumer staples, so Johnson and Johnson Healthcare companies, those types of things. Energy is 3.2%. Financials is 14.1%. Healthcare is 10.5%. Industrial is 8.3%. Now the next one, which is information technology tech is 30%. That is very normal. Tech is always gonna be highly weighted in the s and p 500 because they're some of the most profitable companies in the country right now.

Materials, 1.9% real estate, 2.1% utilities, 2.3%. Utilities help out with some of that volatility, especially when times get tough. So this is how, this is kind of weighted and and structured. And so you can see this is heavily weighted in IT and technology, but there's some other great as well in terms of financials and healthcare and some of these other things.

So I like to look at sector allocation and make sure that we understand what is going on. Then I look at market cap. Market cap identifies what the fund focuses on. You have seen there's all these different kinds of funds, like large cap funds, which is what the s and p 500 or the total stock market fund would be.

There's mid cap funds and then there's small cap funds. You just wanna understand what you're investing in, uh, and making sure that you have. Exactly what you're looking for. And then geographic exposure. So for me, I don't invest a ton of international funds. Instead, I like to find funds like the Total Stock Market Index Fund that also have international business being done.

And so, for example, VX us, which is Vanguard's Total International, ETF has 15% exposure. In Japan, it has 10%. In the UK it has 8% in China. That's the kind of thing you wanna see. If you're investing in an international fund, you want it to be spread across some of these economies that are established, uh, to make sure that they are tracking.

Correctly. And so that's how we wanna look at that one for sure. When it comes to portfolio composition. Now what we're gonna do is we are going to look at the fund size. So one thing we wanna note is how much assets does the fund have under management? And so when you look at some of these assets under management, is it a very large fund?

Is it a small fund? 'cause this can mean that anything under a hundred million dollars can be risky if the fund is going to get into trouble. And so if the fund gets in trouble, if it's under a hundred million dollars, that risk level goes up in comparison to a lot of other funds which have trillions of dollars.

In fact, something like SPY, which is the s and p 500 ETF trades $30 billion daily. So you can see that drastic difference with some of these funds, and you wanna look at that average daily volume as well. Uh, when you look at some of these funds now, one big thing to do. And as we're getting closer here to wrapping up, one big thing we do is we wanna also look at competitor comparison.

So let's take the s and p 500 for example. The last thing I want you to do is just pick one s and p 500 index fund because somebody online told you to. Instead, I want you to compare it to all the other s and p 500 funds that are some of the big ones. In the market. And so you can look at, let's take F-V-F-I-A-X, which we've been using as an example so far in this episode.

If you look at V-F-I-A-X, which is Vanguard's s and p 500 index fund, you also wanna compare that to Fidelity's Index Fund and Schwab's Index Fund and the ETFs. And so what I would do is I would take V-F-I-A-X and compare it to Fidelity's FX A IX, and I would compare it to Schwab's, S-W-P-P-X. And then I would also look at the ETFs.

Now usually Fidelity, Vanguard, Schwab, those are the three that I look at. You can also look at something like iShares, which is BlackRock's portfolio. You can look at Spider. There's a bunch of other ones out there. Um, and then I look at the ETF, so SPY or VOO or IV, V. Those are all gonna be compared on one little chart there.

And then you can go back and forth and see some of the rate of returns. What you're gonna notice is most of them are pretty close, and then you just pick. The one where your brokerage is or whatever is easiest for you, but you wanna make sure that you are comparing all those to see if there's any discrepancies, uh, that might be there.

And then last thing is I want you to think through some of the risk factors and potential drawbacks. So I want you to think through the market risk, and that's why we always like to look at the history and what would happen if the market crashes or if your investment goes down in some way, shape, or form.

I want you to look at the sector risk. So if you're looking at international funds, for example, or if you're doing bond funds, or if you're doing funds in emerging markets, what is that sector? Your risk and are you taking too much of a risk based on your specific risk tolerance and then the foreign exchange risk?

That's a big one. I think a lot of people don't think through, but international funds may fluctuate with currency swings, so sometimes there will be a president or a prime minister or someone across the world who says one or two things, and all of a sudden international funks will. Fluctuate because the currency is going to swing, and so you gotta make sure that you understand some of those currency risks as well.

There's a lot of risks that come into play with international funds that we don't think about always here in domestic funds in the us. So final thoughts that I want to give you here when analyzing an index fund, I want you to look at low expense ratios is number one. Two, consistent performance over the course of, you know, decades.

In comparison to their peers. Three. I want you to look at that low turnover ratio so we can get some tax efficiency going. I want you to look at diversification across holdings and low tracking error to the benchmark, and we want to make sure that we do that side by side comparison. All of those are really, really important to make sure that you are making the right selection.

'cause the last thing I want you to do is go out, make a selection. With some fund, you're paying way too high of an expense ratio and it's not tracking properly in comparison to the index, so that's gonna be really, really important. Listen, if you guys. Wanna learn more about investing in index funds and ETFs?

Again, we have Index Fund Pro available for you. If you go to master money.co/courses, check out Index Fund Pro. That will take you from beginner all the way to advance when it comes to index fund investing. And if you're getting value to this episode, consider sharing it with a family member or friend and leaving a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast player cannot.

Thank you guys enough for listening to this episode and we will see you on the next episode.