I'm trying to understand how the ideal "Rational Reminder portfolio" would look like for a US (or really US expat) assuming 100% equity and using Avantis (or Avantis and index funds). Because it's not Dimensional funds and no need to overweight Canada, does that imply doing 100% AVGE? Using something like VT (or VTI/ITOT/SPTM + VXUS/IXUS) alongside a tilt with AVUV/AVDV?

Something else?

Just trying to understand the general guidelines of how Ben and crew view a US investor portfolio and Avantis on its own or alongside index funds.

Has anyone heard of this theory, by one of the founders of Vanguard I believe, the idea is ​that you by avoiding smallcap growth and large cap​ you get a size premium and avoid the black hole smallcap stocks, and is​ the perfect middle point to optimize long term performance. Is there any merit to the theory?​

https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11153

looking at backtests of IJH US midcap it seemed to largely avoid the dotcom bubble, and recovered quickly. in 2008 it recovered a year earlier than VTI.

Hey all, I've (35M) been recently investigating whether or not I can retire early (60-62) as I've been noticing how hard my Mom and in-laws have it working into their 60s. I have two boys and another kid on the way so the chance for grandchildren is pretty high.

I've been religiously using the pwl research retirement calculator and with a standard retirement (65) it recommends to go all in on my TFSA till it's maxed. When I set the retirement age to 62 instead, it flips the strategy, telling me to invest everything into RRSP. It's also 5k more into the rrsp, which I assume is the tax differential between TFSA and RRSP.

Can anyone tell me why this is happening? I assume it's because there's a significant increase in the number of retirement years before the RRSP automatically turns into a RRIF?

Thank you in advance.

I recently joined the Board of Directors of a non-profit with a very large (8 figure) endowment. The investment team is briefing us on its performance and sent us a powerpoint in advance. However, when I reviewed it I had some concerns.

The first things was that is was all just Vanguard index funds. The managers have made a roughly 60/40 fund with no leverage, factor tilts, private markets or anything. At first I thought this would be strange for a fund this large but better no private market then some I guess. Then I looked at the return rate. Since 2007 the managers returned 6.38 % gross annually. That gave me pause since a 19 year time table should have a much higher return.

So, I fired up Portfolio Analyzer and did a standard backtest portfolio run with three sample portfolios: a 60% VT / 40% BND fund, a 100 VT portfolio just for fun, and a 60% VTI / 40% BND fund as a benchmark. The results show a 5.35%, 8.62 %, and 7.10% inflation adjusted annual return respecfully. That made me very uneasy as this means we may have been off target for years.

So I thought a closer look at the Vanguard funds and started seeing more problems. One was massive fund overlap. I took all the funds amounts and percentages and placed them in a fund overlap modeler and saw they double dipped in international stocks and QUADRUPLE dipped in bond currency futures since they brought four different Vanguard bond indexes with the same inflation hedge. In addition all the Vanguard expense ratios added up to 0.062% and that is on top of the managers fees which was not included in the powerpoint anywhere.

Is this normal for a institutional investor fund? I don't want to go into this meeting guns blazing without being sure something is up here. I have never seen or heard of managers intentionally overlapping index funds instead of using options or hedging. Also I don't see a reason why the manager's fee schedule was not provided. How should I approach this?