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birb_cromble  7d ago (text post)   865 thread views

Weekly Finance Thread - 2026-07-25

A weekly thread to discuss financial matters - from personal all the way up to global.

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I'm doing a long delayed cleanup of my Roth IRA and unloading some old, underperforming mutual funds that don't really serve a purpose in 2026.

If you had a pile of cash to throw into either VT or AVGV right now, which would you pick? I like the philosophy of AVGV, but it's still pretty new and Avantis hasn't been around nearly as long as Vanguard.

I’d also prefer VT. It’s just the entire world’s market-cap-weighted stock performance, right? I love how braindead and good that strategy is. It’s so simple and elegant.

Looking at AVGV’s website I don’t even understand what their strategy is. They want to add value with investment decisions. Okay, me too. What does that mean?

Avantis is a bunch of fund managers who originally worked with Dimensional Funds. They use a strategy for their value funds that is technically considered active, but it's not very hands-on at the human level. They define an algorithm that can quantify "value", then maintain fund holdings based on that algorithm. Their prospectuses go into more detail, but the biggest element seems to be free cash flow vs share price and shares outstanding. Obviously there's a lot of proprietary witchcraft involved, but I generally like the idea of investing in companies that make more money than their share price reflects. I'm a dinosaur like that. In the rare instances where I buy individual stocks, those are some of the same things I look for in a company.

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