COWZ vs VTV

COWZCPacer US Cash Cows 100 ETF

VTVAVanguard Morningstar Value ETF

In short

COWZ Value measured in cash, not accounting bargains. COWZ ranks Russell 1000 large and mid caps by trailing free-cash-flow yield and holds the top 100, with financial companies screened out entirely.

VTV Value investing for three cents on every hundred dollars a year. Since 2004, VTV has run a passive, fully invested portfolio of roughly 300 large US companies that screen cheap, at a fee near the industry floor.

Stated mandate

COWZ The fund seeks to track, before fees and expenses, the total return of the Pacer US Cash Cows 100 Index. Its rules-based index targets 100 U.S. large- and mid-cap companies selected from the Russell 1000 for high trailing free-cash-flow yield after screens for projected cash flow, earnings, and financial companies.

VTV The fund seeks to track a large-capitalization U.S. value-stock benchmark through passive indexing and substantial replication of that index.

Why people hold it

• COWZ The screen is concrete: high trailing free-cash-flow yield, plus tests on projected cash flow and earnings. Cash a company actually throws off, not a cheap-looking book value.
• Rules-based index, about 100 large and mid cap names, quarterly distributions, and a live track record dating to its 2016 launch.
• A multi-billion-dollar fund that trades actively, so getting in and out is rarely the hard part.

• VTV 0.03% a year, about a sixth of the 0.18% median for US value funds. Cost is the part of the outcome the fund actually controls.
• Same recipe, very different sticker: PRXV tracks the same declared value index and charges 0.36%, twelve times VTV's fee.
• Passively managed, full replication, fully invested. No manager hunches, no cash sitting idle, and the fund has tracked its benchmark closely.vanguard.com
• One of the largest and most actively traded funds in the US value aisle, the kind of scale that keeps bid-ask spreads thin for ordinary orders.

Worth knowing

• COWZ 0.49% a year buys the cash-flow screen. Plain-vanilla value funds sit far below that: VTV at 0.03%, SCHV at 0.04%.
• No financials, by design. Ranking on cash yield also piles weight into whichever sectors are gushing cash, so the sector map can look nothing like a broad value index.
• Against the US value ETFs we track, it lands in the bottom quartile of our review, with the fee the biggest weight on the scale.

• VTV Large caps only, about 300 of them. Cheap mid- and small-cap stocks live in separate funds (VOE, VTWV), so this is one slice of value, not the whole market.
• It is a value screen by design, so the priciest fast growers are largely filtered out. In growth-led stretches it can move very differently from a total-market fund.
• Income arrives quarterly, in four instalments rather than a monthly drip.

Full COWZ profile⁠

Full VTV profile⁠