CZA vs VO

CZACInvesco Zacks Mid-Cap ETF

VOAVanguard Morningstar Mid-Cap ETF

In short

CZA A stock picker in index clothing: about 100 mid-caps chosen by a Zacks quant screen instead of the whole segment. Running since 2007, and the 0.69% fee is the price of that opinion.

VO The plain middle of the US market for three basis points. VO owns roughly 300 stocks sitting between the 70th and 85th percentile of investable market cap, each at index weight, with buffer bands that slow the churn at the edges.

Stated mandate

CZA The fund seeks to track the Zacks Mid-Cap Core Index by investing at least 90% of its assets in securities included in that index.

VO The fund seeks to track the CRSP US Mid Cap Index by investing in its U.S. mid-cap stocks through passive, full replication.

Why people hold it

• CZA Rules-based but opinionated. The Zacks Mid-Cap Core Index screens down to roughly 100 names, so the basket genuinely looks different from a cap-weighted mid-cap fund.invesco.com
• The mandate is tight: at least 90% of assets sit in the named index, so this is a quant screen in an index wrapper, not open-ended manager discretion.invesco.com
• Launched in 2007 under Invesco, it has run the same strategy through the financial crisis and every market since. Long track records are rare among rules-based screens.invesco.com
• It stays close to the index it advertises, so what you read in the methodology is broadly what you own.

• VO Costs 0.03% a year against a 0.15% median for mid-cap peers, matching SCHM as the cheapest in the group and undercutting IWR by a wide margin.
• Full replication, not sampling: it holds the index's roughly 300 names at index weight, and its tracking is among the tightest in the mid-cap group.vanguard.com
• Trading since 2004 as a share class of Vanguard's Mid-Cap Index Fund, it has grown into one of the largest and most actively traded mid-cap index funds.sec.gov
• CRSP draws the mid-cap line by percentage of market cap, not a fixed stock count, with buffer zones at the edges so companies migrate gradually rather than jumping buckets.crsp.orgbogleheads.org

Worth knowing

• CZA Cost is the headline trade-off. At 0.69%, this sits far above plain mid-cap trackers such as VO and SCHM at 0.03%. That gap comes out of returns every year, screen or no screen.
• Thinly traded and modest in size, so bid-ask spreads are a bigger slice of your real cost here than with the giant mid-cap funds.
• About 100 holdings means individual names swing the fund more than in a broad index holding several hundred. Concentration cuts both directions.

• VO Mid caps move harder than blue chips, and Vanguard flags that: the fund sits at the top of its own 1-to-5 risk scale.vanguard.com
• One band of the market by design. No mega caps, no small caps, so it covers the middle rather than the whole US market.crsp.org
• About 300 stocks is a narrower net than a total-market fund casts, and sector weights are simply whatever the middle of the market looks like at the time.

Full CZA profile⁠

Full VO profile⁠