DFAU vs PRAY

DFAUADimensional US Core Equity Market ETF

PRAYCFIS Christian Stock Fund

In short

DFAU Active management priced like an index fund. Dimensional spreads across roughly 2,400 US stocks, then tilts the weights toward value, profitability and momentum instead of simply mirroring the Russell 3000.

PRAY Faith screening with receipts: PRAY runs a growth-at-a-reasonable-price screen on U.S. large caps, then filters the survivors through a third-party Christian values tool, eValueator. Active management, 0.68% a year, no fee waiver.

Stated mandate

DFAU Seeks long-term capital appreciation. It uses an integrated research, portfolio-design, management, and trading process to build a broadly diversified portfolio of U.S. companies while balancing long-term return drivers, risk, shorter-term considerations, and trading costs.

PRAY The fund seeks income and long-term capital growth. It actively invests primarily in diversified U.S. large-cap equities selected through a proprietary approach intended to participate in companies’ profit and valuation-expansion cycles while aligning with Christian values.

Why people hold it

• DFAU Charges 0.12% a year, well under the 0.65% median for active US equity funds and the cheapest of the top-graded names in its group (AVLC, DFAC, FELC).
• Holds roughly 2,400 US companies, so no single name steers the fund. Whole-market coverage, not a concentrated bet.
• Active without the stock-picking drama: it leans weights toward value, profitability and momentum, using the Russell 3000 as its reference point rather than a rigid rulebook.
• A multi-billion-dollar fund that trades actively, and one of the strongest overall implementations in its active US equity peer group.

• PRAY The rules are in writing: the prospectus commits at least 80% of net assets to stocks passing its Christian values filter, and names the excluded businesses (abortion drugs, pornography, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, indiscriminate armaments).sec.govfaithinvestorservices.com
• The screen is not just the manager's gut. A third-party tool, eValueator, applies a consistent methodology alongside the adviser's own research, and the adviser can drop a holding if a company's conduct stops fitting.sec.gov
• Holdings line up closely with the actively managed U.S. large-cap, values-screened mandate it advertises, which puts it in the upper half of its peer group.
• At 0.68% a year with no fee waiver in play, the cost sits near the median for actively managed U.S. equity ETFs, despite the extra screening layer riding on top.

Worth knowing

• DFAU Those tilts cut both ways: results can drift from a plain Russell 3000 fund for long stretches, in either direction.
• No published index behind it. The trade-off for flexibility is that you're buying Dimensional's process, not a public set of rules you can check line by line.
• Distributions land quarterly, not monthly, and the mandate is long-term capital appreciation rather than income.

• PRAY Thinly traded next to the category's heavyweights, and a small fund by ETF standards, so bid-ask spreads and order size are worth watching on the way in and out.
• Costs more than broad U.S. core index-style peers such as DFAU (0.12%) and AVLC (0.15%), neither of which uses a waiver. That gap is the price of an active manager plus a values overlay.
• Screening out whole industries narrows the universe, so the portfolio can look very different from a broad U.S. index in any given stretch, in both directions.sec.gov

Full DFAU profile⁠

Full PRAY profile⁠