EDOW vs EQAL

EDOWCFirst Trust Dow 30 Equal Weight ETF

EQALAInvesco Russell 1000 Equal Weight ETF

In short

EDOW The Dow, with the price tags ignored. EDOW holds the index's roughly 30 blue chips at equal weight, so no single high-priced share dominates the portfolio. The trade-off is a fee well above most equal-weight rivals.

EQAL Most equal-weight funds flatten the stocks and let sector weights land wherever the stock count falls. EQAL flattens the sectors first, then the names inside each one, across roughly 1,000 US large and mid caps.

Stated mandate

EDOW The fund seeks to track generally the price and yield, before fees and expenses, of the Dow Jones Industrial Average® Equal Weight Index.

EQAL The Fund seeks to track, before fees and expenses, the Russell 1000 Equal Weight Index by investing primarily in securities that comprise its underlying index.

Why people hold it

• EDOW A rare mandate: it equal-weights the Dow's roughly 30 blue chips, so each name gets the same slice instead of share price deciding influence.
• Straight indexing, no manager discretion: the stated job is tracking the Dow Jones Industrial Average Equal Weight Index, and it has run that job since 2017.ftportfolios.com
• A portfolio you can read in one screen: about 30 US large caps, with distributions paid quarterly.

• EQAL Two layers of leveling: nine sector groups each get the same slice, then every stock inside a sector gets the same slice. Sector concentration is reset by design, not inherited from the parent index.invesco.com
• Roughly 1,000 holdings drawn from the Russell 1000, so the portfolio reaches well past the mega-cap tier and no handful of giants sets the tone.
• A 0.20% expense ratio, right at the middle of the equal-weight group, on a methodology this fund has run since its 2014 launch.
• The portfolio hews tightly to the equal-weight mandate it advertises, and the fund sits in the upper half of its peer group overall.

Worth knowing

• EDOW At 0.50% a year, the fee runs more than double the 0.20% median for equal-weight peers, and rivals like GSEW and EUSA charge 0.09%.
• Thinly traded next to the larger equal-weight funds, so bid-ask spreads can be wider, particularly in fast markets.
• About 30 holdings means every name carries real weight, and the sector mix is simply whoever sits in the Dow at the time.

• EQAL Thinly traded next to the household names of equal weight. Spreads and limit orders matter more here than in a heavily traded fund.
• Cheaper equal-weight large-cap options exist: GSEW and EUSA both charge 0.09%, less than half of EQAL's fee.
• Flattening sectors and stocks means the fund keeps trimming what has run and adding to what has lagged, and it carries more mid-cap exposure than a cap-weighted large-cap fund.invesco.com

Full EDOW profile⁠

Full EQAL profile⁠