FELV vs VTV

FELVBFidelity Enhanced Large Cap Value ETF

VTVAVanguard Morningstar Value ETF

In short

FELV Index-fund shape, active brain. Fidelity's quant models tilt roughly 300 large-cap value stocks while the Russell 1000 Value stays the yardstick, and the whole thing costs 0.18%, the median fee in its peer group.

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

FELV The fund is a diversified domestic equity strategy focused on large-cap value stocks. It uses quantitative, multifactor statistical models to seek benchmark outperformance.

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

• FELV Quantitative multifactor models choose the holdings, but the Russell 1000 Value Index remains the benchmark, so the portfolio still looks and behaves like US large-cap value.
• At 0.18%, it costs exactly the median of its value-factor peer group, unusual for a strategy that actively tries to beat its index rather than match it.
• Same 0.18% as IWD, the plain tracker on the same Russell 1000 Value benchmark, so the active tilt is not priced at a premium to that route.
• A multi-billion-dollar fund spread across about 300 large-cap names, paying quarterly, run under a strategy whose track record starts at its 2007 launch.

• 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

• FELV Plain-vanilla value beta is cheaper: VTV charges 0.03% and SCHV 0.04%. The quant tilt costs several times that.
• Aiming to beat the Russell 1000 Value means results can diverge from it in either direction, which a straight index tracker will not do.
• Moderately traded rather than a volume leader in its category, so spreads on larger orders can run wider than at the busiest value ETFs.

• 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 FELV profile⁠

Full VTV profile⁠