FNY vs VO

FNYDFirst Trust Mid Cap Growth AlphaDEX Fund

VOAVanguard Morningstar Mid-Cap ETF

In short

FNY Most mid-cap funds just own the market. FNY runs Nasdaq's AlphaDEX screen instead: rank mid-cap growth names, cut the weakest, weight by score rather than size. A quant stock-picker in index clothing.

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

FNY The Fund seeks to track, before fees and expenses, the price and yield performance of the Nasdaq AlphaDEX Mid Cap Growth Index. It uses an indexing approach, normally investing at least 90% of net assets in securities comprising 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

• FNY AlphaDEX scores mid-cap names on growth and value measures, drops the low scorers, then weights survivors by rank, not market cap. Deliberately different from a cap-weighted index.ftportfolios.com
• Spreads the bet across roughly 200-plus mid-cap stocks, with at least 90% of net assets in index constituents.
• Trading since 2011, so this screen has a long public record across several market cycles.

• 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

• FNY At 0.73% a year the fee sits well above the mid-cap peer median near 0.15%; cap-weighted rivals VO and SCHM charge 0.03%. The screen has that hurdle to clear.
• Thinly traded next to the mid-cap giants, so bid-ask spreads and order slippage matter more here.
• Rank weighting tilts toward smaller, higher-momentum names, so results can diverge widely from a standard mid-cap index, in either direction.ftportfolios.com

• 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 FNY profile⁠

Full VO profile⁠