FYT vs VTV

FYTCFirst Trust Small Cap Value AlphaDEX Fund

VTVAVanguard Morningstar Value ETF

In short

FYT Most value funds just buy the market, cap-weighted. FYT ranks small caps on growth and value factors, hands the top scorers the most weight, and reshuffles quarterly. A quant stock picker in index clothing.

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

FYT The Fund seeks to track, before fees and expenses, the price and yield of the Nasdaq AlphaDEX Small Cap Value Index. It normally invests at least 90% of net assets in index securities and uses an indexing approach to replicate the index’s performance.

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

• FYT The AlphaDEX rulebook scores small caps on growth and value factors, keeps the top names, then sorts them into tiers so higher-scoring groups carry more weight. Equal weight inside each tier.nasdaqomx.com
• Quarterly reconstitution recycles the roster four times a year, so the portfolio keeps re-ranking instead of drifting into whatever worked years ago.nasdaqomx.comnasdaqomx.com 2
• Roughly 300 names, with weight set by score tier rather than piled into the largest companies. No single holding runs the show.nasdaqomx.com
• Trading since 2011, and built to replicate rather than outguess: at least 90% of net assets sit in index securities, and it has stayed close to that index.

• 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

• FYT 0.70% a year against a roughly 0.20% median for US value ETFs, and giants like VTV and IUSV sit near a nickel. That gap is the price of the screen.
• Thinly traded on a modest asset base, so spreads can run wider than the household-name funds in this category. Limit orders matter more here.
• Small caps plus a factor screen swing harder than the large-cap value indexes that anchor this group, and can spend long stretches looking nothing like plain vanilla value.

• 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 FYT profile⁠

Full VTV profile⁠