If you’re looking for the top ETFs this year, the Vanguard Australian Property Securities Index ETF (ASX: VAP) and the BetaShares Australia 200 ETF (ASX: A200) could be worthy of your watchlist.
Why investors study the Australian Property Securities Index ETF and Australia 200 ETF
The Vanguard VAP ETF provides investors with low-cost exposure to listed Australian property companies and real estate investment trusts (REITs).
The Betashares A200 ETF provides exposure to the largest 200 Australian companies, based on market capitalisation. Unlike many other Australian shares ETFs, A200 uses the Solactive Australia 200 Index. This is virtually the same thing as the indices provided by S&P/ASX, as it also uses a market capitalisation weighting.
Want to know (lots) more? Read through our full A200 ETF review: see our A200 ETF review now.
Obviously, an easy way to analyse any ETF or fund like A200 or VAP is with quantitative methods, such as studying the fees and past performance (keeping in mind past performance is no guarantee of future performance).
We’ll keep it basic and just study the fees. Based on our data for December 2021, the VAP ETF has a management expense ratio (MER) of 0.23% while the A200 ETF’s yearly fee was 0.07%. Therefore, A200 wins on this one. That said, a more useful metric to know is the fee quartiles that these ETFs find themselves in (note: quartile 1 is best). For example, any ETF which has a fee below 0.3% would be considered in our first (best) quartile.
Three-year return?
As Jerry Maguire said, ‘show me the money’. Keep in mind, performance isn’t everything — and past performance is not indicative of future performance. It’s just one part of a much bigger picture. The reason we say performance is not everything is because of volatility of financial markets and the economy from one year to the next. Some ETFs and funds can put in a positive return one year just to generate inferior returns the next time around. That’s why we prefer three-year or seven-year track records over one-year track records. It can smooth out the temporary performances caused by external factors. Both ETFs have achieved our three-year performance hurdle. As of December 2021, the VAP ETF had an average annual return of 13.02%. During the same time, the A200 ETF returned 14.80%.
Finally, at Best ETFs Australia, we apply a rating to the ETF issuer or provider. That is, the company that starts and is responsible for operating the ETF on the ASX. There are too many considerations that go into our scoring to detail here. The issuer of VAP is Vanguard. Vanguard ranks highly for our scores of ETF providers and issuers in Australia. We consider Vanguard to be in Australia’s top three ETF providers for retail investors, advisers and institutions. A200’s provider is BetaShares. Betashares ranks highly for our scores of ETF providers and issuers in Australia. We believe BetaShares is one of the leading providers of index and non-index style products to retail investors in Australia.
Conclusion
Don’t forget our free reviews on ASX VAP and ASX A200.
For us, the VAP ETF ranks fairly better for our internal scoring methodology but not by much.
We hope this article helped you analyse ETFs. Don’t forget, there’s a lot more to investing well than what we just outlined (risks, diversification, other potentially better ETFs, etc.). Our analyst team at Rask Australia spends months looking at new ASX investments (it’s our day job!). To make your life easier, you can get the name of our team’s top ETF pick for 2022 in a free report. Keep reading to find out how to get our analyst’s report emailed to you right now…
