What do they do?
The BetaShares QOZ ETF provides exposure to a ‘fundamentally weighted’ index of 200 large Australian shares. This ETF focuses on weighting the portfolio with a focus on ‘economic importance’ rather than market capitalisation, while also aiming to outperform traditional market-cap weighted indices.
The Vanguard VAP ETF provides investors with low-cost exposure to listed Australian property companies and real estate investment trusts (REITs).
To learn more about the QOZ ETF, read our free ETF investment report once you’re done with this article.
ASX: QOZ or ASX: VAP price performance
To make this article easier to digest, we’ll just study the fees or ‘management expense ratio’ (MER). Using data for December 2021, the QOZ ETF has an MER of 0.40% while the VAP ETF had a yearly fee of 0.23%. So, VAP wins on this metric. Keep in mind, a more useful metric to know is the fee quartiles that these ETFs find themselves in (note: quartile 1 is best). Meaning, we take all the Australian shares ETFs in our database and classify them into 4 quartiles, based on their fees. For example, any ETF which has a fee below 0.3% would be considered in our first (best) quartile.
How we study past performance
Time to look at past returns. 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 attractive return one year just to generate unsatisfactory 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 QOZ ETF had an average annual return of 13.13%. During the same time, the VAP ETF returned 13.02%.
Lastly, we need to consider the issuer or provider of the ETF. There are too many factors that go into our internal scoring of fund providers to detail here (you’d get bored pretty quickly). So here’s the quick version. As you guessed, the issuer of the VAP ETF 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.
Our takeaway
If you’d like to learn more about these two ETFs, be sure to visit our free QOZ ETF report or VAP ETF review.
For us, the VAP ETF rates in a better position against our internal scoring methodology, but only just.
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…
