What do you think of Mawers underperformance recently and which strategy would best serve the needs of a moderate knowledge investor to maximize Performance?
While we think MAW230 is fine and decent mutual fund, the total fee is high at 1.10% vs VBAL at 0.24% and XGRO at 0.20%. We agree with the comment on fees and think the offset of lower fees for a more passive ETF strategy should bode well for total returns in the long run. Looking at performance, XGRO has outperformed MAW230 over the last 5 years, while VBAL has started to outperform this year as well. While we cannot say for certain as Mawer does not have this information readily available for us, it may be more allocated to international equities vs the ETF options which are concentrated in the North American market which is a potential reason to the recent underperformance. We are comfortable moving into a more passive approach and think paying less fees makes sense, especially when looking at the relative performance across these options.