TRUST THE math.
Not the crowd.
VEQT and XEQT hold the whole world by size — the bigger a company already is, the more you own. CAGE holds the whole world by evidence — tilting toward companies that are cheaper and more profitable. Same plumbing. Opposite philosophy.
Same shelf.
Put CAGE and VEQT side by side and they look like twins.
Both are one-ticker, all-equity, globally diversified ETFs. Buy either and you own thousands of companies across every continent, auto-rebalanced, for a fraction of a percent a year.
So if they're so alike — why does CAGE exist? The answer is in one word on the spec sheet: weighting.
Cap-weighting trusts the crowd.
VEQT and XEQT weight every company by its market capitalization — its price times its shares. The more the market already loves a stock, the bigger your slice.
A handful of US mega-caps — Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia — dominate the whole portfolio. You're not betting on the world. You're betting on whatever's already expensive.
CAGE tilts on purpose.
Watch the same companies re-weight. CAGE systematically trims the priciest mega-caps and leans into stocks that are cheaper relative to their fundamentals and more profitable.
Nvidia shrinks. A profitable, unglamorous bank or energy name grows. Nothing is excluded — it's a tilt, not a bet on ten stocks.
Why those tilts?
Because the data behind them is about as close to a law as finance gets.
Nobel laureates Eugene Fama and Kenneth French spent decades showing that, over the long run, cheaper companies (value), more profitable companies, and smaller companies have earned higher returns than the market — repeated across 90+ years and dozens of countries.
A dollar riding those tilts didn't just beat the market. It lapped it — though never in a straight line, and never without stretches of pain.
CAGE's four dials.
ACWI IMI = 0
CAGE doesn't guess. It turns four evidence-based dials, each measured against a plain market-cap index (where every dial sits at zero). Positive = CAGE leans into that style. Click a dial for the why.
Head to head.
VEQT · XEQT
Where they're identical, where they diverge. CAGE costs 4 basis points more than VEQT — about $4 a year on $10,000 — and in exchange you get an active factor tilt instead of pure market-cap.
The catch.
part twice
We're not here to sell you. A tilt is a decision to look different from the market — and looking different is the whole reason it can pay, and the whole reason it can hurt.
It can lag for years
Value underperformed growth for most of 2010–2020. A factor tilt can trail a plain index for a decade before the premium shows up. If you'll panic-sell after three bad years, the tilt will hurt you, not help you.
You pay a little more
0.28% vs VEQT's 0.24%. Small, but real. You're paying for active implementation — daily screening on price and profitability — not just index replication.
Tracking error is the price
CAGE will sometimes visibly trail the index your friends own. That difference — tracking error — is not a bug. It's the cost of admission to a premium that only exists because most people won't tolerate it.
So, is it for you?
answer
- Can answer “why this, not VEQT?” in one sentence — and now you can.
- Have a 10-year-plus horizon and won't flinch when the tilt lags.
- Believe decades of evidence beat the crowd's latest favourite.
- Want a tilt built in, not a five-fund spreadsheet.
- Will compare your return to a friend's index fund every quarter.
- Want the cheapest possible all-in-one and nothing more.
- Don't have conviction in factor premia — and that's fine.
- Would sell the moment CAGE trails for a couple of years.