The Scorecard
VEQT is the market by market cap — the cheapest, lowest-decision bet on every public company. CAGE is the same global equity exposure rotated toward what academic research has called premium-paying corners since 1928: smaller companies, profitable companies, value names. It's not active vs passive; it's index orthodoxy vs the factor pitch.
VEQT ~0.20% effective vs CAGE 0.27%. Cap-weighted indexing is cheaper because it's the lowest-effort weighting scheme — you pay extra for Avantis's factor screens.
VEQT mirrors what investors collectively own. CAGE deliberately overweights smaller-cap and higher-profitability value names. Both have defensible academic foundations — they answer different questions.
VEQT launched 2019 with through-cycle data. CAGE launched 2024 — the underlying factor research goes back nearly a century, but the Canadian wrapper itself is brand new.
VEQT holds 13,700+ securities globally. CAGE holds ~4,500, deliberately concentrated in factor-favored quadrants — fewer names by design.
If size and value premia persist as they have historically, CAGE's tilts should compound to a meaningful edge over multi-decade horizons. The premia have disappeared for 10+ year stretches before — so this is a long-horizon bet.
Holding a factor fund through a mega-cap growth run is harder than holding the market through it — the underperformance feels like a choice. VEQT removes that temptation by definition.
Our recommendation
Hold VEQT if you believe market-cap weighting is the honest default and any deviation is closet-active in disguise. Hold CAGE if you've read Fama–French, want a single-ticket way to harvest the size and value premia, and can sit through years of mega-cap growth dominance without flinching. Don't pick CAGE for the hype — pick it for the thesis, or skip it.
Editorial analysis based on publicly available fund data. Not financial advice. Your situation may differ.