A new ticker, an old idea
You've seen the screenshots. The r/JustBuyCAGE subreddit hit nearly 9,000 members in eight weeks. The Globe and Mail's Inside the Market dedicated a feature to the launch. Ben Felix sat down with Eduardo Repetto on Rational Reminder Episode 401 the same week the fund opened.
The Avantis CIBC All-Equity Asset Allocation ETF — ticker CAGE — is the loudest hype trade in Canadian retail investing right now. And the hype is more substantive than it usually is.
CAGE is not a thematic ETF chasing AI or uranium. It is the Canadian retail wrapper for a strategy Eugene Fama wrote the math for in 1992, that Dimensional Fund Advisors has run for institutional money since 1981, and that Eduardo Repetto — Dimensional's former Co-CEO — has been quietly building a US ETF business around since 2019. CIBC Asset Management sub-advises the Canadian version, which is why the legal name carries both brands.
The longer story is that the strategy has spent the last 12 years embarrassing its proponents. We'll get to that.
This article is the careful version of the case. Where CAGE works. Where it doesn't. Who it's for. Where Ben Felix actually lands on it. What you're actually signing up for when you click "Buy."
The basics
| VEQT | CAGE | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Vanguard | Avantis × CIBC |
| Management fee | 0.17% | 0.28% |
| Effective MER | ~0.20%* | ~0.30%–0.40%** |
| Equity Allocation | 100% | 100% |
| Inception | January 2019 | March 2026 |
| AUM (May 2026) | ~$13.4B | ~$267M |
| Construction | Market-cap weighted | Multi-factor tilt (size · value · profitability) |
| Underlying ETFs | VUN, VCN, VIU, VEE | CAUS, CACE, CADE, CASV, CAEM |
| Index family | FTSE / CRSP | None — rules-based active |
Both are 100% equity, globally diversified, single-ticker, TSX-listed. Both are designed to be the only equity holding most investors need.
The fee gap is real but not catastrophic — roughly 8 to 15 basis points per year in CAGE's first reporting period, depending on where the final MER lands. That's the headwind CAGE needs to overcome before it adds a dollar of value over VEQT.
0.17% management fee post-November 2025 cut. Official MER 0.24% pending fiscal-year recalculation. **CIBC's stated 0.28% management fee plus the operating expenses and trading costs that show up in the first MRFP. Independent analysts have pencilled in 0.30%-0.40%.
What CAGE actually does differently
VEQT does the simplest possible thing: holds roughly 13,700 companies, weighting each by its market capitalization. If Apple is 4% of the world's investable equity, VEQT is roughly 4% Apple. The fund makes no judgment about whether Apple is correctly priced. The market said 4%; VEQT said okay.
CAGE makes three deliberate departures from that default:
- Size tilt. CAGE overweights smaller companies relative to the cap-weighted benchmark. Inside CAGE, ~7.4% sits in a dedicated global small-cap-value sleeve (
CASV) — a structural overweight a cap-weighted fund wouldn't carry. - Value tilt. CAGE overweights companies trading at lower prices relative to their book value or earnings, and underweights expensive ones.
- Profitability tilt. CAGE overweights firms with high gross profitability and underweights low-quality businesses, a Robert Novy-Marx 2013 result that DFA and Avantis both treat as the third pillar.
Repetto's own framing on Rational Reminder Episode 401, versus a geography-matched cap benchmark:
How CAGE re-weights the world
The market’s weights, argued with.
underweight the priciest,
least-profitable names
overweight the cheaper,
more-profitable names
Read the tracking error carefully. At 3–4%, a one-year stretch where CAGE trails VEQT by 6% or more is a normal event, not a malfunction — and it will happen in both directions.
Forty years behind the advisor gate
CAGE is interesting because it inherits a real lineage, not just a marketing one.
Dimensional Fund Advisors was founded in 1981 by David Booth and Rex Sinquefield, both Chicago Booth alumni, with Eugene Fama on the board. DFA was the first major asset manager to translate the Fama-French academic factor work into actual funds — and for 40 years they refused to sell those funds without an advisor in the middle. The thesis was paternal: a 1% advisor fee was the price of behavioural coaching, ostensibly to keep retail investors from selling factor funds at the bottom of inevitable underperformance windows.
The flagship retail expression of that philosophy was the DFA Global Allocation 60/40 Portfolio (DGSIX in the US) — a single fund of factor-tilted equity and bonds that became the canonical "factor 60/40" for advisor-managed portfolios. It was the conceptual ancestor of every single-ticker asset-allocation ETF you can buy today. You just couldn't buy it directly.
Then in 2017, Eduardo Repetto left DFA. He had been Co-CIO since 2007 and Co-CEO since 2009. In 2019 he founded Avantis as an autonomous unit of American Century Investments, bringing several senior DFA executives with him. Industry press called it "DFA 2.0." The three differences from DFA: ETF wrappers from day one (no mutual-fund advisor gate), lower headline fees, and zero asset minimums. DFA itself capitulated in November 2020, launching its first ETFs with comparable fees and structure.
For Canadians, the gate stayed shut a few years longer. Dimensional Canada's mutual funds remained advisor-only. You could buy US-listed Avantis (AVUV, AVDV, AVGE) at a Canadian discount broker, but you absorbed the FX conversion, the Norbert's Gambit dance, and a layer of US estate-tax exposure on the holdings.
That gate closed in March 2026 when Avantis and CIBC Asset Management launched CAGE on the TSX in Canadian dollars. Ben Felix in the Globe and Mail, the day after the launch:
"The pent-up demand for something like this in Canada was huge."
PWL Capital — where Felix is a portfolio manager — has used Dimensional Canada for institutional clients for years and recommended Avantis sleeves (AVUV, AVDV) in their published DIY model portfolios. Felix's own caveat, repeated in his Rational Reminder appearance with Repetto:
"Tilting away from the market means underperforming the market, which can happen for long periods of time."
He's not wrong. He's been saying it consistently since long before CAGE existed.
The bet is small. The outcomes aren't.
Most of the CAGE-vs-VEQT debate online is opinion. The math is simpler than that. Compound $100,000 over 30 years at a 7% baseline equity return, and the whole argument fits in four bars:
$100,000 · 30 years · 7% equity baseline
Four endings, one holding period.
That’s all the net factor premium CAGE needs to cover its fee gap. The target is ten times that. The catch is the sequence — the century-long average can take a very long decade to show up.
Read the top and bottom bars together — that's the asymmetry of the bet. If the premium arrives at the upper end of Repetto's target, CAGE's 30-year outperformance pays for a meaningful chunk of an early retirement. If the factors deliver zero net of fees during your holding period — exactly what happened from roughly 2010 to 2020 — you end up about $26K behind VEQT on the fee gap alone.
The Fama-French record across nearly a century of US data says CAGE should clear its breakeven by a wide margin. The same record says it may take 30 years to get to that average — and you might hold CAGE through the wrong 15.
The decade that broke factor investing
Anyone selling CAGE on the size and value premia today is selling against the memory of the 2010s.
US equities · early 2010 – March 2020
Ten years of being right eventually.
This is the chart to war-game before buying CAGE. Anyone holding the value side lived through ten consecutive years of the tilt losing — and the academic case never stopped being “right.”
The "factors are dead" obituaries arrived on schedule. Cliff Asness, who has run factor strategies at AQR since 1998, wrote that by late 2020 the value spread — the price gap between cheap and expensive stocks — exceeded the March 2000 dot-com extreme by some measures.
Cam Harvey, a former editor of the Journal of Finance, has spent the last decade documenting what he calls the "factor zoo" — by his count over 300 academic factors published in top journals, of which he believes a third to half are statistical artifacts of data-snooping rather than real anomalies. Harvey's recommended significance threshold for accepting a new factor is t > 3.0, not the standard t > 2.0 most papers use.
None of this is a refutation of the size, value, and profitability factors specifically — they remain the most-replicated and most-defended of the lot. But it is a warning: long stretches of factor underperformance are not a hypothetical scenario you read about in academic papers. They happened recently enough that everyone holding CAGE today should sit with the chart above and ask themselves an honest question about what they would have done.
The hardest part is you
The strongest critique of factor investing for retail investors has nothing to do with the academic premium. It's about you.
Morningstar's most recent Mind the Gap study (10 years to December 2024) found the average dollar earned 7.0% per year while the funds those dollars sat in earned 8.2% per year. The 1.2-point gap — roughly 15% of total return — is what investors give up by buying after the runs and selling after the drawdowns.
Factor funds are uniquely exposed to this trap. When VEQT lags, the explanation is "the market is down" — which is everyone's loss, equally. When CAGE lags VEQT for five years, the explanation is "my factor bet is down" — which feels like a personal mistake. The temptation to switch to VEQT at the bottom of that window, locking in the relative loss permanently, is the single most likely way a CAGE investor underperforms.
Ben Felix's standing framing, well before CAGE existed: factor tilts are "for the die-hard investor." If you can't say with honest confidence that you'd still hold CAGE in year eight of a decade where it trails VEQT by 2% annually, you are not the die-hard investor he means.
Who CAGE is for
Three buckets, drawn cleanly:
VEQT — the investor who wants a single ticket, doesn't read Fama-French, doesn't want to think about tracking error, doesn't want to explain factor underperformance to their spouse over coffee in 2032. The cheapest, simplest, most behaviourally robust all-equity portfolio Canadian dollars can buy. This is the right answer for most investors. We say this every day.
CAGE — the investor who has actually read the 1992 and 2015 Fama-French papers (or watched Felix's Common Sense Investing series and understood it), who has a 30-year-plus horizon, who has war-gamed their own behaviour during a stretch like 2010–2020, and who treats the 8–15bp fee gap as a small wager on a long-run premium they understand may not show up at all during their holding period. There are real investors who fit this description and CAGE is a clean way to express it without assembling six US-listed sleeves.
Neither fund will save you — the investor who panic-sold in March 2020, or December 2018, or any other ten-percent move. Fund flavour won't fix a behavioural problem. The 0.17% MER beats both options.
| Factor | VEQT | CAGE |
|---|---|---|
| Philosophy | Trust the market's weights | Re-weight toward factor premia |
| Management fee | 0.17% | 0.28% |
| Effective MER | ~0.20% | ~0.30%–0.40% (est.) |
| Expected edge | The market return | +1.5–2% gross target |
| Tracking error vs market | Near zero | 3–4% |
| Live track record | Since January 2019 | Since March 2026 |
| Behavioural demand | Low — a lag is everyone's lag | High — a lag feels personal |
| Built for | Almost everyone | The die-hard factor investor |
The bottom line
For our live side-by-side on CAGE: VEQT vs CAGE comparison. For the marquee fight: VEQT vs XEQT. And if CAGE is your fund, there's a sibling site built in the same broadsheet voice at buycage.ca.
This article represents the editorial position of BuyVEQT.ca. CAGE specifications cited reflect publicly disclosed data as of the date above; verify against the current CIBC Asset Management fact sheet before making decisions. This is not financial advice.