In one of my recent articles,¹ I mentioned that a serious all-ETF portfolio needed to have at least one fund focused on U.S. large-caps. Which one? As of this writing, there are 121 ETFs that direct their attention to large-cap holdings, many focusing on the S&P 500, the Russell 1000 or any of the variants of those two basic indices.²

Is there a fund that could be said to be, in some meaningful sense, better than the others? Or, at least, is there some identifiable group of funds that seems to be – again, in some sense – better, from amongst which one could choose with a bit of confidence?

I propose to do a long-term project involving the comparison of large-cap ETFs. My goal will be to identify funds that have promise, while at the same time identifying funds that might not be as tempting as others. Each article will be restricted to a handful of funds that have something in common (issuer, index, methodology, weighting, etc.); over the course of the project, no doubt some funds will show up more than once.

In the end, it is not my expectation that there be one special fund that I hold up as the “winner,” but that readers will have some cogent discussions that may help separate the wheat from the chaff. Hopefully, there will be some surprises along the way just to keep things interesting.

Along the way, I hope to develop some tools that will help in examining the group of large caps, and possibly help shed some light on other classes of funds, as well.³ The articles are intended, and expected, to be independent from one another, so readers need not feel that they have to commit to the whole series.⁴

The Guggenheim Large-Cap Funds

Guggenheim Funds Distributors, LLC currently offers five ETFs that focus on U.S. large caps: