“Vanguard Dividend Growth Fund seeks above-average current income and long-term growth of capital and income. The advisor, Wellington Management Company LLP, invests in a diversified array of stable, well-managed companies that have a history of or a potential for growing dividends over time. Valuation is key to security selection, with the advisor preferring stocks that trade at a discount to the market or that possess an attractive risk/reward profile.”
Expense ratio = 0.33% and Net Assets $31.6 billion as of 04/30/2017. So annual fees amount to $104.3 million. Fund is closed to new investors.
We at iMarketSignals have been tracking this fund since July 2014, almost 3 years now. The fund typically holds about 50 stocks and we have all the historic holdings over this period which Vanguard releases about every 3 months. To my surprise I found today that the March-31-2017 holdings are exactly the same as the Dec-31-2016 holdings. So it would appear as if the fund manager has run out of ideas for the time being, and no valuable stock choices have been made over the last 3 months, despite being paid $26.1 million in fees over this period.
The Best10(VDIGX) Trader uses as universe the periodically updated holdings of VDIGX, is rebalanced every 2 weeks to select the highest 10 ranked stocks, and slippage is set at 0.1%. So far, thanks to Portfolio 123, our model has out performed VDIGX and SPY by far.
The model’s out of sample performance YTD is 10.5%, and for the last 12 months is 24.8%. Over the same period the benchmark SPY performance was 7.7% and 18.9%, respectively. Since inception, on 7/1/2014, the model gained 61.04% while the benchmark SPY gained 29.46% and VDIGX gained 26.66% over the same period. Trading is moderate. Avg Days Held= 126.
This demonstrates that it is fairly easy to outperform a fund using a simple ranking system on P123. Also the Best10(VDIGX) holds over 20% of all the stock positions of VDIGX, indicating that our model holds a good spread of all the fund’s stocks.
