MPLY
Monopoly ETF
stockBATSETF

The best argument for you to continue to use index funds is that if you knew how to pick what companies were going to outperform, or if you had the skill to identify the manager/strategy that could through active ETF like (MPLY)…you wouldn’t be on Reddit asking strangers.

Sorry, I think you may be confused. MPLY beat the S&P 500 by a couple hundred basis points the past year. It didn't exist 5 years ago, so obviously the 5 year return isn't terrible, it doesn't exist.

while the concept is compelling, in practice, MPLY seems to concentrate the usual suspects using market cap weighting, so we end up currently with about half technology, 1/4 semiconductors. about 50% currently consists of GOOG, NVDA, AAPL, MSFT, AMZN, TSM, AVGO. this seems unremarkable for a 0.79% expense ratio.

I think it becomes diworsification when you stop adding new exposures and start adding new wrappers around the same exposures. Owning the whole market is boring on purpose because it admits you probably will not identify tomorrow's winners consistently. The cleanest argument against something like MPLY is not that dominant businesses are bad, it is that concentration means you need to be right about today's moat still mattering 10 or 20 years from now.

Longtime ETF investor here and I’m genuinely curious how people on this sub think about this. The older I get, the more I wonder if broad index investing has become a little… intellectually lazy? Not saying it’s bad obviously it works for most people but owning 500 companies means you’re automatically owning a ton of businesses you probably think aren't good companies. Meanwhile, it feels like the biggest wealth creation in the market keeps coming from a relatively small number of dominant companies with massive moats, pricing power, network effects, etc. That led me down a rabbit hole into more concentrated ETFs and I stumbled across the Monopoly ETF (ticker MPLY). The premise is basically owning companies that control the their industry instead of just buying the whole market. I’m not endorsing it, trying to pressure test the idea before I buy anything. So I’m curious: If you had a 20+ year horizon, would you rather own: * the entire market, including mediocre companies, or * a smaller basket of dominant businesses with monopoly/oligopoly characteristics? And what’s the best argumen*t* against a strategy like MPLY from an ETF construction standpoint? Interested to hear both sides because I can see valid arguments either way.