I don't see RSP mentioned much. It's an equal weighted S&P 500 fund. Its pretty much similar to every other S&P 500 index fund except it provides equal weighting to each of its underlying companies as opposed to owning more and more of larger and larger companies. Since it doesn't focus on market cap weighting (unlike say SPY or VOO) it has less exposure to the highs and lows of an individual company; yet since it's the S&P 500 nevertheless, it will still hold the largest companies in the country. When you think about it, market cap weighting is kind of weird since the S&P 500 by definition is already composed of the biggest companies in the US to begin with.
Backtested to its inception in 2003, it outperforms SPY… not by much, but it does to my surprise. The expense ratio is double, at 0.20%, but that's still quite low even in the world of low cost funds so I would consider that negligible. During the recent years when tech exploded, it underperformed SPY… but is back on track to cover that gap since it is only down 9.60% this year as opposed to SPY being down 13.69% this year. That's a pretty big performance gap in funds that are really similar and can be explained by its approach. Of course if one sector booms, it will have a bit less exposure to that boom by the same token.
If you're wanting a big, no frills index fund that is less reliant on one particular sector doing really well or really poorly, this might be for you. It also has more exposure to some sectors that SPY barely touches, like real estate. To me it looks more suitable to very long term holding than SPY does since you never know where the economy will go decade by decade–in 20 years the biggest market caps could belong to energy companies for all we know. My only personal desire would be for it to sport a higher dividend yield since I would have figured it'd hold more of dividend companies and less of non-dividend companies, but it doesn't since that's simply what's in the S&P 500.
I remember I had posted about this fund in either 2020 or 2021 and someone on Reddit had laughed at it because tech was leading SPY to the skies and every other sector was doomed to bankruptcy. Well, it works both ways…
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