BNDW: The Vanguard Total World Bond Exchange Traded Fund

In prior blogs, I suggested that a useful way to implement a World Bond Stock (WBS) fund would be to invest in two Vanguard exchange traded funds – VT (the Total World Stock ETF) and BNDW (The Total World Bond ETF), with the proportions reset periodically based on information from the FTSE Adaptive Asset Asset Allocation calculator website. I discussed the FTSE site in a September post and VT in an October post. This post deals with BNDW.


The Vanguard site provided the following information for BNDW at the end of September 2019:

But how could Vanguard have covered 15,029 bonds with only 172.9 million dollars? The answer is given in an accompanying table:

Aha! The fund actually holds shares in only two securities – each of which is itself a Vanguard ETF. They are: the Total International Bond ETF (BNDX) and the Total (U.S.) Bond Market ETF (BND). At the end of October 2019, each had significantly more assets than BNDW, as the table below shows.

Note that the total value of BNDW shares is by far the lowest (in the $Millions, not $Billions). This presents an investor interested in world bonds with a dilemma. The easiest course would be to invest in BNDW, letting Vanguard worry about covering both U.S. and non-U.S. Bonds in market proportions. But it would be cheaper to invest in BND and BNDX. Of course one would then need to periodically adjust the proportions invested to reflect relative market values of U.S. and non-U.S. Bonds. This could be done using the proportions of the two ETFs in the most recent BNDW monthly report with adjustments for changes in their values since that date. Such a strategy would also cost less, since roughly half the assets would incur an expense ratio of 0.09%, and the rest only 0.04% for a total of approximately 0.065%. Of course it is entirely possible that assets in BNDW will grow and that Vanguard will then lower its expense ratio. But at present, a home-made BNDW using shares of BNDX and BND would cost less than BNDW itself.

[ Update: On Oct. 30 (after the above was written and published) the Vanguard website showed that the expense ratio for BND had fallen to 0.035%, the others remained the same. ]



This is not all. At present, BND and BNDX shares are considerably more liquid than those of BNDW. The table below, from October 28^th 2019, shows the average daily volume traded over the previous 45 trading days and the average spread during that period between the highest bid price and the lowest ask price.

A portfolio that includes BND and BNDX will incur lower expenses and lower likely trading costs than one that includes only BNDW. But BNDW simplifies the investor's life, since Vanguard takes care of any rebalancing required to keep the proportions of U.S. and non-U.S. Bonds similar to those in the indices representing the bond markets. You pay your money and take your choice.



Practical investors may well choose to hold a three-ETF (BND, BNDX and VT) proxy for the world bond/stock (WBS) portfolio. But for research purposes, it is easier to use the slightly more expensive two-ETF (BNDW and VT) proxy. Henceforth, I will generally do just this.



Now back to the analysis of BNDW. Here is Vanguard's breakdown of the bonds in its two component ETFs at the end of September, 2019:

And the top ten holdings by country:

For bond aficionados, here are some key characteristics of the bonds held:

With bonds as with stocks, United States securities constitute by far the largest proportion of world portfolios. For stocks, the U.S. percentage is somewhat over 50%; for bonds it is somewhat under 50%. But there are many companies, industries and securities outside the United States. To hold a piece of the world bond/stock portfolio, one needs U.S. and non-U.S. Securities. VT and BNDW can provide both.

VT: The Vanguard Total World Stock Exchange Traded Fund

In the prior post, I suggested using Vanguard's Total World Stock Exchange Traded Fund for the equity portion of a World Bond Stock (WBS) fund. Following industry practice, henceforth I'll refer to it using its ticker symbol: VT.

As described earlier, VT attempts to track the performance of the FTSE Global All Cap Index which “... covers both established and still-developing markets.” The home page of the Vanguard website provides a search box in the upper right corner. Typing VT in it will provide considerable information about the fund at the end of the prior month. For example, here is a regional breakdown of the holdings at the end of August 2019:



Some of the fund's characteristics at the time were:

And the ten largest holdings were:

Interestingly, 9 of the 10 largest holdings were in stocks of firms headquartered in the United States (but doing business in many parts of the world). Moreover, stocks of firms based in North America constituted almost 60% of the total value of the index. A subsequent breakdown by country showed that of these, at of the end of August 2019 stocks of U.S. companies constituted 55.8% of the total value.





The ETF's prospectus (available at the Vanguard web site) indicates that the FTSE Global All Cap index “..includes ... companies located in 47 countries, including both developed and emerging markets. The fund invests in a broadly diversified sampling of stocks in the index that approximates the index’s key risk factors and characteristics.”


The web site indicated that as of August 31, 2019 the FTSE index had 8,881 stocks while the fund had 8,192. It also showed that the Beta value for the fund relative to the index (rounded to two decimal places) was 1.00, indicating that on average, a given percentage move in the index was accompanied by a similar percentage move in the value of the fund. The rounded R-squared value was also 1.00, indicating that percentage changes in the values of the index were associated with similar percentage changes in the value of the fund.


As of August 31, 2019 the web site showed the following:


Fund total net assets $ 16.6 billion
Share class total net assets $ 11.7 billion


This is a key piece of information. It indicates that the ETF VT shares are only one class of claims on a fund of some sort. Thus there must be one or more other share classes. In this case there are two others. One can invest in “admiral class” shares of VTWAX – a mutual fund with the same asset holdings, or “institutional class” shares of VTWIX, another mutual fund which also has the same asset holdings.

(Note: I inferred the total value of VTWIX shares at the time from the reported values of the other two classes and the reported total net assets of $16.1 billion.)


But which of these three to choose? Most retirees choosing to invest in a total world stock fund will be have less than $5 million for the purpose, so VTWIX is not a possible alternative. However, if more than $3,000 is available to invest, either VT or VTWAX could be chosen. Both have low expense ratios, but VT is slightly cheaper. And, as the table shows, at the time it was clearly the more popular of the two share classes.



The Vanguard web site provides information useful for those choosing between investing in an ETF using the Vanguard brokerage platform and investing instead in a similar Vanguard mutual fund. It points out that the minimum investment in an ETF is the cost of one share, while Vanguard mutual funds generally require at least $3,000 in holdings. Moreover, an ETF can be purchased or sold at various prices during trading hours using market orders "or more sophisticated approaches” while for mutual fund shares “Regardless of what time of day you place your order, you'll get the same price as everyone else who bought and sold that day (and) that price isn't calculated until after the trading day is over.” However, there could be a downside: “if you want to repeat specific transactions automatically an ETF wouldn't be a suitable investment (since) You can't make make automatic investments or withdrawals into or out of ETFs.”



The Vanguard site doesn't cover issues associated with the liquidity of the market for ETFs. Information on this (and much else) is available on the etf.com website. While markets are open, you can find current bid and ask prices and associated volumes. Here, for example, is information from etf.com on October 1, 2019, showing real-time quotes for VT from the Chicago Board Options Exchange. 

As can be seen, at the time there was considerable liquidity for those wishing to buy or sell shares at the “market price”. Alternatively, of course, one can place a limit order that will execute only at a stated price or better.


The ETF.com site also provides historic information on premiums and discounts – the amounts by which “... the market price exceeded (premium) and fell below (discount) its fair value/net asset value (NAV)”. Here are some historic values for VT, with the associated daily volumes of shares traded

At least during this period, disparities between share prices and net asset values were relatively small. There is a reason why this should be the case. A key feature of the ETF form of an index fund is the ability of an “Authorized Participant” to exchange shares of underlying securities for one or more “creation units” of the fund's shares. The ETF.COM site defines such a unit as “The smallest block of ETF shares that an Authorized Participant can either create or redeem at Net Asset Value (NAV) with the issuer in exchange for the underlying shares of the fund”. For VT, the size of a creation unit is 200,000 of the fund's shares, while the fee is 0.07%. The presumption is that any significant deviation of an ETF's share price from the net asset value of its holdings will cause an Authorized Participant to spring into action, reducing or eliminating the disparity.


Some people argue that mutual funds are for investors and ETFs for gamblers. It is certainly the case that many of the thousands of ETFs appear to have been designed for those who wish to bet that certain types of securities are periodically overpriced or underpriced. And some may well use this ETF to try to try profit from possible market mistakes. But it would seem that either VT or VTWAX could provide an efficient and relatively low-cost stock component of a two-instrument low-turnover world bond-stock fund. To obtain a slightly lower expense ratio and to be au courant, I'll use VT in posts that follow. But VTWAX could serve the purpose as well.

A Two-fund Proxy for the World Bond Stock Fund

In the preceding post, I updated the material in my ebook that showed how to use four mutual funds to approximate a fund including all traded risky stocks and bonds in the world. I also suggested that it might be easier to approximate such a “world bond stock fund” (WBS) with two traded instruments. This post shows how this can be done.


Vanguard offers a number of exchange traded fund (ETFs) which invest in various types of bonds and stocks. The two of interest for our purposes are:

The Vanguard Total World Stock ETF (ticker symbol: VT)
The Vanguard Total World Bond ETF (ticker symbol: BNDW).

Following convention, I'll refer to them henceforth using ticker symbols.

I'll have more to say about ETFs in general and the particular approach utilized by BNDW. But first, let's consider the investments included in the funds and a way to determine the appropriate amounts to invest in each.

Here are the product summaries from the Vanguard website:

VT

• Invests in both foreign and U.S. stocks.
  
• Seeks to track the performance of the FTSE Global All Cap Index, which covers both well-established and still-developing markets.
  
• Has high potential for growth, but also high risk; share value may swing up and down more than U.S. or international stock funds.
  
• Only appropriate for long-term goals.

BNDW

• Seeks to track the performance of the Bloomberg Barclays Global Aggregate Float Adjusted Composite Index.
  
• Broad, diversified exposure to the global investment-grade bond market.
  
• Unique ETF of ETFs structure.
  
• Intermediate-duration portfolio, with exposure to short-, intermediate-, and long-term maturities.
  
• Provides current income with high credit quality.
  

While these may not be perfect representatives for the overall world bond-stock market, they should provide a reasonable approximation. But how much to invest in each one? The market capitalization for the stocks covered by the FTSE Global All Cap Index can easily be found online. The fact sheet for the end of August 2019 showed a total value of $51,447,853 Million (roughly 51.5 Trillion US Dollars). But values for the bonds in Bloomberg Barclays indices are not available to the general public.

Not to worry. FTSE Russell graciously provides and maintains an Adaptive Asset Allocation Policy Calculator that allows investors or advisors to back-test and update strategies that adapt asset allocations to market proportions, using an approach that I presented in a paper published in the May/June 2010 issue of the Financial Analysts Journal.

For an investor wishing to hold market proportions of bonds and stocks, the approach simplifies to simply adjusting proportions of bond and stock holdings periodically as needed to approximate those of the market as a whole. Moreover, the FTSE AAAP site provides estimates of these proportions as of the last trading day of every month.

To access the site, go to: https://research.ftserussell.com/Analytics/AAAP/Home/Index. You will arrive at the home page for the calculator. The upper-left portion of the page looks like this:

Simply click the text “Calculator” to the right of the “Home” tab to obtain the page for the calculator. The top left-hand portion should look like this:

If the region shown is not Global , click the nearby arrows until it appears.

The text at the bottom of this section indicates the market capitalization proportions of global (world) equity and bonds at the end of the month shown as the current month. This information is generally updated from 7 to 10 days after the end of the each month.

To get a more precise indication of the bond and stock proportions, look at the graph to the right of this first bar. Initially, it will look like this:

The policy weights can be ignored – our interest is in the equity and bond market weights (the black and grey curves). As can be seen, these have varied substantially over the period covered (from December 2002 to the end of the prior month).

To obtain more detailed information, you can simply move your mouse to the diagram to obtain a dashed vertical grey line, then move it to any desired month . For our purposes, the final month (on the far right) is germane. Here is the diagram for the end of August, 2019:

The most recent proportions are shown at the upper right of the graph. In this case FTSE estimated that at the end of August 2019 equities consituted 47.699% of the market and bonds 53.301%.

FTSE makes these functions of the AAAP Calculator available without registration. Those who wish to analyze policies involving combinations of stocks and bonds other than those of the market as a whole need to register to obtain the full functionality of the adaptive asset allocation approach. But this is not needed for our purposes.

Once the proportions of world bonds and stocks at the end of the preceding month have been obtained it is straightforward to calculate the number of shares of one of the two ETFs that need to be sold and the number of shares of the other that need to be purchased in order to bring the portfolio proportions of bonds and stocks close to estimated current proportions.

The google spreadsheet below does the job. The values in green are required inputs, those in black are computed by the spreadsheet, and those in red indicate the number of shares of one ETF to purchase and the number of the other to sell as well as the associated estimated values. The information in column E indicates the sources of inputs (in green) and the computations utilized by the spreadsheet (in black). When constructing your own spreadsheet you will need to enter formulas in columns C and D for the rows in which there is a formula in black in column E.  Once you have done this you can just type in current values for the items in green for your portfolio and click “run” to obtain the appropriate values for the numbers in red.

Due to the need to trade in integer numbers of shares the proceeds proceeds generated from the sale of shares of one of the etf's is designed to exceed the cost of the shares of the other etf. However, if execution prices differ significantly from the prices input in line 4, this may not be the case. In any event, the total value of the holdings of the two assets is likely to change only slightly.

There is little reason to make frequent changes in holdings of the two funds. The majority of the changes in their relative values will result from changes in the prices of assets already held rather than new issues, redemptions, dividends, interest payments and the like. It should suffice to check the relative values of your holdings against those shown in the AAAP calculator every month or so, changing your portfolio holdings only when the differences are substantial.

The Four-fund Proxy for the World Bond Stock Fund

Chapter 7 of my ebook on retirement income suggests the use of a portfolio of four Vanguard mutual funds to serve as a proxy for the “World Bond Stock Fund”, which can serve as the “market portfolio” in analyses using the RISMAT software. This post will update the information needed for this approach. However, times have changed. It is now possible to approximate the world bond stock fund with only two funds. The next post will discuss this. Feel free to wait for it.

Now to the four-fund approach. The ticker symbols and names of the funds are:

VBTLX  Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund (admiral shares)

VTABX Vanguard Total International Bond Index Fund (admiral shares)

VTSAX Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund (admiral shares)

VFWAX Vanguard FTSE All-World ex-US Index Fund (admiral shares)

In each case, the shares are of the "admiral" class which provide the same gross returns but with lower fees than the "investor class" shares of the same fund. At the time the chapter was written in 2015, the minimum investment for admiral shares in each of the funds was $10,000. However, this has fallen as the funds have attracted more assets. As of this post in 2019, one can obtain admiral shares for any one of these funds for an investment of $3,000 or more.

The first and third funds invest in securities of United States companies, while the second and fourth hold only securities of companies based in other countries. In the mutual fund industry the term “international” generally means “non-U.S.” but I prefer to use the latter term for clarity. Funds that hold securities of U.S. and non-U.S. Companies are generally called “Global” – a convention that I will follow.

A fund's expense ratio indicates the proportion of one's investment that is dedicated to cover the expenses of fund management. It is generally expressed as an annual percent of value. Over the course of potentially many years in retirement such expenses, if high, can significantly affect one's standard of living. Here is a table from Chapter 7 of the ebook showing the funds and their expense ratios in 2015:

	U.S.	Non-U.S.
Bonds	VBTLX: 0.06% per year	VTABX: 0.14% per year
Stocks	VTSAX: 0.05% per year	VFWAX: 0.13% per year

And here are the expense ratios today:

	U.S.	Non-U.S.
Bonds	VBTLX: 0.05% per year	VTABX: 0.11% per year
Stocks	VTSAX: 0.04% per year	VFWAX: 0.11%  per year

 

Happily, all the expense ratios have decreased, presumably due to the increased assets under management allowing fixed costs to be spread over larger pools of money.

In the ebook I suggested that the world bond/stock fund be proxied by a combination of these four funds, using the relative market values of the underlying securities in each of the four component sectors. But where to fund such values? Ideally, for each fund we would find the market capitalization at some recent date of the index being tracked, then adjust the holdings of the four funds so that their relative values would have equaled those of the corresponding indices at that date.

Here are the values of indices tracked by the four funds in 2015:

VBTLX:
 Barclays U.S. Aggregate Float Adjusted Index

VTABX:
Barclays Global Aggregate ex-USD Float Adjusted Regulated Investment Company Index Currency Hedged

VTSAX:
The Center for Research in Security Prices U.S. Total Stock Market Index

VFWAX:
FTSE All-World ex U.S. Index

In 2019 the funds tracked were similar, although the names of the indices tracked by VBTLX and VTABX had been changed to reflect their acquisition by Bloomberg. Moreover, small changes had been made in their composition. The current names are:

VBTLX:
 Bloomberg Barclays U.S. Aggregate Float Adjusted Index

VTABX:
Bloomberg Barclays Global Aggregate ex-USD Float Adjusted RIC Capped Index (USD Hedged).


At the time the book was written, Barclays bond index values were not available to the public at large, so I proposed using capitalization values from relatively similar funds provided by Citibank:

VBTLX:
Citibank U.S. Broad Investment Grade Bond Index (USBIG)

VTABX:
Citibank World Investment Grade Bond Index (worldBIG) minus the value of the USBIG index.

Fact sheets for the Bloomberg Barclays bond indices are still not publicly available. The Citibank indices are now provided by FTSE, which does make fact sheets with capitalization values available to the general public.

Here are ways to find the fact sheets for the four indices. The search texts given will generally work but you might need to choose from multiple provided links. In most cases the desired fact sheet will appear in your browser, but a downloadable pdf file may be provided instead. As always with information on the web, things may change and some extra effort may be needed.

U.S. Bonds
    Search for: FTSE USBIG fact sheet

Global Bonds
     Search for: FTSE WorldBIG fact sheet

U.S. Stocks
     Search for: CRSP U.S. market fact sheet

Non-U.S. Stocks
      Search for: FTSE all world ex US fact sheet

The FTSE fact sheets provide market capitalizations as of the end of the most recent month but CRSP capitalization values are provided only as of the end of the most recent quarter.

Once you have index market capitalizations for the end of the most recent quarter, you can update the desired values for the four funds using the approach given in the ebook for estimating current market values or, if you have access to the MATLAB language, the program given in chapter 7.

But instead you might want to use the two-fund approach. For this, see the next post.

Prior blogs

This blog was preceded by two others, neither of which will be updated in the future. However, each contains some information on retirement income analysis that may be of interest to readers of this blog.

The first contains posts from 2003 through 2013.
It can be found at: 

   LifetimeFinance.blogspot.com

The second contains posts from 2013 through 2017.
It can be found at:

     RetirementIncomeScenarios.blogspot.com