Hello there,

I hope to get more into some actual fundamental analysis once I finish up with uni and figure out my life, however, I would like to posit the following:

I understand that not many of the StrawPeople would necessarily hold an ETF, but the VAS has become somewhat of a core holding in RL. I do live in Australia and, despite that bias, I reckon we have a lot to love with our natural wealth and rule of law. The following is not a question about ETFs in general, but more about if anyone has found a way to allocate capital to Australia without necessarily taking on the risk of the resources and financials sector - which I understand is ironically also a great source of the indexes returns.

That being said, I have in recent times found it difficult to allocate a lot of capital to something like an ASX200 considering the weighting to banks and miners. I know both Andrew (@Strawman) and Scott on MFM have gone on long about this dilemma and the notion of picking a small cap Aussie ETF.

Personally, I’ve considered the options and decided to just go with the old VAS, because a reweighted ETF might lose its winners, etc. However, I wonder if I have neglected any potential alternatives.

Realistically, I am just wondering if anyone has had success (or decided to start using) a different approach…. Whether they have tried a small cap ETF that gets reweighted or an ETF that simply excludes the CBAs and BHPs to try and juice extra returns?

I suppose, I love where I live, I think it’s a great market with a lot of interesting and relative “safe” opportunities. I hate that investing in a basket of Australia also involves the risk associated with the banking and/or commodities sector when they start to slump, then I suffer greatly. At the same time, these reliable industries are what might make Australia such an appealing location to invest…

I suppose, I’ll likely just stick to dumping into the whole of Australia, but would love to know if anyone has actually had success with an alternative diversified ETF that has both the exposure to Australia without the banking and resources risks. Wishful thinking I’m sure…

thank you