Written by Sam Kovacs
How should we measure stock market performance?
Vanguard's total market ETF (VTI) is an interesting beast. It is supposed to track the total US market, in a market cap weighted portfolio. Practically speaking, this means that the 1200 to 1300 largest names make up about 95% of the portfolio. That leaves over 2000 stocks which have to fight for the remaining 5%. In fact, the fund doesn't even bother buying all of these remaining shares, and contents itself in holding a "representative sample" of remaining stocks.
What this effectively