After my article about Avantis came out the day before, a reader forwarded me this article in his deeper research on Avantis.

He specifically lifted this part of the performance:

Since inception, AVUS is marginally ahead of ITOT in total return (the is only 2.1% in 5 years), and it has underperformed the large cap benchmark SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) by 4.8%.

My reader then say “So one might have to be patient with this ETF and manage expectations.”

At first, I thought that AVUS really underperform badly.

So I took a look at what benchmark Avantis is using for the AVUS: The Russell 3000 index.

Then I wonder: “Why the hell is this author at Seeking Alpha using ITOT or SPY when he could have just use Russell 3000 index??”

So here is the performance of the AVUS (in orange