Video review — PensionCraft live with Toby Newbatt: the vanilla global all-cap and the 0.07% price war
Source: “Toby Newbatt & Ramin Nakisa — Live”, PensionCraft, streamed 20 August 2026, 1h 15m, ~23,500 views. https://www.youtube.com/live/SPS071QcpGE — reviewed 15 September 2026 from the full auto-generated transcript. Quotes are tidied from machine captions; timestamps are where each point starts.
1. The sixty-second version
Three things in this stream are worth keeping, and one thing is missing from it.
- A global all-cap index fund is the honest default. Both hosts put it the same way: own everything, at its market-capitalisation weight, and you have made no active decision at all. Toby Newbatt says his only holding in his own pension is a global all-cap fund, the higher-fee mutual-fund version (23:39).
- The price war is real and it is now very cheap. Vanguard has launched a global all-cap ETF at 0.07% a year — for 0.07% you get roughly 10,000 companies, developed and emerging, small caps included (22:03–23:13). A rival FTSE All-World tracker from Xtrackers is also at 0.07%, and Vanguard’s own long-established All-World ETF has been cut to 0.14%. “An all-world ETF for 0.07% is incredible.”
- Do not churn your portfolio for five basis points. The better advice in the stream is the calm bit: among funds this cheap, the fee is no longer the main thing — tracking difference, the bid-ask spread on the trade, and your own behaviour matter more (24:03–24:50).
What is missing: nobody mentions that the 0.07% fund is weeks old and small, that the fund fee is usually the smallest cost you pay (the platform charge is often several times larger), or that switching in a taxable account is a disposal. §4 covers those.
2. The tilt question — answered for exactly the sort of portfolio this is about
At 25:32 a viewer asks the most relevant question in the stream: for his 11-year-old son over 50 years, would they choose 100% global equity or 80/20 with a multi-factor tilt? Both hosts answer the same way, and the reasoning is the valuable part, not the verdict.
Toby Newbatt (25:55–28:33): keep it simple and hold the global equity fund. Factor investing has evidence behind it over long periods, “but you have to put up with knowing that it’s going to deviate a little bit from the market for a bit, and there’s no guarantee you’re going to outperform.” His test for tilting someone else’s money: “Think about the worst case. Are you going to feel really bad if in 20 years’ time it’s underperformed?” He also notes that promising to beat the market by “0.2% a year” may not be worth the mental effort of justifying it every time it stumbles.
Ramin Nakisa (26:28–27:25): he used to run factor funds — the Vanguard factor funds, before Vanguard closed them — and held value funds while they underperformed. He knew switching was the wrong response, “but I was so tempted, so every day was like torture watching this thing underperform.” His conclusion: with a plain global equity fund “you just don’t think about it — I never think I’m in the wrong thing.”
The definition that matters (27:25–28:10). Toby: “the vanilla default, where I own everything, is some kind of global index fund. If you own it at its market-cap weight, that’s about as true and passive as you can get… anything that deviates from that, then that’s an active decision.” In other words, the tilt question is not “is a tilt clever?” but “am I willing to be an active investor, and can I hold it through a bad decade?”
And if you tilt away from the US (12:49–14:30), you have two timing decisions, not one. Ramin: moving out of the US requires deciding when and whether to come back — “is there a magic signal you’re waiting for?” Toby’s worry is how much people tilt without realising the odds: “anytime you step away from a globally diversified market-cap-weighted portfolio, you’re becoming an active investor… the stats are against them.” Note also Ramin’s own sizing: he does his tilts only inside a side portfolio that is 10% of his investments (14:22).
3. The rest of the stream, briefly
| Where | What was said | Worth keeping? |
|---|---|---|
| 15:28–17:30 | The valuation scare: Shiller CAPE near record highs, the Buffett indicator, Magnificent Seven concentration, AI capital spending. Their verdict: these are valuation tools, not timing signals — “they can tell you what the returns will be like for the next 10 years, but how useful is that?” Comparing today’s P/E ratios with those of 100 years ago is “pointless… it’s a different set of companies.” | Yes — the direct answer to “should concentration worry me?” is that it is a reason to diversify, not a reason to trade |
| 22:03–25:12 | The Vanguard launch: global all-cap 0.07%, global small cap 0.22%, FTSE All-World ex-US 0.12%; “Vanguard… just filled in all the vanilla stuff”; “Vanguard are like the Apple of the world” — not first to market but they arrive with the name. US market has zero-fee funds and “an ETF for everything, which is good and bad” (10x leveraged single stocks: “madness”) | Yes — the fee floor has moved permanently |
| 29:52–31:19 | The most widely repeated advice they think is oversimplified: start early, save as much as you can, credited to Ben Felix and the Rational Reminder podcast. In your twenties, spending an extra £1,000 on a nicer flat in a better area — which might lead to a better job — can beat saving it while “eating super noodles every night” | Yes, especially for a young investor — it is an argument for a pre-funded spending reserve, not for investing every penny |
| 57:30–59:40 | Could index funds break price discovery? — i.e. if everyone indexes, who sets prices? Their answer: markets find an equilibrium, “someone has to sell you a share anyway”, and active management will persist because “it pays so well to be an active manager”. Fundamental and value indices are “pseudo-passive” filters that can do some of that work | Mildly — a good rebuttal to the “passive has broken the market” argument |
| 1:02:39–1:03:50 | Terry Smith’s Fundsmith letter, read out: the market is “dominated by so-called passive or index funds” and AI momentum “rather than any fundamental factors like profitability, returns on capital and growth” — the factors he picks on. The hosts’ reading: passive investing has broken his method, which is why he has underperformed cash over two years and global index funds over five | Yes as context — note the asymmetry: a fund that underperforms for five years has “broken” methodology; an index fund that lags for five years is simply “the market” |
4. My assessment (Alf)
The stream is right about the big thing and quiet about two small ones.
Right about the big thing. The most useful sentence in 75 minutes is not about fees — it is Toby’s “anything that deviates from market-cap weight is an active decision.” That reframing does more work than any argument about value versus growth, because it converts a vague preference (“I quite like the idea of value”) into a testable question (“am I an active investor, and can I hold this through a drought?”). Two experienced practitioners each independently arriving at “keep it simple, and I stopped worrying once I did” — one of them after running the factor funds themselves — is evidence worth more than a backtest.
Quiet about the switching costs. The discussion treats the choice as fee-versus-fee: 0.23% (the mutual fund) against 0.07% (the ETF). Three things go unmentioned, and all three decide whether switching is worth it:
- The bid-ask spread is a one-off cost, the fee is annual — so the honest comparison is break-even. On £100,000, eight basis points is £80 a year. A round-trip spread cost of about 0.10% is £100 — so the switch pays for itself in roughly fourteen months if the money is long-term money. Over 40 years at 7%, that 0.08% compounding is worth about £43,000 on a £100,000 pot. So: for new money, take the cheaper fund; for existing money, the case is real but modest, and it is a decision to make once, not to revisit every time a fund launches.
- The fund fee is rarely your biggest cost. A platform charging 0.25% a year costs more than three times the entire difference being argued over. Before switching funds to save five basis points, check what the wrapper costs — and check whether your platform even lists the new fund, and whether it charges to deal.
- Switching outside a tax wrapper is a disposal — a taxable event in a general account, and nothing at all inside an ISA or SIPP. The cost of the trade depends entirely on which pot the money is in.
Quiet about the newness. A fund three weeks old with a few hundred million in it is not the same asset as a €70bn incumbent: spreads are wider, the index-sampling is unproven in practice, and the tracking record does not exist yet. That does not make it a bad choice for a long-horizon investor, but “0.07%” is the quoted cost, not necessarily the achieved one. The mature all-world ETF at 0.14% is not expensive; it is priced for liquidity and a track record.
One thing the hosts understate. The “keep it simple” case is usually argued on returns. The stronger case is on behaviour: the failure mode being described — “every day was like torture watching this thing underperform” — is what actually costs money, and it is not measurable in a backtest. For money invested on a child’s behalf, with a 40-or-50-year horizon and an owner who may not be the person who chose it, that argues even harder for the plain default.
What I would take from it, in one line: the all-cap fund at 0.07% is a genuine improvement to the global default and a sensible home for new long-term money; the tilt advice is sound and confirms a rule worth writing down — no deviation from cap weight without a written reason, a size you can lose, and an owner who will still be there in ten years.
5. What I verified independently
| Claim in the stream | Status |
|---|---|
| New Vanguard global all-cap ETF at 0.07% | Confirmed. Vanguard FTSE Global All-Cap UCITS ETF, TER 0.07%, first traded 20 August 2026, tracking the FTSE Global All Cap Index — about 10,000 large-, mid- and small-cap companies across developed and emerging markets. Irish-domiciled, accumulating class ISIN IE000VAHT5T0; listed in GBP as VALL and USD as VALU on the LSE, VGLA on Xetra. A distributing class exists (IE000CVUM3N6) |
| Two sibling funds | Confirmed. FTSE Global Small-Cap UCITS ETF at 0.22% (IE0007TPRF31) and FTSE All-World ex-US UCITS ETF at 0.12% (IE0009A5ADV9) |
| “Xtrackers has come out with an All-World at 0.07%“ | Confirmed in substance. Xtrackers launched a rival FTSE All-World product at 0.07%, and Vanguard cut its own All-World ETF from 0.22% to 0.19% (October 2025) and then to 0.14% (July 2026) in response |
| Toby’s own pension holding is the all-cap mutual fund at 0.22–0.23% | Consistent with Vanguard’s UK Global All Cap Index Fund (0.23%). Not independently verifiable — it is his own account |
| Comparative costs | State Street’s MSCI ACWI IMI ETF (all-cap) is 0.17%; Vanguard’s ESG Global All Cap is 0.24%; the US-listed Vanguard Total World Stock ETF is 0.06% |
Sources: Vanguard launch and fund documentation, fund pages and independent ETF write-ups, read 15 September 2026. All fees quoted are the ongoing charge / TER, which excludes platform, dealing and FX costs.
6. Caveats, if this is republished
- The stream is a live question-and-answer format, not a researched report. Quotes above are cleaned up from automatic captions (the caption software repeatedly renders “Ramin” as “Robin”); timestamps are given so anything can be checked against the recording.
- PensionCraft’s channel carries affiliate links and sponsor offers, and sells coaching and a paid community. That does not make the points wrong — nothing here is a product pitch — but it should be disclosed.
- A 0.07% fund is not automatically the right fund for you. Fund fee is one of four costs (platform, dealing, FX, tax), and the newest and cheapest product is rarely the most liquid.
- Nothing here is personal financial advice, and nothing in it recommends buying or selling anything.
7. If you want to publish this
A short, standalone version — about 250 words:
A 0.07% global tracker changes the default, not the decision. On a recent PensionCraft live stream, Ramin Nakisa and guest Toby Newbatt spent a few minutes on Vanguard’s new FTSE Global All-Cap ETF, which costs 0.07% a year and holds roughly 10,000 companies — large, mid and small cap, developed and emerging markets — for a fee that a decade ago bought you only an S&P 500 tracker. Ramin’s verdict: “an all-world ETF for 0.07% is incredible.” Xtrackers has matched the price, and Vanguard’s long-standing All-World ETF now costs 0.14%. The more useful part of the conversation was what they said about tilting. Asked whether a child’s 50-year portfolio should be 100% global equity or carry a 20% factor tilt, both said keep it simple. Toby Newbatt’s definition is the one to remember: own everything at its market-cap weight and you have made no active decision; anything that deviates from that is an active decision. His test before tilting money on someone else’s behalf: “think about the worst case — are you going to feel really bad if in 20 years’ time it’s underperformed?” Two things the discussion left out. The fee is annual and the trading spread is one-off, so the honest comparison is break-even — on £100,000, an eight-basis-point saving is £80 a year, which repays a 0.10% round-trip in about fourteen months. And the fund fee is usually the smallest cost you pay: a 0.25% platform charge is more than three times the difference being argued about. Before switching funds to save five basis points, check the wrapper first.
8. Sources
| Source | What it verified |
|---|---|
| PensionCraft live stream (20 Aug 2026, 1h15m) — full auto-caption transcript | Every quote and timestamp in §2 and §3 |
| Vanguard FTSE Global All-Cap UCITS ETF — launch announcement and fund documentation | 0.07% TER, ~10,000 holdings, ISINs, tickers, first day of trading 20 Aug 2026 |
| Independent ETF write-ups and fee comparisons (Banker on Wheels via news coverage, VALL reviews, treasury-of-funds comparisons) | The Xtrackers 0.07% response; Vanguard All-World fee history (0.22 → 0.19 → 0.14%); State Street ACWI IMI at 0.17%; the ESG all-cap at 0.24%; sibling fund fees and ISINs |
| Toby Newbatt’s channel and third-party channel guides | Background: UK personal-finance creator, described as “calm, no-hype beginner investing” and “just buy the global tracker and stop fiddling” |
| Arithmetic in §4 (break-even, 40-year fee drag) | Computed in code from the stated fees at a 7% gross return: £100,000 at 0.15% vs 0.07% over 40 years = £1,415,732 vs £1,458,756 |
Change log
| Version | Date | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 1.0 | 15 Sep 2026 | Created. Full review of the 20 August 2026 PensionCraft live stream: the vanilla global all-cap default, the 0.07% fee war (Vanguard’s new all-cap ETF and Xtrackers’ response), the tilt question answered for a child’s 50-year portfolio, the two-timing-decision problem if you tilt away from the US, valuation scare-metrics as non-signals, and the active-versus-passive and price-discovery exchanges. Includes an independent fact-check of every product claim, the switching arithmetic the stream omits, a “what to take from it” line, and a 250-word version for publication. |