The Rational Reminder Podcast · Thursday, July 16, 2026
PWL's investment committee benchmarks nearly all of its holdings annually to ensure they are delivering on stated objectives, particularly for index funds where performance is compared to the benchmark index net of fees. A notable case involved a US equity index fund with significant tracking error due to its structure.
“So we benchmark them every year to answer whether they're delivering on their stated objectives. So for an index fund, that's pretty straightforward. It just means asking whether the index fund is capturing the index return net of fees and costs.”
“But we actually have picked there's one memorable case where there was a large well-known US equity index fund that had pretty meaningful tracking error and it ended up being related to the way that the fund had been structured and implemented.”