It’s not that often an ETF launch causes so much buzz, but my usual feeds are all talking about Avantis CIBC CAGE. So what is it? Per its fact sheet it

Invests primarily in equity securities from developed and emerging markets through a portfolio of ETFs. The fund selects companies based on value and profitability characteristics, using a broad set of company financial fundamentals such as book value, earnings, and cash flow, together with current market prices. Designed to provide diversified global equity exposure in a single investment option.

https://www.cibc.com/content/dam/cibc-public-assets/personal-banking/investment/etfs/pdfs/cibc-fund-snapshot-cage-en.pdf

So let’s break that down:

“Invests primarily in equity securities…through a portfolio of ETFs”

Translation: CAGE is a fund of funds that’s 100% equity. Sounds a lot like XEQT/ZEQT/TEQT/VEQT. Looking a little deeper, it holds

• CAUS: A US Equity ETF
• CACE: A Canadian Equity ETF
• CADE: An International Equity ETF
• CASV: A Global Small Cap ETF
• CAEM: An Emerging Equity ETF

Seems pretty normal so far.

“The fund selects companies based on value and profitability…using financial fundamentals”

Translation: This isn’t an index fund. CAGE is picking which companies to invest in based on balance sheet metrics. This starts to sound like a typical managed fund that typically underperforms the index it’s supposed to be measured against¹.

I’m skeptical. Index (aka passive) investing has proven that it works over time.

What’s inside CAGE?

So, let’s see what’s actually inside this fund and compare it to XEQT². As it turns out, this isn’t easy. Figuring out what’s inside CAGE requires you to navigate to each of CAGE’s holdings and look at what’s there. Irritating, but that’s not the worst of it — the constituent funds only show top 10 holdings each. That leads to a tremendous blind spot as to what you’re actually purchasing when you buy shares of CAGE. I hope CIBC fixes this, and soon. Anyway, I took XEQT’s top 10 and compared it to CAGE’s allocation.

Company	XEQT Holding (%)	CAGE Holding (%)
NVIDIA	3.07%	1.89%
Apple	2.52%	1.88%
Microsoft	1.92%	1.45%
Royal Bank	1.81%	1.88%
Amazon	1.64%	1.51%
Alphabet Class A	1.42%	0.96%
TD Bank	1.30%	1.44%
Broadcom	1.25%	<1%3
Alphabet Class C	1.13%	0.77%
Shopify	1.07%	0.99%
Total ex Broadcom	15.88%	12.77%

What’s immediately obvious is that CAGE doesn’t place as much money in the trillion dollar market cap companies as XEQT does.

A more interesting (?) exercise might be to take a look at CAGE’s top holdings as compared to that of XEQT.

Company	CAGE Holding (%) / Rank	XEQT Holding (%)/ Rank
NVIDIA	1.89% / 1	3.07% / 1
Apple	1.88% / 2	2.52% /2
Royal Bank	1.88% / 3	1.81% /4
Amazon	1.51% /4	1.64% /5
Microsoft	1.45% /5	1.92% /3
TD Bank	1.44% /6	1.30% /7
Shopify	0.99% /7	1.07% /10
Alphabet Class A	0.96% /8	1.42% / 6
Canadian National Resources	0.91% /9	0.72% / 16
CIBC	0.86% /10	0.75% /14
Total	14.56%	17.00%

And again, not too much of interest here — CAGE holds less of the trillion dollar companies than XEQT, but the differences aren’t massive.

High level metrics

Well, since we can’t get a good feel on what’s inside CAGE, maybe looking at other vital signs are helpful?

Metric	CAGE	XEQT
MER	0.28%4	0.20%
Number of underlying holdings	69265	8475
Dividend Yield	2.18%6	0.82%7
Target allocations8	US Equity: 39.4% Canadian Equity: 30% International Equity: 17.6% Global Small Cap Equity: 8%9 Emerging Equity: 5%	US Equity: 45% Canadian Equity: 25% International Equity: 25% Emerging Equity: 5%

This shows that CAGE is more expensive, holds fewer underlying stocks (we think), has a higher dividend yield (unsurprising, given its focus) and invests more in Canada than XEQT at the expense of International Equity¹⁰.

Performance

Comparing performance isn’t going to be very useful since CAGE is new, but CAGE inherits its strategy from an older US-based fund, namely AVGE. Now, to be clear, AVGE and CAGE aren’t quite the same thing. CAGE, as a Canadian fund, will tilt more to Canadian Equity holdings. But the approach used by AVGE and CAGE is the same: find quality companies and invest in them, wherever they are. So to me, comparing AVGE to its benchmark, the MSCI all-country investable market index, is a fair comparison. That index can be purchased by buying ACWI, an ETF that I’ve never heard of. I have heard of VT, so I’ll throw that into the mix since that seems to be a similar idea. Here’s what https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/¹¹ had to say about that:

AVGE doesn’t have a hugely long track record either (less than 4 years in existence) but, regrettably, it’s coming up on the short end of the stick as compared to the passive index funds. Not by a lot, though.

My take

Buzz or no, I don’t think this product is for me. I buy passively managed ETFs, for the most part¹². The lack of transparency on CAGE’s holdings is irritating (I am hoping/assuming that CIBC will fix this) and there’s nothing about the performance of its US sister that leaves me with FOMO. I’ll stick with The magnificent seven ETFs for now.

1. Canada’s own CPP fund is, sadly, one of those ↩︎
2. As of April 30, 2026 for both. I note that XEQT provides daily updates on one screen to see what’s inside. For CAGE, you have to resort to spreadsheets. ↩︎
3. The constituent ETFs of CAGE only show top 10 holdings; Broadcom doesn’t crack the top 10 of CAUS which is 40.13% of CAGE. ↩︎
4. Per https://usegreenline.com/en-ca/articles/cage-etf-explained. ↩︎
5. 1782 for CAUS per https://www.investing.com/etfs/caus-toronto-holdings, 299 for CACE per https://www.investing.com/etfs/cace-toronto-holdings, 2403 for CADE per https://www.etfrc.com/CADE.TO, 1316 for CASV per https://www.investing.com/etfs/casv-toronto-holdings, 1126 for CAEM per https://ca.investing.com/etfs/caem-toronto-holdings for a total of 6926. For reasons unclear, CIBC doesn’t seem to think it’s worthy of them to publish this information themselves. ↩︎
6. As of end April 2026, the latest thing published ↩︎
7. As of end May 2026. ↩︎
8. For CAGE, refer to https://www.cibc.com/content/dam/cibc-public-assets/personal-banking/investment/etfs/pdfs/cibc-fund-snapshot-cage-en.pdf. For XEQT, refer to https://www.blackrock.com/ca/investors/en/literature/product-brief/core-etf-portfolios-product-brief.pdf ↩︎
9. 60% is US Equity, 4% is Canadian Equity per https://www.cibc.com/en/personal-banking/investments/etfs/avantis-global-small-cap-value-etf.html ↩︎
10. XEQT is a bit of an outlier here; read Are my portfolio’s asset allocation targets “correct”? ↩︎
11. It seems that my formerly preferred tool has gone to a registration process; I’ll have to revisit Tools I Use I guess… ↩︎
12. Bond funds are often actively managed. ↩︎