Summary: BMO has reduced fees on its family of asset-allocation ETFs (ZCON, ZBAL, ZGRO, ZEQT) to put its Management Expense Ratio (MER) in the same realm as competing families from GlobalX, iShares and TD.
If you’re a fan of all-in-one ETFs (as I am)1, then there is a new low-cost competitor2 to consider in BMO. BMO announced a reduction in their fees last week, and per Rob Carrick, it’s a win for everyone concerned. If you’re new to the idea of all-in-one ETFs (aka asset allocation ETFs), here’s a good place to start: https://moneyengineer.ca/2025/01/21/why-you-can-fire-your-advisor-asset-allocation-etfs/.
It’s probably worth taking a quick scan of the four lowest-cost families out there. Here’s the overview.
| Provider | Fund Symbols |
|---|---|
| TD3 | TEQT, TGRO,TBAL,TCON |
| BMO4 | ZEQT, ZGRO, ZBAL, ZCON |
| GlobalX5 | HEQT, HGRW, HBAL, HCON |
| iShares6 | XEQT, XGRO, XBAL, XCNS, XINC |
In my view, any of these families are worthy of your investment dollars. Which particular fund you pick within a family depends on your tolerance for volatility and/or your timeline for needing the money you’re investing. Each list of fund symbols in the table above is listed in order of amount of equity — so for TD, you can see that TEQT has the most equity (100%) whereas TCON has the least (40%). You might want to give https://moneyengineer.ca/2025/05/06/investment-basics-asset-allocation/ a read to get more familiar with the concepts.
- XGRO and XEQT are both members of the coveted “ETF All Stars” slot. ↩︎
- There are other all-in-one families (Vanguard, Fidelity, Mackenzie), the ones shown here are the least expensive of the lot at 0.20% MER or less. TD is the current winner of the lot with a rock-bottom 0.17% MER. ↩︎
- TEQT launched in April 2025. ↩︎
- There’s also an ESG asset allocation fund, ZESG. ↩︎
- There’s also a bunch of covered call variations that are of no interest to me. ↩︎
- iShares is the family I work within. I started with them over the others because they could be traded for free on my former provider (QTrade). My current provider (Questrade) allows free trading for any ETF. ↩︎
The Money Engineer 