Ben Felix Model Portfolio
The Ben Felix Model Portfolio is a globally diversified, factor-tilted equity strategy developed by Ben Felix, Portfolio Manager and Chief Investment Officer at PWL Capital, and presented in his paper "Five Factor Investing with ETFs." The strategy builds on a standard global index portfolio by adding deliberate tilts toward small-cap and value stocks, with the goal of capturing return premiums that broad market-cap-weighted funds do not fully access.
Signals are available for a curated set of tactical portfolios. This portfolio is not currently covered.
See covered portfoliosarrow_forwardTarget Allocation
Performance Snapshot
Rolling Returns
| Period | Low | Average | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Year | -45.8% | +10.6% | +61.6% |
| 3 Year | -15.2% | +8.8% | +25.7% |
| 5 Year | -4.8% | +8.3% | +22.2% |
| 10 Year | -0.0% | +8.2% | +14.7% |
Growth of $10,000
Historical Drawdown
Percentage decline from the portfolio's peak value at each point in time.
Rolling Returns
Annualised return for each rolling period ending on that date.
Annualised return for each 1Y period ending on that date.
Investment Philosophy
The portfolio is grounded in the Fama-French Five-Factor Model, which identifies five independent sources of expected return: market beta, size, value, profitability, and investment. Felix's argument is that as global equity markets become increasingly correlated, geographic diversification alone provides diminishing benefits -- factor diversification offers a complementary and empirically supported way to broaden a portfolio's exposure to distinct return drivers. The core tradeoff Felix acknowledges explicitly is between simplicity and optimization: a plain global index fund is easier to hold, but a factor-tilted portfolio has a stronger theoretical and empirical case for higher expected returns over long horizons.
Who It's For
Best suited to long-term investors who are comfortable with the intellectual case for factor investing and willing to accept that factor premiums can underperform for extended periods. It requires conviction in the underlying research, since the strategy will periodically look wrong relative to a simpler market-cap index.
Pros
- Exposure to five independent return factors, providing diversification beyond geography alone
- Grounded in decades of peer-reviewed academic research, not a proprietary or backtested strategy
- The factor tilts are achieved with a small number of holdings, keeping implementation manageable
Cons
- Factor premiums are not guaranteed -- size and value have had multi-decade stretches of underperformance relative to the market
- Higher fund costs compared to plain market-cap index funds, which partially offset the theoretical return advantage
- Requires understanding and conviction in factor theory to avoid abandoning the strategy during periods of underperformance
Related Portfolios
How Index Fund Portfolios Performed in the Two Worst Crashes of the Last 25 Years
Download the free PDF — plus get monthly portfolio insights from PortfolioDB.