Appropriately, on a day when four civilian astronauts were launched into space with a SpaceX Falcon rocket, Brad Ferguson, an ardent Elon Musk fan, discussed the origin and application of the Ferguson Metrics to identify consistent outperforming funds. Here is the Zoom session recording.

Here's a deeper dive into Vanguard's three new active equity funds for PAS clients.
Link

I wouldn't necessarily describe VEMBX as being unique.
However, the fund generated higher returns (5 Yr - Top 2%) with lower volatilty than its EM Bond fund peers.
Nobody knows if VEMBX will continue to outperform in the future.
I don't own this fund, but would put it on my list if I was considering EM bond funds.

For my two cents ( maybe mistaken) I think that this is a twist on the argument that with deficits so high the government is squeezing out almost all the private borrowers in the economy.
Banks park money overnight at the repo facility to ensure they have enough cash available for the next day and the treasury pays 0.05%. But many of them apparently are just flipping the money over each night, without using it for more productive loans.
the Fed's purpose in buying bonds with created money is to increase the loans banks make to productive uses. Instead much of it is sitting on the sidelines, or in the stock market

David Rubenstein often has interesting guests on his show.
Link
I watched several episodes from Season 7 (current season) the last few days.
Episode 2: McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski
Episode 3: Moderna Chairman Noubar Afeyan
Episode 5: Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder and partner at Greylock Partners

Brad Ferguson will be joining us tomorrow to discuss his methodology, 15 September, at 10:30 am Pacific. Please register here.

Yes, tnx, 'similarly' was not the exact adverb.
In some senses the def of labile, esp under color of your recent analyses of weightings.
>> are not all that similar. Six weeks ago, the former had 45% of its holdings in the top ten, while the latter had "only" 28%.
Right, it ranges more widely than smaller sets, perhaps (have not checked the data); why I own / favor VONG, thanks to someone on this forum, perhaps Hank.

To compare, no pun intended, apples to apples, you need to drop Tesla since it wasn't in the original list.
VRGWX and VFIAX are not all that similar. Six weeks ago, the former had 45% of its holdings in the top ten, while the latter had "only" 28%. Data from M*.
https://www.morningstar.com/funds/xnas/vrgwx/portfolio
https://www.morningstar.com/funds/xnas/vfiax/portfolio
Further, because a given stock can have, say, 60% of its cap weight allocated to the growth index and 40% of its cap weight allocated to the value index, what it means when a stock has a large (or small) weight in the growth index is not straightforward. That company could be a larger (or smaller) company, or it could simply be more (or less) growthy than other stocks in the growth index.
https://research.ftserussell.com/products/downloads/Russell-US-indexes.pdf
Given that six weeks ago the top ten holdings of VFIAX constituted 28% of the fund, it should be clear that the five named companies (six securities) could not now comprise 41% of the S&P 500.
Six weeks ago, those six holdings comprised 22% of VFIAX, and thus presumably of the S&P 500. As of yesterday (Sept 13), they accounted for 23% of the S&P 500. Per SlickCharts.
It is best not to take figures on blind faith, especially when they don't pass a laugh test.

Good interview. Don’t expect any hot investment tips. Baron’s a long-term buy and hold investor. Just a slight plug for his mutual funds at one point, (which it sounds like you can get into for as little as $500 initial plus $50 a month auto-purchase).
UPDATED LINK (full 24 minutes).
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?view=detail&mid=C3121E5A29A01428FE6EC3121E5A29A01428FE6E&q=utube

Yeah, jeez, as of 6w ago the mighty VONG is similarly >39% in:
AAPL Apple Inc 10.52
MSFT Microsoft Corp 9.87
AMZN Amazon.com Inc 6.64
FB Facebook Inc Class A 3.92
GOOGL Alphabet Inc Class A 3.19
GOOG Alphabet Inc Class C 3.05
TSLA Tesla Inc 2.45

Some of those top holdings are just the companies I love to hate. Crap. But I can't pull out now.

“… for those … who might be wondering, if you put a dollar into the S&P, 41 cents goes toward Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook, with 59 cents going into the other 495 names.”
Bill Fleckenstein - “

Market Rap” (paid subscription) 9/14/21

Exactly why I hate market-cap weightings in funds and indices!!
No fund I own holds 100% stuff I agree with, but I am more than comfortable with Giroux's team and PRWCX's investing style to rest easy while sitting on a large slug of it.

Vanguard Core-Plus Bond Fund will officially launch on October 25.
There is a subscription period which will start around October 12.
Link

Some of those top holdings are just the companies I love to hate. Crap. But I can't pull out now.

“… for those … who might be wondering, if you put a dollar into the S&P, 41 cents goes toward Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook, with 59 cents going into the other 495 names.”
Bill Fleckenstein - “Market Rap” (paid subscription) 9/14/21

Yes. The page loads if it feels like it. Sometimes it's just blank. Using Safari on a MacBook Pro OS ver 11.5.2

Could you explain your thinking a bit?
For example, someone else posted in the thread announcing First Eagle Global Real Assets Fund that it could simply be a grab for more assets. That was my initial reaction here as well.
Though after checking on the prospective manager, Bryan C. Krug, I reconsidered. He currently manages a five star HY fund for Artisan, APDFX. M* describes his style as concentrated and idiosyncratic, hence capacity limited. For this reason that fund recently closed.
This new fund could be a way for him to invest in one part of the HY market where he has not yet reached his capacity limit. Just a possibility based on a brief look. At least this is likely not going to be another "me too" fund.

For clarity - regulations are enacted by the executive branch, consistent with stautues enacted by Congress. For example, 17 CFR § 240.10b5-1, aka Rule 10b5(1), concerning Trading “on the basis of” material nonpublic information in insider trading cases, was promulgated by the SEC in accordance with Section 10(b) of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934.
In fact, the SEC chair is currently considering beefing up this rule. Legislation not required.
https://www.sidley.com/en/insights/newsupdates/2021/06/sec-enhances-focus-on-rule-10b5-1-plans-what-should-companies-do-now
Since 2012 when the STOCK Act was passed, Congress has been subject to more or less the same rules as everyone else. One can make the case that Congress should be subject to more stringent laws, and for that, legislation would be required.

Let's try backing up and going through this again, slowly.
I wondered how the differences in methodologies might effect the composition of the fund as a result of the change.
The methodologies here are of two indexes. Ideally then one would compare the indexes themselves. Unfortunately, since one of those indexes (Nasdaq US Dividend Achievers Select Index) is proprietary, it's impossible to get data directly about the index. (This illustrates why one of the promoted advantages of index funds - transparency via the underling index - is sometimes less than advertised.) So BaluBalu used VDADX as a proxy for the Nasdaq index.
To its credit, Vanguard is moving this fund from an opaque index to a transparent one.
People generally look at funds in terms of average (mean) market cap. When they ask whether a fund is large-, mid-, or small-cap, they are looking at where the fund's average market cap falls. When they do screening on fund market caps, they are screening on average market cap. And so on.
There are two points here. One is that a discussion of average (mean) market caps is on point because the question is about how these two indexes compare. Average market cap is a part of that comparison. The other is that the use of median rather than average (mean) market cap as a basis of comparison seems a little odd given the greater familiarity with mean market cap. For both these reasons, I will continue to discuss mean market cap as well as median.
Vanguard reports the mean market cap of VDADX (as of June 30) to be $262.8B (vs. $262.6B for the underlying index). In comparison, S&P reports the mean market cap of the replacement index to be $53.3B. As this 5:1 ratio is huge, albeit not nearly as large as the 13:1 ratio of median market caps reported, it raises the same question: is this large difference for real?
That question has the same answer for either average: The discrepancy is due to the fact that S&P calculates unweighted averages (both mean and median), while Vanguard calculates weighted averages.
How would one know this? One way would be simply as a result of due diligence - reading the fund's statutory prospectus, hardly something obscure or difficult to find. In it, one sees:

Median Market Capitalization. ...the midpoint of market capitalization (market price x shares outstanding) of a fund’s stocks, weighted by the proportion of the fund’s assets invested in each stock. Stocks representing half of the fund’s assets have market capitalizations above the median, and the rest are below it.

As far as knowing that the average (mean) market cap figures given by funds are weighted, I take that as a given. As noted above, most people look at market cap numbers (or market cap ranges/style boxes) when carefully researching funds. So we can assume that most people understand what these figures represent.
Average market caps are a very familiar quantity. Forget about Vanguard. Even Blackrock, another large purveyor of index funds, posts average market cap figures without seeing the need to add a footnote that the averages are weighted. I understand people's zeal in ragging exclusively on Vanguard, but in this case the narrow focus is misplaced.
Because VDADX is a market-cap weighted fund, the proportion of the fund's assets invested in each stock is proportional to the market cap of that stock. So weighting each holding by the dollars invested is tantamount to weighting each holding by its market cap.
A trivial hypothetical can illustrate this: Assume three companies, A (market cap $2B), B (market cap $3B), and C (market cap $4B), and a market cap weighted fund holding these three companies. So their weights would be in the ratio 2:3:4.
We would compute the weighted mean as:
2/9 x $2B (A) + 3/9 x $3B (B) + 4/9 x $4B (C)
Notice that aside from scaling (dividing by 9), the summands are the squares of the market caps: 2², 3² and 4².
Again appealing to the fact that "everyone" understands and works with weighted average market caps, I'll skip illustrating why weighting presents a better picture than relying on unweighted averages.
I hope I've covered all the comments, from whataboutism to why market cap weighting is relevant to the squaring of market caps in computing averages. As well as the stuff in between.

The underperformance unfortunately goes beyond 2015-16. Prior to this year in which the fund is winning, Sequoia has underperformed its Morningstar Large-Cap Growth fund category peers for seven straight calendar years. Admittedly, one could argue it is miscategorized as large-growth. I wonder how it would hold up versus say the large-blend category. But 2021 so far has been a good year for this fund.