The beauty of ETFs is they give cheap(er) exposure to specific risk factors. So ultimately you can decide what exposure you want - property, value, growth, momentum, inflation linked bonds, nominal bonds, balanced fund approach etc, etc...and buy those ETFs. It all depends on what you want. For a maximum growth approach for retirement in say 20-30 years time you have to go for a large chunk of equities. For my money and given the (not small) amount of research I have done there are only a handful of equity risk factors that pay off over the longer term (relative to the market cap index): Value, Momentum, Low volatility, Midcaps and equal weight. There is an ETF for each of those factors (see
www.etfsa.co.za/docs/etfsonetfsa18.pdf). Let's not forget the rand which is specific to SA so you can add in an offshore ETF (such as DBX) for good measure. (As an aside I do have a problem with Betta Beta but its the only equal weight ETF out there. For my own money I have left it out because it doesn't capture a large portion of the equal weight performance, but for a risk management aspect its good enough.) For an excellent (free) source on research into equity risk factors check out blog.alphaarchitect.com/
