The Vancouver Growth Index: An Equal-Weighted Equity Experiment

Background and Motivation

During my internship at Haywood Securities in 2024, I spent a significant amount of my free time exploring an observation that initially felt anecdotal but increasingly appeared structural: a disproportionate number of public companies headquartered in Vancouver were delivering outsized equity performance.

This insight was catalyzed less by screens and more by familiarity. Many of the brands, mining developers, royalty companies, and resource operators I encountered professionally were names I already knew well, yet their equity performance appeared to be consistently overlooked in broader benchmark discussions dominated by U.S. mega-caps or diversified Canadian indices.

That observation led to a natural question:

How would a simple basket of Vancouver-based public companies perform if treated as a standalone equity index?

Index Construction and Methodology

To test this idea, I constructed a self-made index composed of Vancouver-headquartered public companies, selected primarily by market capitalization, with a small number of growth-oriented additions identified through bottom-up research.

Key design choices:

• Constituent universe:
  26 Vancouver-based public companies

• Sector exposure:
  Predominantly natural resources (precious metals, base metals, energy), with selective exposure to consumer and financial names

• Weighting scheme:
  Equal dollar-weighted

• Rebalancing assumption:
  Annual

• Return type:
  Price returns only (no dividends)

• Data source:
  Bloomberg Terminal (annual closing prices, last trading day of each calendar year)

The equal-weighting decision was deliberate. Given the dispersion of outcomes in resource equities and the tendency for market-cap weighting to concentrate exposure in late-cycle winners, an equal-dollar approach better reflects the breadth of opportunity across the Vancouver market ecosystem.

Historical Performance (2020-2025)

The results of this exercise were striking.

Over the six-year period from 2020 through 2025, the Vancouver basket significantly outperformed both major benchmarks:

• Vancouver Index CAGR: 39.39%

• S&P 500 CAGR: 14.78%

• TSX Composite CAGR: 14.46%

Annual returns exhibited substantial volatility, particularly during commodity drawdowns, but the aggregate performance was consistently dominated by upside convexity during favorable cycles. Equal-weighting across high-beta resource equities allowed extreme winners to meaningfully contribute to index returns, while diversification muted the impact of individual drawdowns.

The data strongly suggests that Vancouver’s public equity ecosystem has historically offered persistent structural alpha, driven by:

• Concentration of globally relevant resource companies

• Entrepreneurial management cultures

• Exposure to commodity cycles with embedded optionality

• A tendency for under-representation in global benchmarks

The index’s outperformance was not dependent on a single year or commodity regime. While returns were strongest during periods of elevated commodity prices, relative performance versus benchmarks remained favourable across most market environments.

Vancouver Growth Index vs. Major Benchmarks (% returns)

Shifting from Research to Capital Allocation

After completing my internship, I continued tracking this index passively to ensure that the observed performance was not an artifact of sample bias or short-term market conditions. The pattern persisted.

In 2026, I made the decision to convert this research into a live portfolio implementation.

Portfolio characteristics at inception:

• Number of holdings: 26

• Average position weight: 3.85%

• Maximum weight: 4.48%

• Minimum weight: 3.12%

• Construction: Whole shares, approximately equal dollar allocation

• Initial Market Value: $7,554.68

This structure closely mirrors the theoretical index while remaining practical and executable within a real investment account. The modest dispersion in weights reflects price differences rather than discretionary tilts.

Forward-Looking Implications

The goal of this live implementation is not to optimize short-term returns, but to test whether the historical edge observed in Vancouver-based equities persists out-of-sample.

Over the next year, I will be actively tracking:

• Index-level performance versus SPY and TSX

• Dispersion of returns across constituents

• Drawdowns and volatility relative to benchmarks

• Practical rebalancing considerations

If performance remains robust, this index may serve as the foundation for a more formalized, rules-based investment strategy centered on geographically concentrated equity ecosystems.

Conclusion

What began as a casual observation during my time at Haywood Securities evolved into a structured research exercise with compelling results. A simple, equal-weighted basket of Vancouver-based public companies has historically delivered materially superior returns relative to major North American equity benchmarks.

While past performance does not guarantee future results, the consistency, magnitude, and economic intuition behind the results suggest that Vancouver’s public equity market represents a distinct and underappreciated source of long-term opportunity.

The next phase is empirical: tracking real capital against a live implementation to determine whether this structural advantage continues to exist.