My ETF picking is working better than my stock picking

Michael James' tongue in cheek The Stock Picker's Checklist prompted me to look at one of my accounts at TD where I have bought individual stocks as part of my overall Canadian equity allocation.

On first glance, the screenshot below of my account return against the TSX Composite Index Total Return (which is the appropriate benchmark since the account is entirely Canadian equity holdings and all the stocks, and the holdings of the one ETF, are part of the TSX Composite) makes me look like a rival to Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger.

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... but the sudden divergence of the lines around September 2014 made me look a bit closer and the source of the marked difference is the sole ETF in this account, BMO's Low Volatility Canadian Equity fund (TSX: ZLB). ZLB contains much less weight in energy and materials by virtue of its criteria to select low volatility stocks.

The following chart from Yahoo Finance shows ZLB against the TSX Composite and a couple of other ETFs - iShares' XIU, which tracks the TSX 60, and Powershares' PXC, which is a fundamentally-weighted Canadian equity fund. PXC has closely tracked the pattern of the TSX while doing appreciably worse. Meanwhile ZLB works completely differently.

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The TD account balance screenshot (edited to remove dollar amounts of my holdings, which unfortunately are nowhere near rivalling those of Buffett and Munger) confirms this. ZLB is about half the holdings and its gain is far ahead of anything else. Its return has dominated the account.

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My takeaways:
1) My stock picks so far have been doing about the same - no better but no worse either - than their benchmark. Not much benefit or harm either way.

2) ZLB's low correlation with PXC and the TSX Composite indicates that a portfolio built to include non-cap-weight components (like the Smart Beta described here on my other blog) makes sense. The last three years, market conditions have been such that ZLB is powering ahead. At some point, it will be PXC's turn. All along my portfolio is more stable / less volatile.