Hi andymca. OK, easiest to answer the fees question first. In short, the fee will be what it says on the tin. No tricks with ETFs on that front. The external factor is just your trading costs (brokerage and buy/sell spread). The only real risk in buying multiple ETFs is doubling up on your stock exposures which kind of defeats the point.
Top picks is trickier. While you are looking for a combination of yield and growth, you need to consider what's in the other half of your portfolio. Again, this is about limiting dual exposures to stocks. No point adding say VAS if you already hold the big banks, miners and TLS! You also need to consider how much risk you want to take on i.e equities or other asset classes.
I think about this sort of stuff holistically. I've done some posts along similar lines, but the short version is I believe in globally diversified portfolios using a mix of asset classes and strategies. Basically, in a well diversified portfolio, around 80% of your returns will come from asset class allocation, not investment selection. Therefore, asset allocation is a critical issue.
In the following table, I've set out what I believe is a fairly reasonable asset allocation framework for a global diversified portfolio for a high growth type investor. Then where possible, I've listed ETFs which may be used as to get some of these exposures. The ones I've chosen are based on my view around combination of efficiency of exposure to each asset class sleeve and low cost.
Inherently this asset allocation would tend to be biased more to growth than income. To get a higher income, you could tilt to income producing asset classes like AREITs, large cap Australian equities and infrastructure. Or, you could take another tack. There are obviously ETFs which tilt to certain factors. Dividends (VHY/RDV), Value (RLV) etc. Then there are sector tilts (healthcare etc).
This would also tend to be a high beta portfolio. Therefore it might pay to think about some of the smart beta ETFs to potentially alter some of the risk exposures.
Ultimately, I don't generally use ETFs for asset class exposures (although I do use MGE). I believe it depends on what you want to use an ETF for. If it's for high beta/low cost, well that's one thing.But if it's because you want to use diversified investments easily through the ASX, there are other options available.
I hope this helps get the process started. Shout out if you want more details and good luck!
