(I'm not 100% clear on why you're talking about DRIP when the ETF in question doesn't seem to offer a DRIP scheme, and Accums are legally different from DRIP?)

I can't really think of a way in which it's not functionally a DRIP, other than the personal tax differences mentioned up thread. They're the same in terms of losses due to withholding tax, which is what I pay.

Of course the coupons from all investees are allocated equally across the full list of holdings, not to more shares of the company that paid it, so it's a DRIP at the fund level, not a fund full of DRIPs.

It's a tiny pinch worse than the average corporate DRIP. The fund doesn't (can't) invest in the proceeds of the dividend in the underlying stock(s) until the date of payment. Some company DRIPs use a weighted average price and/or a discount to the price used, so sometimes you do a little better. Corporate DRIPs also don't pay trading costs on the acquisition of the new shares for you, though that's probably pretty negligible for an accumulating fund invested in liquid large caps these days.



DRIPS... Value destruction every time.
...
*Every* time? That is surely not correct. It depends on where you live, what you invest in.

In context, I meant "every time" in the sense of "every time the company in question pays you a coupon". A little loss each event, true for any reinvestment where there is a tax consequence.

Berkshire is an interesting case, in that it is most frequently valued by both analysts and market pricing on a multiple of book per share, usually around 1.4X in recent years. In their case, the $1 coupon that they pay you which reduced book by $1 is pretty darned likely to reduce market value by $1.40, even though that isn't entirely rational on the part of the investing public. Thus there is often a loss from reinvestment even in the case of no tax or transaction cost at all.

<DIGRESSION>
It's not rational in the sense that a *reasonable* basic valuation of almost any firm is in two parts: an appropriate multiple of the typical future earnings, plus whatever excess cash isn't needed to keep the business going. The latter should rationally get no multiple, and it's the source of funds for dividends, so market price should drop by the amount of the dividend, not a multiple of that. Phrased a more rational way, Berkshire has said that a dividend policy for them makes no sense so long as it is regularly true that each $1 of retained earnings is being given more than $1 in market value, which remains the case so far because the investing population believes most of the cash will be invested productively sooner or later and the cash pile won't become an ever-larger fraction of the company. The latter has long been the baseline assumption in Japan.
</DIGRESSION>

Re your example of multiple levels of taxation on the coupons from different jurisdictions....stop, you're scaring me!
I've run into a few analogous complications myself, for example holding companies in the Brookfield family. They have operations in multiple countries, so even though they are not a fund, the withholding tax is a blended/weighted rate among the source locations and therefore completely unpredictable even if you know the size of the upcoming coupon. For anything over one jurisdiction, I give up trying to predict it. My two main strategies: (1) Invest for capital gains only, never assign any value to a dividend stream. On the rare occasions I deviate from that, strategy (2) I buy a tracker position and wait till the first dividend then see how much showed up in my account. That's what I did with WIP, which is all zero-withholding-tax investments from various governments, but annoyingly subject to full 30% withholding tax because the fund wrapper is in the US.

Jim