State Street® SPDR® EURO STOXX 50® ETF

What this fund is

State Street® SPDR® EURO STOXX 50® ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from SPDR, traded under the ticker FEZ (ISIN US78463X2027). In a single purchase you get a diversified basket of holdings rather than a stake in just one business. In plain terms it is about owning small slices of companies, so you share in their growth when they do well — and their falls when they don't, spread across its target market. It passively tracks the EURO STOXX 50 Index index — mirroring that market instead of paying a manager to pick winners, which keeps costs low, and its largest holdings include ASML HOLDING NV, SIEMENS AG REG and BANCO SANTANDER SA.

Spread across roughly 56 holdings (the ten largest ≈ 41%), no one position makes or breaks the fund. By industry it concentrates most in ~19.4% Financials and ~16.3% Industrials. Investors often use a broad fund like this as a long-term 'core' holding — a single building block that covers much of a global portfolio in one trade. Its ongoing charge (TER) is 0.29% a year — about €29 a year on a €10,000 holding, taken automatically from the fund.

It holds the underlying investments directly (physical replication); it is domiciled in the United States and trades in USD. Its price has swung about 18.6% over the past year, which describes how much its price tends to move rather than whether it is good. It launched in 2002. Like any investment, it can lose value as well as gain, and what it did before does not predict what it will do next. (Fund data sourced from SPDR.)