State Street® SPDR® S&P® China ETF

What this fund is

State Street® SPDR® S&P® China ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from SPDR, traded under the ticker GXC (ISIN US78463X4007). 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 follows the S&P China BMI Index index (passive investing): it tracks the market rather than relying on a manager, keeping running costs down, and its largest holdings include TENCENT HOLDINGS LTD, ALIBABA GROUP HOLDING LTD and CHINA CONSTRUCTION BANK H.

With about 1367 holdings (the ten largest ≈ 30.8%), your money is diversified rather than concentrated in a handful of names. Its heaviest sectors are ~17.1% Consumer Discretionary and ~12.5% Communication Services. 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 0.59% a year — about €59 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 19.1% over the past year, which describes how much its price tends to move rather than whether it is good. It launched in 2007. 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.)