State Street® SPDR® S&P® 1500 Value Tilt ETF

What this fund is

State Street® SPDR® S&P® 1500 Value Tilt ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from SPDR, traded under the ticker VLU (ISIN US78464A1280). One trade buys a whole basket of holdings, so your money is spread out instead of riding on a single company. 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 1500 Low Valuation Tilt Index index (passive investing): it tracks the market rather than relying on a manager, keeping running costs down, and its largest holdings include AMAZON.COM INC, BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY INC CL B and MICROSOFT CORP.

Spread across roughly 1476 holdings (the ten largest ≈ 17.8%), no one position makes or breaks the fund. By industry it concentrates most in ~16.1% Technology and ~15.3% Financials. 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 0.12% a year — about €12 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 10.8% over the past year — a gauge of how much the value moves, not a judgement of quality. It launched in 2012. 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.)