State Street® Global Allocation ETF

What this fund is

State Street® Global Allocation ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from SPDR, traded under the ticker GAL (ISIN US78467V4005). It lets you buy a basket of holdings in a single trade, spreading your money across them rather than one company. In plain terms it is about a ready-made mix of shares, bonds and sometimes other assets in a single fund, so the balance is managed for you, spread broadly across markets worldwide. It follows the MSCI ACWI IMI Index index (passive investing): it tracks the market rather than relying on a manager, keeping running costs down, and its largest holdings include STATE STREET SPDR S+P 500 ETF, STATE STREET SPDR PORTFOLIO DE and STATE STREET SPDR PORTFOLIO EM.

With about 19 holdings (the ten largest ≈ 83.2%), your money is diversified rather than concentrated in a handful of names. 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 0.35% a year — about €35 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 9.6% 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.)