State Street® Health Care Select Sector SPDR® ETF

What this fund is

State Street® Health Care Select Sector SPDR® ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from SPDR, traded under the ticker XLV (ISIN US81369Y2090). 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 Health Care Select Sector Index index — mirroring that market instead of paying a manager to pick winners, which keeps costs low, and its largest holdings include ELI LILLY + CO, JOHNSON + JOHNSON and ABBVIE INC.

It holds around 63 positions (the ten largest ≈ 61.8%), spreading risk so no single holding decides your outcome. Its heaviest sectors are ~31% Consumer Staples and ~21.9% Health Care. 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 0.08% a year — about €8 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 15.7% over the past year, which describes how much its price tends to move rather than whether it is good. It launched in 1998. As with any investment, its value can go down as well as up, and past performance is not a guide to future results. (Fund data sourced from SPDR.)