State Street® Financial Select Sector SPDR® ETF

What this fund is

State Street® Financial Select Sector SPDR® ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from SPDR, traded under the ticker XLF (ISIN US81369Y6059). 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 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. Rather than a manager picking stocks, it simply replicates the Financial Select Sector Index index — the passive, low-cost approach, and its largest holdings include BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY INC CL B, JPMORGAN CHASE + CO and VISA INC CLASS A SHARES.

Spread across roughly 80 holdings (the ten largest ≈ 57.1%), no one position makes or breaks the fund. 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 14.6% over the past year, which describes how much its price tends to move rather than whether it is good. It launched in 1998. 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.)