Vanguard S&P 500 Value ETF

What this fund is

Vanguard S&P 500 Value ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from Vanguard, traded under the ticker VOOV (ISIN US9219327031). 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 passively tracks the S&P 500 Value Index index — mirroring that market instead of paying a manager to pick winners, which keeps costs low, and its largest holdings include Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Exxon Mobil Corp..

Spread across roughly 439 holdings (the ten largest ≈ 24.5%), no one position makes or breaks the fund. By geography it is weighted towards ~94.6% United States, ~3.4% Ireland and ~0.6% Switzerland. By industry it concentrates most in ~21.1% Technology and ~14.8% Financials. It is commonly used to tilt a portfolio towards one market, usually alongside broader, more global funds rather than on its own.

Its ongoing charge (TER) is 0.07% a year — about €7 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 9.9% over the past year, which describes how much its price tends to move rather than whether it is good. 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 Vanguard.)