Vanguard S&P Mid-Cap 400 Growth ETF

What this fund is

Vanguard S&P Mid-Cap 400 Growth ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from Vanguard, traded under the ticker IVOG (ISIN US9219328690). 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 MidCap 400 Growth Index index — mirroring that market instead of paying a manager to pick winners, which keeps costs low, and its largest holdings include Flex Ltd., Twilio Inc. Class A and TechnipFMC plc.

With about 242 holdings (the ten largest ≈ 15.9%), your money is diversified rather than concentrated in a handful of names. By geography it is weighted towards ~88.4% United States, ~3% Singapore and ~2.4% Ireland. Its heaviest sectors are ~31.7% Industrials and ~22.4% Technology. 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 0.1% a year — about €10 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 17.8% over the past year, which describes how much its price tends to move rather than whether it is good. 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 Vanguard.)