Vanguard International High Dividend Yield ETF

What this fund is

Vanguard International High Dividend Yield ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from Vanguard, traded under the ticker VYMI (ISIN US9219467944). 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 broadly across markets worldwide. It follows the FTSE All-World ex US High Dividend Yield Index index (passive investing): it tracks the market rather than relying on a manager, keeping running costs down, and its largest holdings include HSBC Holdings plc, Roche Holding AG and Novartis AG.

It holds around 1578 positions (the ten largest ≈ 13.4%), spreading risk so no single holding decides your outcome. Its biggest country exposures are ~11.3% Japan, ~10.4% United Kingdom and ~8.7% Canada. Its heaviest sectors are ~41.1% Financials and ~8.5% Energy. 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 0.07% 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 13.5% over the past year — a gauge of how much the value moves, not a judgement of quality. 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.)