Vanguard Health Care ETF

What this fund is

Vanguard Health Care ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from Vanguard, traded under the ticker VHT (ISIN US92204A5048). It lets you buy a basket of holdings in a single trade, spreading your money across them rather than one company. At its core it is a focused, thematic fund: it concentrates on the health care part of the market, so it lives or dies by that one area rather than the economy as a whole. Underneath, 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. It passively tracks the Spliced U.S.

Investable Market Health Care 25/50 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.. With about 424 holdings (the ten largest ≈ 51.7%), your money is diversified rather than concentrated in a handful of names. By geography it is weighted towards ~97.1% United States, ~2.2% Ireland and ~0.2% Bermuda. Its heaviest sectors are ~99.5% Health Care and ~0% Corporate. A focused fund like this is typically held as a smaller 'satellite' position around a broader core — a way to lean into one theme, not usually a portfolio's only holding.

Its ongoing charge (TER) is 0.09% a year — about €9 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 15.3% 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.)