Vanguard Utilities ETF

What this fund is

Vanguard Utilities ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from Vanguard, traded under the ticker VPU (ISIN US92204A8760). 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 utilities 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 follows the Spliced U.S.

Investable Market Utilities 25/50 Index index (passive investing): it tracks the market rather than relying on a manager, keeping running costs down, and its largest holdings include NextEra Energy Inc., Southern Co. and Duke Energy Corp.. With about 68 holdings (the ten largest ≈ 52.5%), your money is diversified rather than concentrated in a handful of names. Its biggest country exposures are ~99.6% United States and ~0% Cayman Islands. By industry it concentrates most in ~99.2% Utilities and ~0.5% Energy. 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 14.7% over the past year — a gauge of how much the value moves, not a judgement of quality. 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.)