The 7 Best Growth ETFs for Beginners Over 40

So, you're over 40 and you're trying to catch up with investing, but you don't want to necessarily just invest in the S&P 500. Instead, you want to invest in more tech or growth ETFs so this way you can accelerate your portfolio, right? Because of course, you're trying to catch up. However, you are a complete beginner and you have absolutely no idea where to begin. Well, in this video, I'm going to share with you three things. First, I'm going to share with you my five ETF picking criteria that I use for myself and how I built my seven figure portfolio. And basically, this is what all of my community members do to build their five, six, seven figure portfolios as well. Second, I'm going to go over seven ETF examples. So, this way you can see, well, which ETF is best suited for you. And then third, I'm going to go over the risk and reward pros and cons with all of these growth tech ETFs because I feel like this isn't really talked about enough in the investing world. And remember, none of this is considered financial advice. You want to make sure that you do your own research before you make your first investment, okay? Because this is your money here. You want to make sure that you have control over your own investing portfolio. So, if you haven't done so already, you can download my entire study guide. It's all part of the $1 million investing road map down below. And this is what we're going to be looking at right here. If you don't want to download the study guide, that's totally fine. You can just take screenshots and refer to all of these notes later on. But I put a lot of time into writing everything here. None of this is AI generated. I promise. I actually typed up everything here. So, make sure that you download the study guide so this way it can help you with your first investment. Now, the very first thing that I'm going to go over is the five ETF picking criteria. In today's video, we're going to focus on the second column right here. I already made a video on stable backbone ETF. So, if you haven't checked that out, if you haven't watched that video, you can watch that video later after this video, but let's focus on the second column, tech and growth ETFs. So, the five ETF picking criteria that we're going to follow here is this one right here. So the very first thing is we're going to make sure that the one year, 5year, and 10year trend is going up. If you are a beginner, a lot of beginners that I observed, a lot of the people that I worked with, they will choose ETFs that are trending downwards. That's a big no no for me or a big no no for all of our community members. You want to make sure that the ETF, the asset that you are investing in is going up in the long term. If you pick an asset that is going downwards, then most likely you're going to have a portfolio that is also going to go downwards over the long term. Okay? So, make sure that the trend is going upwards. Second, we want to make sure that the one-year, 5-year, and 10-year performance is more than 12% per year on an average annual basis. The S&P 500 usually gives us around 7 to 12%. But now, because we are focused on tech and growth ETFs, we want to be looking for ETFs that have more than 12%. Sometimes maybe even 15%, 17%, 18%, and occasionally even 20%. I'm going to go over some examples in a little bit, so stay tuned. Third, we want to, of course, make sure that we are not paying too many fees. So our expense ratio needs to generally be below 050%. That's my guideline. Okay. Fourth, for our dividend yields, because these are growth and tech ETFs, we don't necessarily care too much if they have a high dividend yield. Because for these companies that we're investing in, we want to make sure that they are reallocating their portfolio and reinvesting their revenue back into their own companies rather than rewarding shareholders like you and I with dividends. Okay, so this is what makes them more growthoriented. And then fifth, we want to make sure that the companies within these funds, within these ETFs, of course, like what I've said in many of my videos, that they aren't penny stocks or meme stocks or crazy IPOs, any of these high-risk assets because we are over 40 years old. We want to make sure that we are investing responsibly, okay? We're not yoloing our money right now. This is the time that we are actually financially responsible. We're taking care of our kids, taking care of our parents, if that's something that you do. We are not at that age where we are just going to gamble our money away. Okay, I'm currently 39 years old. I have a lot of friends in their 40s, 50s right now. We all know we need to be financially responsible right now. Okay, so this is basically the criteria. And now we can go to the second part, these seven ETF examples. Okay, we're going to do a deep dive into each one and then you get to choose which ones best fit your risk tolerance and that you want to invest in your own portfolios. Okay, so the very first ETF that we're going to look at is Schwab's large cap growth ETF or SCHG. And remember from my previous videos, anything that starts with SC just means that it's from Charles Schwab. Anything that starts with V comes from Vanguard. Anything that starts with S usually it's from State Street and anything that starts with F usually comes from Fidelity. Okay, that's how their naming system works. So the very first one is SCHG. Now if we take a look at our first criteria, we want to see the charts for the 1-year, 5-year, and 10-year time frame. Right? So one year, is it going upwards? Yes, it is. We can see that it has a growth of over around 15 16% over the last year. pretty good. For the 5-year chart, it's around 85% it's been going up and 10 years plus. Pretty good. 931% over the long term ever since, you know, 2010 or so. Great. So, that passes criteria number one. We like this. Criteria number two, we want to make sure that the performance is over 12%. So, let's see if we go to this is Yahoo Finance and I am trying my best to teach you to do this yourself. Okay. after this video or maybe during this video, you want to go on Yahoo Finance yourself and see if you can also research all of these ETFs so this way you can figure out what is most comfortable for your own portfolio. So when you go to Yahoo Finance, you're going to go to performance on the left. When you click on performance, it's going to show you all of the percentages. So for the first year or last year, one year, right, the one-year return, it has given us a 27.91% return. Is this over 12%. Yes, it is. Awesome. Over the last 5 years, on average, each year gives us around 15 to 16%. Is that over 12%. Yes. Very good. Over the last 10 years, now that we have more data points, it's around 18 19%. Is this over 12%? Yes, it is. So, this is good. So, this hits our criteria number two. Criteria number three, we want to make sure that the expense ratio is under 050%. So, again, we're going to go back to this. We're going to click on summary. Once you go to summary, you can scroll down and on the bottom right corner right here, it's going to tell you the expense ratio. The expense ratio for this is 04%. This just means that you pay4 cents out of $100 invested. Is this pretty good? Yes, it is. Because if you compare this to investing with a money manager where they invest your money instead of you investing it yourself, then they can charge upwards of one to 2% or a dollar or $2 for every $100 invested. Over here, you're just paying four pennies. That's it. So, it's relatively on the cheaper side. So, I like this. This is considered as a lowcost fund. So, this hits criteria number three. Cool. Criteria number four, the dividend yield. Is it pretty low? Is it maybe like 2% 3%? Let's take a look. The answer of obviously it's going to be yes because I already filtered all of these yields here. But if you take a look at the dividend yields, it's 36%. Meaning that a lot of the companies within this fund, they are reinvesting the majority of their revenue, their growth back into their own companies, right? That's why they're growth companies. They're not paying them out as dividends. And number five, we want to make sure that the holdings, the companies inside are not these crazy stocks that noame stocks that aren't actually generating any revenue or they're not penny stocks, meme stocks, or any of these IPOs and that they predominantly hold growth oriented companies with high earnings revenue, right? And most likely or not, they're going to be techheavy, which is going to be very, very normal. And you're going to see a pattern in a little bit as I go over these seven ETFs. So, how can we figure out what these holdings are? You can scroll down or you can just click on holdings right here. And you can see that the top 10 holdings for SCG right here. The top 10 holdings are going to be Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. And you're going to see this pattern time and time again with all of these seven ETFs. The main difference with these growth and tech ETFs are the weights. So, you're going to see that, okay, for this specific fund, 11% of this fund is composed of Nvidia. Around 9 or 10% of this fund is composed of Apple, around 7% for Microsoft, around 5% for Amazon, and around 4% for Alphabet Google. Cool. So, just take a snapshot of this. Remember this. You can also refer back to this number here, but 11% Nvidia, 10% Apple. Now, if we take a look at another ETF, look what happens. So, this is another ETF, another growth ETF. This is from Eyesshares. This is IWI or the Russell Top 200 Growth ETF. Again, let's run through the criteria. Over the one-year period, is this going upwards? Yes, it is. 18%. Not bad, right? Fiveyear mark, yes, it is also going upwards. And then over the past 10 years plus, is this going upwards? Yes, it is. So, this hits my first criteria. Perfect. If we take a look at the performance, same thing, folks. You can take a look at the one-year average, which is around 29%, very good. 5 years, 16% over 12% very good. And then 10 years 19%. Which is pretty impressive, right? I like this. Perfect. Let's go back to the summary and let's take a look at the expense ratio. The expense ratio is.20%. So this is a little bit more on the pricier side compared to 0.3%. 04%. This right here we're going to pay 20 cents for every $100. Again, this is considered a lowcost index fund, right? a lowcost ETF because compared to these money managers that charge you 1 to 2% this is only.20%. It's not even 1%. Pretty good. And if we take a look at the dividend yield very similar to CHG it's around 32%. Awesome. Now this is where it gets more interesting. Take a look at the holdings. So we're going to scroll down here again. You're going to see ah look at the top 10 holdings here. Very similar companies right? This here we see Nvidia takes up around 14 15% of this fund. Apple takes up around 13%. Microsoft 10%. Broadcom ah this see this is a little bit different than this one right here. Broadcom was around 4% here. Broadcom here is around what 5% Amazon four 5% and in Alphabet Google 4%. But take a look at Nvidia. This is around 14 15% compared to this ETF CHG which was around 11%. So if you are someone who says okay I'm totally bullish on chips Nvidia AI right now then yes I is going to be more suited for you because you are leaning towards a heavier weight towards Nvidia and Apple compared to something like SHG. Okay. So all of these ETFs that I'm about to show you it's all about weight. How much weight do you feel confident, comfortable with investing in one particular or two particular companies or maybe the top three companies in your portfolio? That's all it is, folks. Okay? It's all about weight. So, the next ETF, the third ETF that we're going to talk about is VUG, which is Vanguard's growth index fund. I talk about this ETF a lot in a lot of my reels. Again, you can take a look at the one-year chart, upper trending, 5-year, all all upper trending. Very good. Take a look at the expense ratio. It's a little bit cheaper. 03% the dividend yield slightly higher but still around that.3% area. 37%. Awesome. And then we can take a look at the holdings. Nvidia is a little bit lower, right? Compared to this one right here for IWY, right? It is around this one was 14 15%. But for this VUG, it's around 13%. Apple is a little bit higher, right? 12% it's then it's Microsoft around 9% Alphabet Google 5 6% and then Broadcom so on and so forth. Cool. So VUG is another popular growth tech ETF. The fourth ETF that I see everyone talk about and also I invest in this myself is QQQ. This is not from Vanguard or from Charles Schwab. This is from Invesco. Now this one again one year great fiveyear upper trending all upper trending. Okay we need to see patterns here. make sure that we have evidence that the fund is actually doing well. If we take a look at the yield, same thing 38%. But if you take a look at the expense ratio, it's a little bit again higher than the 03s 04s. It's around8%, right? 18 cents for every $100 invested. Awesome. Still pretty good. If we scroll down, we can take a look at the holdings. So this right here is lower in weight for Nvidia compared to what we saw before where they were 10 plus%. So Nvidia in this case is only 8%, Apple 7%. Microsoft 5%. Micron is now here which is around 4.8% and then of course there's Amazon and a little bit of AMD here and so on and so forth. So again it's all about what? All about weight. All about weight. I'm going to be a parrot here. I'm going to keep repeating the same thing. Okay, let's take a look at another example of an ETF. So, if you're someone who says, "Okay, I don't want to invest in QQQ because maybe the expense ratio is too high." And also, if you take a look at QQQ, this is around $736. And you say, "Okay, I want to invest in something that is similar to QQQ. Why not invest in something like QQQM?" The M, what I say is kind of like the mini version of QQQ where the price per share is cheaper. It's only $300. Same thing if you take a look at the one-year chart 33% 5-year all all upward trending and then the expense ratio here is.15%. So it's a little bit cheaper. the dividend yield 042% just slightly higher but not so much right if we take a look at the allocation very similar if not pretty much like the same thing as QQQ it's 8% for Nvidia 7% for Apple Microsoft Micron same thing here okay so if you are looking for a cheaper alternative per share QQQM is a what I would say is a better alternative compared to QQQ now why would people invest in QQQ compared to QQQM well QQQ Q is more liquid, meaning that there are more people trading QQQ on a daily basis. If you are an options trader like myself where we like to sell cover calls or cash secure puts, then QQQ might be a good candidate for you where it's easier for you to sell cover calls and cash secure puts. There's higher liquidity. Also, with the option chain, you can choose different expiration dates. So, you have a more robust option chain compared to something like QQQM. Okay. And again, if you want to take a look at prices, look at Vanguard. Vanguard, if you say, "Okay, all the 300, 400, 500, $600 ETFs are too expensive for me." And you want to go for something that is lower price per share. VUG is only $86. iShares IWY is 290, right? It's on the pricier side. And then Schwab's CHG is only $33. Okay? Now, some of you might say, well, price doesn't really matter because we all live in 2026, 2027. Now, we are able to invest in fractional shares or most brokerages allow you to invest in fractional shares. So, this means that instead of investing in one full share of QQQ, a lot of brokerages will allow you to invest in half a share of QQQ or a quarter of a share of QQQ. So when you type in how many shares you want to purchase, instead of typing in one, you can type in 0.5 or 0.25 for a quarter. Okay. So what's the sixth ETF? This is going to be VGT. A very popular growth ETF here. VGT. This is the Vangor Information Technology Index Fund. Same thing. We're going to take a look at the one-year chart. 44% 5-year 139% and in all all upper trending. Amazing, right? Take a look at the expense ratio. It's relatively cheap. 009%. I like it. All right. Dividend yield still around that range between.3.4% 32%. We like that. And now if you take a look at the waiting. Okay. So why has the performance been higher compared to everyone else's? Well, it's because of the weight. Look at Nvidia. Nvidia is around 167% of this fund. So if you are someone who is comfortable investing in more shares like if you have a 100 shares and 16 of them are Nvidia if that is something that you are comfortable with then yes VGT is going to be perfect for you right and if you take a look at Apple 15% Microsoft 9.8% right Broadcom 4.4% 4% Micron, AMD, Intel, the list goes on and on and on. Okay, so the waiting is higher for VGT in terms of Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, so on and so forth. Okay, and if we take a look at the performance real quick, look at the one-year performance, 60% growth over the last year on average, right? If we take a look at the last 3 years around 33%, over the last 5 years is 21 22% and over the last 10 years around 25%. And if we compare this to something like CHG, our first ETF that we took a look at, we take a look at the performance. Well, one year was only 27%. Right? I don't want to say only, but that's still pretty good, right? The 10-year average 18%. So VGT has outperformed all of the previous ETFs that we talked about here. Cool. So the last ETF that we're going to talk about is XLK. XLK is State Street Technology Select Sector. So again, take a look at the summary. We can take a look at the one-year chart. Upward trending. Very good. 5-year chart. Very good. And in all, it's all upper trending. I like it. Take a look at the dividend yield. It's the highest among all of the seven ETFs that we talked about today. 40%. It's negligible, right? It's not that high. The expense ratio, is it still pretty low? Yes, it is around 08%. It's under the 050% criteria that we have for ourselves. If we take a look at the holdings, same thing. Same thing. Nvidia 13%, Apple 11%, Microsoft, Micron, Broadcom, so on and so forth. So, these are the companies as of this recording right now. These are the companies that are leading the way that are really carrying the stock market. So if you feel comfortable investing in 13, 14, 15, 16% of Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, then yeah, you can invest in something like XLK or maybe VGT. If you say, okay, I don't want to invest too much into Nvidia and all of these other companies, then it's okay. We can decrease the weight. You can invest in something like QQQM where the holdings are around what? Around 8%, 7%, 5%. So it's all up to you and your own risk tolerance. Okay. Hopefully this makes sense right here. If this makes sense, maybe you can give me a thumbs up for the video. This gives me a lot of feedback here. Great. So now let's talk about pros and cons, risk and reward. Okay, so this is very very important especially for beginners because you need to understand what you're getting yourself into before you actually invest in these ETFs. So what are the pros and cons? Well, the pro is obviously you have the highest upside, right? The highest growth compared to S&P 500. these steady, stable backbone ETFs that we talked about in this other video. And if you compare it to these dividend income ETFs, then you're going to of course outperform them over the long term. Now, you can also say that some of the pros are there are larger option premiums because there is higher IV. IV just stands for implied volatility. Because there is an ETF that has more movement in the stock market, it creates higher premiums in the option chain. if you want to sell cover calls and cash your puts later on for income, it's going to give you more premiums on a monthly or quarterly basis. Okay, if you don't care about this, then it's totally fine, too. What are the cons? The cons are with these growth tech ETFs or any growth tech stocks companies, whenever there is uncertainty in the stock market, the number one sector to go to drop the fastest are tech and growth. pretty much every single time, 90 95% of the time, it's growth in tech ETFs. Okay? And I'm going to show you some historical examples in a little bit. And you can also do this for yourself, too. And of course, it has a lower dividend yield because we already talked about why, right? They're reinvesting back into their own company. So, if you don't care about the dividend yield, then yeah, this will be for you. If you do care about dividend yields, then these growth tech ETFs are not going to be for you. So, here is something that I want you to do tonight as your homework. You're going to, of course, go to Yahoo Finance to look through these ETFs yourself, see what you're most comfortable with, and you're going to go to tradingview.com and create an account. This is absolutely free. When you go to Trading View, you can type in the ticker symbol that you want to invest in. And then, so for this example, I'm going to say QQQM. All right. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to do a comparison. So, what I'm going to do is click on this plus symbol, compare symbols, and I'm going to compare QQQM with something like SCHD. SCHD is a high yield dividend paying ETF. It is on the steadier Eddie side where it's just kind of doing its own thing. It's a pretty stable ETF. It doesn't really get phased by, you know, what markets do or the external events in the world or whatever it is. But you're going to see that over the long term, a lot of, you know, these tech and growth ETFs, they outperform SCHD. It's natural because SHD pays a higher dividend, right? They're paying their shareholders more of that quarterly dividend yield. So, you can see, well, this is QQQM, the red and green line, it's outperformed by a lot. QQQM 150% ever since 2023 and SHD around 33% growth. Okay, big difference here. However, let's kind of change the timeline. You can see that as I change the x-axis, you know, in different timelines, you're going to see the graph start shifting. And the reason is because when you're on trading view, it's going to line up both ETF graphs with the same inception point on the very left point right here. So, they start off at the same point. So, if you remember back in history in 2022, we had our bare market where the Federal Reserve was saying that they were going to raise interest rates. A lot of people were pulling a lot of institutions were pulling money out of the stock market causing a lot of ETFs, stocks drop in price. And what did I say before the very first sector that is going to drop are these tech and growth ETFs. So if I line it up ever since the beginning of say 2022 right here, take a look at what happens. You see here, QQQM dropped the most. So if you take a look at this Yaxis here and you can see the percentage drop. If I go all the way down for QQQM, the very lowest, it dropped all the way down to 33 34%. Right? 33 34% drop all in October 2022. So, if you are a beginner and you cannot stomach this volatility, you don't want to be investing in these tech growth ETFs, okay? Because it's going to cause you to not want to sleep at night. But if you take a look at something like CHD, you see how it's just kind of bouncing up and down, just going left and right. It didn't really get phased by all of these negative events happening around the world. You know what what was happening with the Federal Reserve? It did drop, of course, right? It's natural. It dropped all the way down to what around 13 14%. You can see that on the XY AIS here. So big difference here. Again, if you want to invest in these tech growth ETFs, you need to make sure that you are able to stomach the volatility. Whenever there's negative news, first thing to go, tech growth ETFs are going to nose dive. Okay? It's just natural. It's been like this for in all historical events. You can look at this yourself when you are on tradingview.com today. Okay? But if you are okay with the volatility in the long term, if you were to zoom out just like what I'm doing right now, you can see that ah okay these tech growth ETFs they have the highest potential for growth in the long term. So if you want to be investing in something for the next 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, then tech and growth ETFs are the way to go. If you can't stomach it, go for the dividend income ETFs here. Okay. All right. So take a look at this table here. I really hope this helps. If you are someone who has not downloaded these study guides, I highly recommend that you do so. Get the road map. It's going to help you. I promise you. If you are a complete beginner, I am 99.9% sure, I'm that confident. 99% sure that it's going to help you. I have all of my resources here. You get to see all of my resources within my Google Drive, my ebooks, all my study guides that I spend hours and hours writing, my sheets here that goes over everything and how I think about the stock market. And if you have more than $50,000, I am going to invite you to my 5day investing challenge where I help you set up all of your accounts and get diversified in under 5 days. Like speed is a thing. If you're trying to catch up, I want to make sure that you are rocking and rolling in under 5 days. You're going to get access to all of my videos here, my video course, all of my quizzes because I used to be a public school teacher. And you get to get access to my community chat where you get to ask me all of your questions. My team and I are always here to answer your questions. And on top of that, you get access to all of my live chats. Right now, I have my private live chats every Thursday at 5:00 p.m. Pacific time. So, if you want to ask me your questions in real time, it's just going to be me, you, and maybe like 10 or 15, 20 other people as of now, right? It's going to grow later on, but you can join all of this. All of this is 100% free. 100% free. So, my whole goal here is to give you autonomy. I want to make sure that you are able to not use a money manager and you're just overcharging in all of these fees here and you're just overpaying with all these fees. I want to make sure that you're able to invest yourself so that you have financial independence. Okay? If this is anything of interest to you, you can download the road map here. And if you are still confused with the live chats, with all you know, the chat function with all my videos, I can even hop on a one-on-one strategy call with you, okay? I'll talk to you or my team members will talk to you and we'll see what it is that we can do to help you and potentially invite you to our one-on-one coaching program if that's something that you're interested in. Okay, so again, let me know down below if you are already investing in tech growth ETFs, what you're investing in down below in the comments. Hopefully this helps and yeah, I will see you all in the next video.