QQQ vs QQQM vs IQQ - Which one is BEST in 2027?

So, are you a beginner investor? Maybe you're 35, 40, 45, 50 years old and you want to be responsible and diversify your portfolio into maybe the tech sector, into tech ETFs. But now you're wondering, Steve, which one is better? QQQ, QQQM, or IQQ? So, in this video, I'm going to do a complete breakdown in a very simplistic approach on what the main differences and similarities are. So, this way by the end of this video, you have 100% clarity on which one actually best fits your portfolio. And remember, none of this is financial advice. Make sure that you always invest based on your own risk tolerance and you do your own research. So, first of all, all three of these ETFs, QQQ, QQQM, and IQQ, they all track the Nasdaq 100. And basically, if you go to a website like Yahoo Finance or whatever it is that you usually use, you go to the left side here and you click on holdings, you get to see all of the companies within this fund. So, it includes companies like Nvidia Apple Microsoft Amazon Micron, AMD, so on and so forth. And you can also notice all of the percentages here. For Nvidia, it takes about 8% in QQQ and around 7% of Apple is in QQQ. And around 5% is Microsoft and around 4.83% is Amazon. If you compare this to another ETF like QQQM, you can see that the holdings are just pretty much the same exact thing, right? You see Nvidia takes up around 8%. Apple takes around 7.5%, Microsoft 5.71%, so on and so forth. However, the main differences really comes down to a couple of these variables here. The first one is the expense ratio. So, basically, the expense ratio is just a percentage that shows you and me how much we need to pay on an annual basis just by holding on to these ETFs. The expense ratio for QQQ is 0.18%, meaning that you pay around 18 cents for every $100 invested per year. QQQM's expense ratio is 0.15% meaning that you pay 15 cents for every $100 invested. And IQQ is a little bit different because IQQ is actually a newer ETF that tracks the Nasdaq 100 where you have to pay 0.10% or 10 cents for every $100 invested. However, this is actually a fee waiver all the way until July 31st. This expense ratio is going to go up to 0.12%. Basically, IQQ is a competitor and iShares created this ETF to compete with Invesco's QQQ and QQQM. Again, Invesco, iShares, Vanguard, Fidelity, these are all big brokerages and they all create their index funds, ETFs, whatever it is, and they all generally create the same types of funds that compete with each other. That's why there are a whole bunch of funds, ETFs out there that are virtually the same thing. It's just that they are from different providers. QQQ is one of those OG ETFs that has been around since 1999. QQQM is right in the middle. It came out in 2020 and IQQ just literally came out in 2026. And because of the age, the popularity, of course you're going to see that QQQ has a higher AUM. It just means assets under management. This just means that there are a lot of investors who put a lot of their money towards QQQ where the AUM is currently around $481 billion compared to something like QQQM where it's $98.8 billion and that is compared to IQQ which is around $25 million AUM. The other main difference besides the expense ratios, the AUM, the launch dates, are the share prices. The share price for a QQQ currently at the time of this recording is around $710 per share. I know it's on the pricier side. However, if you take a look at QQQM, one share is around $292 and if you take a look at IQQ, one share is around $24, $25. However, I mean it's 2026, 2027, does it really matter? Not really because now we have a lot of brokerages that allow us to buy fractional shares. So, if you do choose to invest in QQQ, you can actually buy half of a share or maybe a fourth of a share. You don't have to buy the complete full share that costs $710. Now, the next main differences among all three of these ETFs are going to be within its option chain. So, if you're someone who likes to sell cover calls, cash secured puts, maybe you like to buy leaps options or set up some sort of spread, then this is going to be very important for you. So, when you go to a website like Charles Schwab's thinkorswim web platform and you type in the ticker symbol QQQ, see this little section right here where it says the option chain and you can expand it. Now, you can see, okay, wow, there are a lot of expiration dates. So, I know this is a beginner's video and a lot of you probably don't know what cover calls or cash secured puts are expiration dates. If you don't know, it's okay, you can watch my other YouTube videos where I talk about these income generating strategies that you can use in your portfolio to, of course, generate income or even hedge your portfolio. But, in a nutshell, expiration dates just show you when your contracts can expire or they dates that you can choose to have your contracts expire. Maybe it can be 7 days out, 14 days out, 30 days out or maybe even up to like 600 days out. So, if you take a look at QQQ, of course, you're going to see a lot of expiration dates. I don't want to count every single one of them here, but I want to say that there is probably at least 20 or 30 of them here. And if you click on a random expiration date, so let's say that I click on the September 18th expiration dates, and you can scroll down, you can see that there are a lot of different strike prices, a lot of prices that you can choose to sell your shares for. And if you take a look at the volume, you can see that there is around 1,300 contracts just like floating around for the $710 strike price and around 1,100 contracts floating around being traded around for the $711 strike price. And even if you scroll down just a little bit more, you can see that there are around 7,000 contracts for the if we were to compare this to not QQQ but QQ QM, you can see that there's going to be a bigger difference. So, if you take a look at the option chain, instead of having say 20 or 30 or 40 expiration dates, whatever it is, there's only 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 to 9 10 expiration dates for QQ QM. And also, if I were to open up a another expiration date, say the September 18th expiration date, if you were to do a side-by-side comparison, there aren't that many options compared to QQQ. And if you take a look at the volume, you'll see that there is a significant drop. Instead of having a couple of thousand, there's only 25 here, or even 22 here, or even 48 contracts here. And if you take it a step further, and you were to compare this with IQ and you look at the expiration dates and the option chain, there's going to be around nine expiration dates. And if you open up the September 18th expiration dates, look at the number of strike prices there are. It's not that many compared to QQQ and QQ QM. And if you take a look at the volume, pretty much there's like no contracts being traded. Because why? I QQ is fairly new. Not a lot of people really want to trade this ETF. It's not as popular as QQQ and QQ QM. So, why does the option chain really matter? Well, I mean, if you are someone who wants to sell covered calls or cash-secured puts, do these options trades, uh you want to hedge your portfolio later on, then of course, it would be more ideal to have more QQQ in your portfolio because you actually have a tighter bid-ask spread, meaning that you get better pricing whenever you sell these contracts to other people. However, if you go for something like QQQM or even I Q Q where there are barely any contracts floating around then it's going to be very hard for you to find a buyer if you are trying to sell these cover call or cash secured put contracts. And if you do find a buyer, it's going to be at a much lower price so you're not going to get the best pricing for your premium. So which one is best suited for who? Again, remember there's always going to be trade-offs in the stock market world. So if you are okay with paying for the higher expense ratio but you have the options to have more options for selling cover calls and cash secured puts, you want to get higher premiums and that can compensate for the expense ratio and QQQ is going to be the best option for you. However, if you're just someone who is a long-term investor, you're kind of like in between with wanting to sell cover calls and cash secured puts, then maybe you can go for something like QQQM. Or if you're someone who just says, "I don't care at all about options trading, cover calls, cash secured puts." Then of course you can just go for I Q Q because hey, take a look. I mean, I Q Q is only what? $24, $25. It has a lower expense ratio and it's just very easy for beginners to get into. Now if you're someone who is a complete beginner, you're trying to catch up with investing, you feel like you're really behind, then it's okay. I actually have my $1 million investing road map and you get all of my calculators, my study guides like the one that you just saw before in this video and all of my templates, ebooks, everything that will possibly help you get started with investing all within the road map. My coaches and I have had students like Diana where she was able to use the road map and set up and automate and diversify her portfolio in under 14 days. Jerome right here was a complete beginner. He thought it was too late to invest too and he and his wife just automated everything and now they have a projected of $4.7 million portfolio by retirement. And Tina and her husband also were complete beginners and now they have all their accounts set up. They're collecting around a couple of dollars of dividends every quarter and they are projected to having a 5.2 million dollar portfolio by retirement. So if you want to get all of my free resources, you can get them down below and if you have more money maybe like 50 or 100,000 dollars plus, then you can even get invited to our 5-day investing challenge and if you still need help, you can hop on a one-on-one strategy call with either me or one of my team members and we'll give you some actionable steps on where you can go uh from where you are right now. And if you're interested, we may potentially invite you to join our one-on-one coaching program if it's a good fit for you. Let me know down below which of the ETFs that you gravitate towards more, QQQ, QQQM, or even I QQQ and yeah, thanks for watching and I will see you in the next video. Bye everyone.