Top 5 Vanguard ETFs For Beginners in 2027

So, there are more than 400 Vanguard funds out there and it gets really confusing, especially if you're a beginner and you're just trying to figure out which ones is the best for you if you just want to start and diversify. So, in this video, I'm going to go through the top five Vanguard funds or specifically ETFs that you can look into and I'm going to go through the performance over the last 1, 5, 10 plus years or so, their expense ratios, their dividend yields, and even talk about the actual companies that each fund holds. So, this way you understand exactly what it is that you're investing in. So, the very first one, of course, you've guessed it, it's VOO, which is the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF. Now, remember, this is an ETF, an exchange-traded fund, which allows you to buy and sell the shares in and out as many times as you want during the market open. Whenever you're on the Vanguard website, you're always going to see something like this where it says also available as an Admiral Shares Mutual Fund. When you click on it, it's going to take you to this site right here where it says VFIAX. Now, this is essentially the same thing as VOO. It allows you to invest in the top 500 companies in the United States like Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Google, so on and so forth. The only difference is with this, this is a mutual fund, which means that you can only buy or sell the shares once per day towards the end of the day. And there are generally limited functions with mutual funds and sometimes the expense ratio is a little bit higher compared to ETFs nowadays. With these mutual funds, they are more, I would say, old school. ETFs are more of the newer products that just came out a couple of years ago and they're more popular nowadays with the retail investor. Now, with VOO, the expense ratio is generally low. If you take a look here, it's around 0.03%, meaning that it's going to charge you around 3 cents for every $100 invested. And this is way better than investing with maybe like a money manager who invests in something like an S&P 500 fund exactly just like this, but instead they charge you 1% or 2%. They charge you $1 or $2 for every $100 invested, which is why I encourage people to take control of their own finances so they can invest themselves and then they can save more money. Now, if you go to Yahoo Finance, we can see the performance of VOO over the last year or so. You can see that we had around a 20% increase. Right now, the price per is around $696, just a year ago it was around $579, which is pretty good. 5 years ago, you can see that we were around at $407 and we went all the way up to around $700 and ever since inception, ever since 2010 or so, it was around $97 per share. So, we see this very consistent upward trajectory here. If you scroll down, just like what I said before, you have the expense ratio here and you can also see the dividend yields, which is around 1.07%, which is generally normal for a lot of these S&P 500 funds. They're usually around 1% to 1.4%, meaning that you get paid around $1.07 for every $100 invested per year. And then you can divide that by four because usually these dividends are paid out quarterly. Now, if you want to see what exactly that you're investing in, you can click on holdings on the left side and you're going to see a pattern here with the other ETFs that I talk about. You can see that the top five companies in here are Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Google. And with Nvidia, this is the one that's leading the way. You can see that Nvidia holds around 7.50% or there's around 7.50% of Nvidia within this fund, which is a little bit of the heavier side. So, if you invest in the S&P 500 fund like VOO, just know that 7% 8% of your portfolio is going to be rooted in Nvidia. Now, the second ETF is going to be something like VTI, which is the Vanguard Morningstar Total Stock Market ETF. Now, if you click on the Admiral Shares, you're going to see, "Okay, the equivalent for this is VTSAX." Again, very similar to what I talked about with VOO and VFIAX, this is a mutual fund. And I just want to note that with ETFs, with the in terms of functionality, there are more things that you can do, specifically with options trading. Maybe towards the end or as you graduate yourself at to be a better or more mature investor, and you want to figure out how you can hedge your portfolio, how you can generate more income, you can use strategies like selling covered calls or selling cash-secured puts or even setting up spreads during volatile market times or maybe even when the market starts to trend sideways, which is a very normal cycle in the stock market. So, with mutual funds, that's an option that you cannot use, but with ETFs, that's something that you can do because there is an option chain that exists for a lot of these ETFs. Now, with VTI, it's very similar to VOO, the expense ratio is around 0.03%. The price per share is a little bit on the higher side, so it's around $368 per share. But, because it's 2026, 2027, this doesn't really matter because a lot of brokerages nowadays allow you to buy fractional shares, meaning that you don't have to buy the entire one full share, you can just buy half a share or maybe even a quarter of a share. So, the price does not matter because percentage-wise, it still works out to be the same exact thing, okay? Now, with VTI, even though it's very similar to VOO, you just want to also note that while you're not investing in the top 500 companies in the United States, you're actually investing in more companies. So, if you want to invest in the top 3,500 companies all at once within this fund, then this is going to be a This is VTI. Now, I just want to note that even though that it says that you are investing in the top 3,500 companies, I don't want you to be deceived because again, the waiting for VTI is very similar to VOO. If you go back to Yahoo Finance and you go to the holdings right here, you can see that okay, the companies are very similar to VOO. Nvidia is around 6%, Apple is 5%, Microsoft around 3.81%, Amazon, Google. So, very similar to VOO. However, it's just that their waiting is slightly less. Nvidia was around 7.5% for VOO, but for VTI, it dropped down to around 6%. So, this way a lot of the other capital can get shifted towards the smaller cap stocks and a lot of the smaller companies. If you take a look at the performance, same thing. You can see that the one-year chart we had around a 22% increase, 5 years around 63%, and all ever since inception back in 2001, around 574%. And again, very healthy upward trending chart right here. Expense ratio is 0.03% and the dividend yield is around 1.05%, which is in par with VOO. The third index fund or the third ETF is going to be VGT, which is the Vanguard Information Technology ETF. Again, it has its equivalent of its mutual fund here, but we're not going to talk about that. With VGT, if you take a look at the little banner here on top, they actually just had this thing called a share split. They had an 8-for-1 share split. The price of VGT is around $113 right now, uh which means that just a couple of months ago, each share was around 8 to 900 dollars if we keep everything equal. Because the share price was a little bit on the higher side, Vanguard decided to split it, divided by eight, so that if you had one share, it became eight smaller shares. But mathematically speaking, everything is still the same thing. The only difference with this share split is that because you have more shares and if you get to that multiple of 100 shares or 200 shares or 300 shares, it allows you to sell covered calls. Because with covered calls, you need to have 100 shares collected in the first place. If you don't know what I'm talking about with these covered calls, don't worry. I actually made another video about it on YouTube that you can check out that I made a couple months ago. Or you can even join my 5-day investing challenge down below if you download the $1 million investing road map. You get to see all of my videos and training. And I also do a lot of live classes on how to sell covered calls. Now, going back to VGT, the expense ratio is around 0.09%, which just means that you pay around 9 cents for every $100 invested. Now, if we take a look at the charts, you can see that this actually has grown much higher compared to VOO and VTI. Because why? This tracks the information technology index. There's a lot more technology companies within this fund. So, 1 year's performance was around 36%. 5 years ago, around 122%. And in all, you can see that's around 1,789% here, which is actually very, very good. Now, if we take a look at the holdings, you're going to see why. Well, you see with Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Micron, all of these companies that you saw with VOO and VTI, the weighting is heavier. With VOO, Nvidia took up around 7.5%. This is almost more than double Nvidia, right? There's around 16.1% here. Same thing with Apple, it's around 14.33%. So, if you're someone who says, "Hey, I am okay with the volatility." Because like what I said in my other videos, if you invest in a lot of these technology ETFs, these companies, there is going to be more volatility in the short term whenever there's any negative news, any negative geopolitical events, technology ETFs and technology companies generally will drop the fastest and react to news the fastest compared to something like VOO or maybe something like a dividend fund or a dividend income fund, which I'll talk about in a little bit. But if you're okay with the volatility, if you're okay with investing in heavier tech companies like these right here, then VGT can be a great option for you. Now, the fourth ETF is going to be VXUS, which is the Vanguard Total International Stock ETF. And this is actually very good ETF, especially for those of you who have said, "Okay, Steve, with VOO, VTI, VGT, a lot of them invest in the same companies. There's Nvidia Apple Microsoft Alphabet Google. The list is always the same. Steve, how do I diversify so that I'm not just so heavily invested in the United States?" So, VXUS is going to be a great alternative. The expense ratio is around 0.05%, which again, very good. Anything below 0.50% is good. So, you're just paying 5 cents per share right here. And the market price is very affordable, attainable. It's around $84.59 per share at the time of this recording. But, again, who cares about the price because you can always buy these fractional shares. Now, if we take a look at the performance of VXUS, the one-year chart shows, "Okay, it's still in an upward trajectory, 24, 25% over the last 5 years, 29% all." It's going to be around what? We were around $50, and then now we're around $85 per share. The dividend yield is a little bit higher. It's around 2.56%, meaning that you get paid around $2.56 per $100 per year. And then you divide that by four. Okay, say that three times fast. And just like what I said before, the holdings are going to be different compared to VOO, VTI, VGT. Now, the top 10 holdings for this fund is going to be something like Taiwanese Semiconductor. There's also a little bit of Samsung and Tencent. So, these are all companies outside of the United States. Again, if you want to diversify outside of this country. Now, if you're someone who says, "Okay, Steve, I don't want to be heavily invested again into these companies Nvidia Microsoft Amazon Alphabet, Google. Then there's another alternative. There's VYM. A lot of times with like what I said before, with these high-tech ETFs, they drop really quickly during the market uncertainty. And the dividend payers like VYM generally will hold its price. And you can see that from time to time again throughout history where VYM likes to trend even sideways or it doesn't drop down as much compared to like these technology ETFs where they might drop like 20 or 30% during a correction or so. The expense ratio is still pretty good. It's around 0.04% and the market price the or the price per share is around $161 per share. Now, if we take a look at the performance over the last 1 year or so, again, very healthy upward trend, 22% 5 years around this. And then all ever since inception, one share was around $51 and we're now at around $162 per share. Now, if you take a look at the dividend yield, it's much higher because again, it's a high dividend yield index fund. It's around 2.3% at the time of this recording compared to 1.07% like with VOO. So again, if you value more of the consistent dividend payouts on a quarterly basis, you like to have more stability within your portfolio, then VYM can be a great choice. And even when you look at the holdings, you're it's going to be very different compared to the ones that we saw before. The top 10 holdings, top 10 companies include Broadcom, there's JP Morgan, there's a lot of these financial services companies. There's J&J, Exxon Mobil, some of energy. And basically, the sector weightings is going to be all of this right here. It's more in the financial services. Of course, there's tech, health care, industrials, and energy, and a little bit of the consumer defensive right here. So yeah, basically, these are the top five ETFs from Vanguard and you can try to see well, pick and choose which ones are the best for you. Now, if If a beginner investor and you're still trying to figure out how to get started, and how to set up your accounts, what to invest in based on your risk tolerance, based on your age, and everything, then you can join, or you can download my $1 million investing roadmap down below, and you get access to everything, my free training, calculator sheets, templates, ebooks, study guides. And if you have more than $50,000, I am going to invite you to my free 5-day investing challenge, where I'm going to help you get everything set up in under 5 days. And if you still need help, even with all the live chats, the private live chats that we have, the community chat room, and everything, you can even hop on a call with me. My team members will see where you are right now, where you need to get to, so you can retire comfortably, or retire earlier, and we'll give you maybe like two to three, or two to five actionable steps to move you forward. And then, potentially, we'll invite you to join our one-on-one coaching program, if that's something that you're interested in. Let me know if you have any questions down below with any of these ETFs, and please let me know if you have any other ideas on what you want to learn, or what you want to see in the future for this channel. And yeah, thank you for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.