Got $200 per Month? This ETF Could Turn It Into $704,000 or More (2024)

FAQs

How to calculate ETF return? ›

Return on investment (ROI) allows you to measure how much money you can make on a financial investment like a stock, mutual fund, index fund or ETF. You can calculate the return on your investment by subtracting the initial amount of money that you put in from the final value of your financial investment.

What is the Average ETF Return? The average ETF return will vary depending on each fund's strategy and goals. However, broad market ETFs generate an average return between 7-10%. You can invest in ETFs that track specific types of stocks, such as high dividend-paying companies.

Though ETFs allow investors to gain as stock prices rise and fall, they also benefit from companies that pay dividends. Dividends are a portion of earnings allocated or paid by companies to investors for holding their stock.

For most individual investors, ETFs represent an ideal type of asset with which to build a diversified portfolio. In addition, ETFs tend to have much lower expense ratios compared to actively managed funds, can be more tax-efficient, and offer the option to immediately reinvest dividends.

Imagine you wish to amass $3000 monthly from your investments, amounting to $36,000 annually. If you park your funds in a savings account offering a 2% annual interest rate, you'd need to inject roughly $1.8 million into the account.

Generally, passively managed ETFs and index mutual funds should have a lower turnover ratio. If a passively managed fund is turning over at a rate of more than 20% to 30%, that could suggest that the fund is being mismanaged. With actively managed funds, there's no such thing as a too-high ratio.

Holding an ETF for longer than a year may get you a more favorable capital gains tax rate when you sell your investment.

You can make money from ETFs by trading them. And some ETFs pay out the money the ETF makes to investors. These payments are called distributions.

In order to withdraw from an exchange traded fund, you need to give your online broker or ETF platform an instruction to sell. ETFs offer guaranteed liquidity – you don't have to wait for a buyer or a seller.

You expose your portfolio to much higher risk with sector ETFs, so you should use them sparingly, but investing 5% to 10% of your total portfolio assets may be appropriate. If you want to be highly conservative, don't use these at all. Consider the two funds below.

What is the safest ETF? ›

Vanguard S&P 500 ETF

Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are one of the safer types of investments out there, as they require less effort than investing in individual stocks while also increasing diversification.

For instance, some ETFs may come with fees, others might stray from the value of the underlying asset, ETFs are not always optimized for taxes, and of course — like any investment — ETFs also come with risk.

Dividends and interest payments from ETFs are taxed similarly to income from the underlying stocks or bonds inside them. For U.S. taxpayers, this income needs to be reported on form 1099-DIV. 2 If you earn a profit by selling an ETF, they are taxed like the underlying stocks or bonds as well.

To determine true yield, investors can total all distributions over the preceding 12 months and divide the sum by the NAV at that time.

Dividend-paying equity ETFs offer potential capital gains from increases in the prices of the stocks your ETF owns, plus dividends paid out by those stocks. Bond fund ETFs may provide more reliable interest income from investments held in government bonds, agency bonds, municipal bonds, corporate bonds, and more.

NAV = (assets - liabilities) / ETF shares outstanding

However, the NAV is an important value because if the market price deviates too much from the NAV, institutional investors will engage in trades to arbitrage the price back closer to its NAV.

Over the past decade, you would have done even better, as the S&P 500 posted an average annual return of a whopping 12.68%. Here's how much your account balance would be now if you were invested over the past 10 years: $1,000 would grow to $3,300. $5,000 would grow to $16,498.