I think exchange-traded funds (ETFs) could be the best way to achieve good returns through easy investing.
The great thing about an ETF is that we can buy a large parcel of shares for the cost of just one brokerage fee.
Some ETFs allow us to buy a slice of dozens of shares whilst some low-cost international ETFs give us exposure to literally thousands of shares.
Two ETFs to think about are these ideas:
Betashares Global Cybersecurity ETF (ASX: HACK)
Some ETFs give us exposure to a specific industry. This ETF is about the cybersecurity sector which is seeing increasing demand as more and more important data is held in the cloud, and more services are delivered electronically. Thank how many hacks and DDoS attacks there have been in recent years.
BetaShares charges an annual management fee of 0.67%, which is not bad compared to active fund managers.
The ETF has top holdings like Raytheon, Palo Alto Networks, Okta, Splunk, Cisco Systems, Symantec and BAE Systems.
Since inception in August 2016 the ETF has delivered an average return per annum of 18.5% – although past performance is not an indicator of future performance of course.
Vanguard Australian Property Securities Index ETF (ASX: VAP)
As the name might suggest, this ETF is focused on Australian real estate investment trusts (REIT), we get to buy a group of all of them for diversification.
Most properties in the same sector as each other (retail, office, logistics and so on) produce reasonably similar returns, so it's hard to know which one to buy. A diversified play could be the way to go.
Around a third of the ETF is allocated to 'diversified' REITs, 30.5% is allocated to retail REITs, 18.6% is allocated to industrial REITs and 13.5% is allocated to office REITs, the rest is allocated to small sectors.
In terms of individual holdings, its largest holdings are Goodman Group (ASX: GMG), Scentre Group (ASX: SCG), DEXUS Property Group (ASX: DXS), Mirvac Group (ASX: MGR) and GPT Group (ASX: GPT).
REITs have been performing strongly recently because of the lower interest rates, but there could more interest rate cuts to come which could send prices even higher.
Vanguard charges only 0.23% per annum for this ETF and it still has a 4.2% distribution yield which isn't bad in this investment world.
Foolish takeaway
I think they're both good options to consider diversifying a portfolio, but they're not the ETFs I'd want to buy for my own portfolio right now, I'm waiting for a better entry price.
