Vanguard US Total Market Shares Index ETF (ASX: VTS) could be one of the best options for long-term wealth building in my opinion.
Two of the main things to remember when investing is to invest in great businesses and keep your costs to a minimal.
I think this ETF could be one of the best ways to tick those two boxes.
Vanguard is a world leader in providing extremely cheap investment options to people like you and me.
The Vanguard US Total Market Shares Index ETF is one of the cheapest ETFs available to investors on the ASX. It has an annual management fee of just 0.03%. That means almost all of the returns are left in the hands of investors. There are some ETFs and fund managers out there that take a sizeable chunk of the returns each year.
In terms of being invested in great businesses, the Vanguard US Total Market Shares Index ETF provides sizeable exposure to Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Berkshire Hathaway and so on. These are some of the best businesses in the world, I'd definitely be happy owning them directly or indirectly. It has been these businesses that have helped drive the mid-teen per annum returns over the past few years with this ETF.
But it has over 3,600 actual holdings, so you're getting enormous diversification, although the exposure to many of those holdings would be very small.
This is a good way to diversify away from Australia's economy. It doesn't provide exposure to just American businesses though, many of the ones you get more than 1% exposure to here are truly global businesses.
Each year the global economy gets a bit bigger. Each year the American population and global population grows a bit more. There are questions about how sustainable continuing population growth is, but it helps ETFs like this one keep growing the underlying profit and dividends to investors.
Foolish takeaway
There are only one or two ETFs that I think could potentially claim to be better ETF investments than this one like iShares S&P 500 ETF (ASX: IVV) and Vanguard MSCI Index International Shares ETF (ASX: VGS).
