In this tricky investment environment, it might be difficult to know what investment is good value and what could be a value trap. A diversified ASX exchange-traded fund (ETF) could be a way to take a measured approach and invest in many shares while still targeting growth.
That's one of the best things about ETFs — we can buy dozens or even hundreds of businesses in a single investment.
In an ETF's portfolio, there are going to be some losers. But, over time, hopefully there will be more (big) winners in the portfolio than losers.
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Betashares Global Quality Leaders ETF (ASX: QLTY)
What I like about this ASX ETF is given away in the name — it's global (which is good for diversification) and the portfolio is full of names that have been judged as high quality.
It has 150 businesses in the portfolio from across the world. Around 60% of the portfolio is from the US, which is lower than some other globally focused ETFs. There are a number of other countries that have a weighting of at least 1.5%, including Japan, Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, Hong Kong, Denmark, the UK, and Sweden.
For a company to be potentially included in this ASX ETF's holdings, it needs to do well on four measures: return on equity (ROE), debt to capital, cash flow generation ability and earnings stability.
The positions are fairly evenly weighted, but the biggest positions are: Automatic Data Processing, Novo Nordisk, Texas Instruments, UnitedHealth, AIA, Accenture, ASML, Cisco Systems and Alphabet.
Despite the Betashares Global Quality Leaders ETF falling around 25% since the start of 2022, it still registers a return of 10.6% per annum since inception in November 2018.
I like that this ETF has a management fee of just 0.35%.
Vanguard Diversified High Growth Index ETF (ASX: VDHG)
This ETF is really diversified, in my opinion. It's a fund of funds, meaning that it's invested in a range of different shares of assets.
While it does have a small allocation of global and Australian bonds (around 10% of the portfolio in total), the other 90% is invested in shares.
The ASX ETF invested in Australian shares (36% of the portfolio), larger international shares (42.5% of the portfolio), smaller international shares (6.5%), and emerging market shares (5%).
So, within many of those funds are hundreds of businesses. Each individual fund within the Vanguard Diversified High Growth Index ETF would offer a good level of diversification, in my opinion, so multiple funds translate into ample diversification.
While the bonds help lower volatility, I don't think this ETF will perform as well as an all-share ETF such as Vanguard MSCI Index International Shares ETF (ASX: VGS) over the long term because I think shares will outperform bonds.
I think the management fee of the Vanguard Diversified High Growth Index ETF is reasonable for all of this diversification, at just 0.27% per annum.
