The Smartest ETF to Buy With $500 Today Is the Vanguard Value ETF (VTV) -- No Matter Where the Market Goes Next

• Vanguard Value offers an alternate to growth-heavy scale funds.

• It besides pays a respectable dividend yield.

• 10 stocks we similar amended than Vanguard Index Funds - Vanguard Value ETF ›

If you've got $500 burning a spread successful your pouch and you're looking to put it for galore years successful immoderate promising stocks, see the Vanguard Value ETF (NYSEMKT: VTV). It's an scale money focused connected worth stocks, and if you're disquieted astir a imaginable marketplace correction oregon economical recession, it could beryllium a large imaginable for you.

Here's a person look astatine the exchange-traded money (ETF), however it invests its shareholder dollars, and its apical holdings. (Remember that an ETF is simply a money that trades similar a stock, making it casual to get successful and retired of.)

The Vanguard Value ETF tracks the CRSP U.S. Large Cap Value Index, which measures the show of large-capitalization worth stocks. It determines which ones suffice arsenic worth stocks by assessing the pursuing factors: price-to-book ratios, forward-looking price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios, humanities price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios, price-to-dividend ratios, and price-to-sales ratios.

Vanguard is known for debased fees, among different things, and this ETF is nary exception, sporting a tiny disbursal ratio (annual fee) of conscionable 0.04%. So for each $10,000 you person invested successful it, you'll wage lone $4 per twelvemonth successful fees.

The array shows however the ETF has performed lately. I'm including the show of the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (NYSEMKT: VOO) arsenic good for comparison.

Data source: Morningstar.com, arsenic of Dec. 9, 2025.

It's existent that the S&P 500 (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC) ETF has outperformed the worth ETF, but that's due to the fact that it includes galore maturation stocks -- which tin autumn harder during marketplace pullbacks than worth stocks apt will. Consider, too, that a modular S&P 500 money volition person astir 40% of its full worth successful conscionable its apical 10 holdings -- retired of 500 holdings.

By the way, those apical 10 volition see companies specified arsenic Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon. Nvidia unsocial precocious made up astir 8.5% of the worth of the S&P 500 index.

So what, then, is successful the Vanguard Value ETF? Here are the ETF's caller apical holdings:

Data source: Vanguard.com. As of Oct. 31, 2025.