One. The whole market
What one fund that owns everything costs, what it was compared against, and how far it can fall. Read this first, whichever portfolio you end up holding.
What it holds
| Ticker | Fund | Weight | Cost a year |
|---|---|---|---|
| VT | Vanguard Total World Stock ETF | 100% | 0.06% |
That is the whole portfolio. On $10,000, as an illustration, the fee comes to $6 a year.
If you would rather set the US and non-US split yourself, two funds do the same job:
| Ticker | Fund | Weight | Fee | Cost after lending income |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| VTI | Vanguard Morningstar Total Stock Market ETF | your US share | 0.03% | 0.012% |
| VXUS | Vanguard Total International Stock ETF | the rest | 0.05% | 0.014% |
The second column is the fee. The third is what the fund actually costs you once the income it earns lending its shares to short sellers is subtracted. Both were read from filings on 17 August 2026. We have not run the lending audit on VT, so its 0.06% is a fee rather than a true cost, and the true cost will be a little lower.
Why each piece is there
VT holds every listed company in every market its index covers, in proportion to what each is worth, so you never have to decide which country or which company deserves more.
VTI and VXUS split the same thing in two, which lets you set your own US and non-US weights and costs marginally less. They also mean two funds to maintain instead of one.
What it is compared against, and what the comparison showed
The comparison is against professional fund managers trying to beat the same index. S&P’s mid-2025 scorecard found that 90.3% of US stock funds lost to their benchmark over ten years, and 93.8% over twenty. Judged on return per unit of risk it is worse: 94.4% at ten years and 96.2% at twenty. Large-company funds lost 86.0% of the time over ten years, global funds 91.7%, and funds investing in emerging markets 85.9%.
Survivorship makes it starker. Of 2,373 US stock funds alive in 2005, only 37.3% still existed in 2025. Nearly two in three of the funds you could have chosen are gone.
There is one more piece of outside evidence worth carrying. Patton and Weller took every US mutual fund and asked what funds actually earned per unit of exposure against what the strategy earned on paper. Plain market exposure came through at 6.93% a year against 6.72% on paper. Value came through at 2.84% against 7.76%, and momentum at 1.86% against 9.48%, both before the fund’s own fee. Plain market exposure is the one thing that survives the trip out of a paper and into a real account. Holding it costs almost nothing, so there is almost nothing to lose on the way.
How sure we are
Settled. The comparison is a count of what happened to thousands of real funds over twenty years, not a model, and it points the same way in every category S&P measures.
What it feels like when it is losing
US stocks have fallen 83.7% from a peak to a trough. That happened once, from 1929, and any test run over the full record has to live with it. Over the 427 months we tested, to May 2026, a cheap global index that borrows nothing fell 52.7% at its worst.
Falls are not the hard part. The hard part is the flat stretch afterwards. In the ten years to February 2009, US stocks lost 2.55% a year. As an illustration, $10,000 put in at the start of that decade was worth about $7,700 at the end. Nobody had done anything wrong.
Owning the world does not spare you either. International stocks have run 69.0% behind US stocks over 18.2 years, and had not recovered when we measured them. Through that stretch, owning the world rather than just America looked like a mistake every single year, and there was no way to know it was not one.
What would make us drop it
A fee that stops being close to zero. A fund that quietly changes what it holds, which is why the filings get re-read rather than re-quoted. And the only finding that would really overturn this: a long stretch in which most active funds beat their benchmarks, which would mean the arithmetic that makes indexing work had changed.
The decision that matters more than this page
How much of your money is in stocks at all outweighs everything above. Moving a portfolio from 60% stocks to 90% was worth 1.27 points a year, against 4.85 points of variation from one year to the next. That is more than every lean on this site combined. Choosing 60/40 is itself a forecast: it says stocks will do better than bonds by only about 1.2 points a year. One country, 1963 to 2025, with a modelled ten-year government bond, and about 24 years of your own results before you could be 90% confident about the step.