 Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the Independent Investor Channel. We're going to drop you into the Vanguard ETF account. This is comprised of the 11 sectors, the S&P 500, each of the specialty ETFs have garnered about a 10% to rate of return since the early 2000s. So what a great way to enter into the total stock market domestically here using the power of M1 Finance. I'll show you how I've custom allocated each of the sectors to the allocation that I've chosen. You guys have the freedom to choose the allocation that you want or just invest in a total market ETF or index fund. It's totally fine. I just felt like the shoe fit with M1 Finance in this style of investing is proven to be incredibly lucrative. It's gone up nicely. The account is just over two years old. So let's drop you into the M1 Finance account with the Vanguard's specialty ETF portfolio and check up on the progress. All right. So for you guys that have been with the Independent Investor Channel for a long, long time, you'll know that iFootstomp consistency has the key in your application. Nothing speaks more to that end than the Vanguard sector specialty ETF portfolio. I know that's a lot to say. I know there's probably going to be some investors out there that maybe come across the channel for the first time. Please stick with it. Spend a couple minutes with me and understand here how there are multiple ways of seeking exposure to the market. And I think that there's a lack of acknowledgement to the importance of reducing risk entering into the market with a defensive posture, using diversification, using total sector ETFs. You can use total market ETFs or even global ETFs in your application and you don't have to do it 100%. This is something that is somewhat unique to my message. This is about 38% of my total comprehensive program, this being a part of that 38%. When you look at the total overall in my strategy, this fits into the passive strategy. I repeat again. This fits into the passive strategy. For you guys out there who are working with 401Ks, who are working with TSP, who are working with taxable brokerage accounts, or even Roth IRAs, you can have specific holdings within each of those buckets, i.e. accounts, that do fall under this passive umbrella, which is the most important. I say again, passive investing is the most important bucket that you can establish over your life and it absolutely can be the standalone bucket. In other words, you don't have to add in speculative investing, you do not have to add in swing trading, you do not have to add in even a dividend growth strategy. If it doesn't fit for your family's risk profile or you as a single investor related to the time that you have to monitor active investing, this requires no time. This requires an initial establishment to the portfolio and then an allowance to just let the portfolio do what it is that it needs to do over time. The key ingredient to that is time. I repeat again. The key ingredient to passive investing is time. Only time alone will realize the maximum benefit of passive investing where the compounding value over your money will have the ample time to enjoy market appreciation. Yes, but allow your dollar cost averaging to flow into the market even during times of volatility. You can see here that this account was started in March of 2019, so this account is just a touch over two years old, not too bad. For those investors out there that want a little bit of relativity, you can kind of see how powerful this can grow over time where we look at the dividends earned here. We are getting a small stipend here. M1 Finance has just recently changed this dividend feature in that it actually shows the dividend history paid on each of those holdings. So kind of a cool feature is that M1 Finance is constantly upgrading their platform and they've done quite a good job of doing just that over time. I'm very, very proud of that and I just am the recipient of that as I do own two taxable brokerage accounts with M1 Finance. This portfolio as declared, I do share with you guys. It is shareable, so I do provide this. I will provide it in the comment section as well as in the description of all my videos just so folks can look at it. And they can use it as a benchmark to see how it is I'm seeking my passive exposure, a little bit different to going the specialty ETF portfolio route. Please understand if you use any of those affiliated links, the Independent Investor Channel is in fact affiliated with M1 Finance and proudly so. We are a proud owner of two accounts with them. But if you do click on any of the links, the channel can receive a small compensation for using my detailed custom portfolio to your liking if you do opt into their services. So the special ETF portfolio, this has been awesome. This has been added to over time. There has been no changes to date. Let's look at the chart real quick, obviously slightly leaning to the right. That's exactly what we want. I think this was started with about 1500. Yep, there it is. You invest and then you get that initial dip, of course, you invest and then boom, boom, boom, you're like, what am I doing? I'm down $25. This is totally terrible. What should I do? Should I panic and pull everything out? Well, I'm glad I didn't do that because this stayed static for a while. Small dollar cost injects of around $25 and it stayed that way all the way from March until September. So look at that guys. I only had about 300 of capital appreciation. Well, there's about 400 there as it got up to the 1900 mark. And here was the pandemic low right here where it really dropped off. And this was about the time when I strategically made my first fund up in the account. So we dropped from a pandemic low to around 2000 after gosh, six, eight months here of investing. Look at that and it dropped right here and it was down to, you know, 2000 bucks right about there. It dropped below 2000. So over that timeframe, look at that almost a total year almost to the nose of investing. And I had only made $400 took the strategic fund up here of around 2000 bucks. I think is what it was probably 2500, 2200 something like that allowed the dollar cost averaging to continue to work over time. There's my second fund up here. So you can see here how some of these strategic fund ups, there's no right or wrong time to do that. It's just I monitor the market enough. And I haven't done any since we've come all the way since then. So these were the two initial fund ups to get that little bit of a boost, little bit of extra oomph here to get that principal amount up a little bit. And then it's been slightly going up ever since then and we have not done a strategic fund up in this account since then. So here the value over time has crept over 18,000 just absolutely phenomenal performance for an account that I put zero attention on it's doing exactly what I want it to do. I considered this to be close to 20% of 18.38% toward my $100,000 goal in this taxable brokerage account. I'll continue to let it ride. I'll continue to dollar cost average it and as the business starts to really materialize will continue to fund this up over time. Some of the some of the YouTube YouTube ad revenue goes into this account for so for you guys with smaller channels out there, you know, like mine anything less than 50,000 subscribers may not even get the nod on YouTube. I feel like for the quality of content, I don't get the nod and I think a lot of people fall into that camp. You can kind of siphon some of those opportunities into a nice side account like this because if you need the money to live on that's one thing. But if you have the ability to do somewhat of a side hustle to help supplement a program like the one I'm disclosing to you now, it can really help boost your bottom line. So like my dividend to growth portfolio, I do cut this up into 11. And I understand that the VNQ is outside of the tax protection. I actually own the VNQ and I own VP you within each of my respective Roth IRAs in larger positions own 25 shares of each of these fine ETFs. These have performed magically since they came out in 2002. These have just been on fire since then around a 10% rate of a return per year and we're probably on that mark probably a lot above it because the market has been conducive to gains over that time. But I do control my allocation now remember the sector sector ETFs are comprised of small cap mid cap and large cap names within each of the respective sectors. So I've got all 11 in the S&P 500 here represented in the portfolio. I took some heat for this when I started it. Some people were like, why don't you just invest in VTI? I do. Why don't you just invest in VOO? I do. This just seems to fit like a glove in M1 Finance because if I wanted to start a an account with M1 Finance and just do VOO, I could do that. I really could. I just liked the opportunity that I had to take the sector ETFs and split them up to the allocation of my liking. So this is a little bit customized. Some people will ask me how I come to this target allocation. It's arbitrary. It's to your liking. It's one of those things that I don't think you could screw up all together. Even if you were not a very educated investor and had a lot of experience, you could kind of use mine as a benchmark. I just want to make sure that some of the underrepresented sectors in the S&P don't end up on the top here. And a great opportunity in technology ends up on the bottom here. So you just need to be a little bit critical on the allocation that you award for yourself and make sure that you're getting the most bang for your buck out of this. Energy for a long time was underperforming. And as the dollars flowed into this, it funded energy at its base. And this is exactly what happens. Now I'm overweight energy and energy is moved up. So new funds will not flow into energy now because obviously it's killing it. I mean, up just incredibly for such a small amount in this to be up 621 real dollars. This is a time-weighted return. So it's not very accurate. I'd have to click in here to actually see the real percentage of return, but not too bad. I look at this and this is just about maybe 67, 68% if my quick math in my head is serving me correctly. But nonetheless, this just shows the power of M1 Finance as these sectors are recessed. A lot of people will ask me, well, I'm just going to add VGT. VGT is a great, great sector ETF. The problem is if we have a sell-off in tech and ultimately it's almost for certain that sector rotations happen all the time. And when those sector rotations happen, you want to make sure that you're holding the entire basket of the S&P 500 to make sure that you profit from those sector rotations and hold those sectors like materials, like industrials, utilities, energy, real estate that could benefit from a rotation like that to where it's like, yeah, okay, you can go ahead and rotate and suffer a little bit on technology, but you're going to take those rotations into some of these other sectors. So each of these sectors return about 10% per year. So nothing to shake a stick out here. So collectively, as a portfolio, return it on an average of about 10% conservatively year over year. So that's exactly what we're after. I'm not trying to get too cute with this, guys. All I'm trying to do is approach this as a passive bucket that if I can get myself as close to 10% year over year return on this, then we're making a dent in this and we'll continue to grow this toward our six-figure goal. Next on the list is 25,000 on this account, then to 50, then to 100 as we meet our investing threshold. So really hope you appreciated this Vanguard Sector Specialty ETF review, guys. With that, we'll kick you back and conclude the video. So we've come out of the Vanguard ETF portfolio. Hope you appreciated the update here. Fantastic performance thus far. Great way to get exposure to the stock market for those investors out there. They don't have a lot of time to manage their investments. This is a great way to passively invest the market dollar cost average over time and benefit from the fluctuation to the upside and to buy cheaper ETFs on the downside. So it's a win-win for those investors that, again, don't have the time to sit there and stare at their portfolio every minute of every day. It's a great way to put some wealth to work in a passive manner. Time in the market is the key here with passive investing. Guys, if you appreciate the message and make sure and subscribe to the channel, leave your comments at the bottom of the video, share the message with anybody out there looking for that introductory path to the market. Passive investing is certainly that door that you need to walk through as a beginning investor. Learn to get passively invested in the market, seeing your dollars fluctuate up and down in the market. It'll build your risk tolerance over time and make you that much more strong of an investor to layer up potentially into your future. Guys, thank you so much for tuning in to the message and good luck in your investment future.