 What's up everybody, it's Stas here, welcome back to another video. So in today's video, we're going to be talking about my favorite international ETF, the number one international ETF that I actually own throughout my stock market portfolios. And for those of you guys that actually watch my M1 Finance portfolio series where I'm creating an M1 Finance portfolio from absolute scratch, you see that I actually own this ETF in that portfolio. And in this video, we're going to be talking about assets under management for this ETF, what stocks this ETF owns and the countries that this ETF is really diversified across because that is super, super important. So without further ado guys, without wasting any more time, let's take a look at the chart of this ETF and I'll tell you what ticker symbol the ETF is before we do hop into the Safari tab and talk about some more details about the ETF. So right here, the ETF is VEA, it's called the Vanguard FTSE Developed Markets ETF and this is the performance of this ETF over the past 20 years on the 20 year one month chart as you guys can see here on Thinkors Swim. We can see when the last recession hit in 2008, this ETF along with many other ETFs and many other stocks out there, asset classes got rocked, right? This one went from 56 down to about $19 and if you were keeping cash on the sidelines, if you were waiting for opportunities back in 2008 to really invest and diversify your portfolio across some international funds and you were to get in at let's say $23, $22, whatever, if you time the bottom perfectly at $19, you know you would be up right now about 100% on your position, right? You would have doubled your money across 10, 11 years and a fund, that's a yield of about 10 to 11% per year over the past 10 years if you were to buy during the last recessionary period which is pretty, pretty good, right? So VEA, this is really the price performance over the past couple of years and you guys can see we've seen many corrections in the past where if you were to invest, if you were to buy money into the fund at that point, you know you would have came out on top over the next couple of years. So let's hop to my Safari tab very quickly here so we can break down this ETF and we can really go over the specs of this ETF and what I personally look for. So remember, an ETF is an exchange traded fund. So it's a fund that is managed by people because it has many different assets in it. This one in particular has thousands of holdings guys and when a fund is managed, they're going to need the people that are managing it, they're going to need a fee from you and this fee, sometimes you see in the financial industry, people are paying you know 1, 2, 3% sometimes and some of these mutual funds for their accounts to get managed which is absolutely crazy right. You see even some ETFs out there, they have expense ratios of like 0.3, 0.4, 0.5 and those are very rich expense ratios. The higher you get, that means the less return you're making because you're paying more and more to the person managing the fund right. So in this case, the expense ratio is extremely low. This is very very good 0.05%, not even 0.1% guys. So this is a very minuscule expense ratio which I very much like. So if we go to portfolio and management very quickly, we can see the region allocation of this fund and by the way guys, this fund does not include the United States. This is a way to diversify your money in developed countries that do not include the United States which I personally like because in my personal stock market portfolio, I have a lot of holdings that are United States companies. So this is kind of the point of investing in a fund like this is to get out of you know the United States a bit right. So number of stocks it holds, like I said, a lot of these funds have thousands of stocks. This one has 39.50, almost 4,000 stocks guys. The median market cap here is 27.1 billion fund total net assets, 108.7 billion share class total net assets, 69 billion. If we go here the month end, 10 largest holdings back at the end of the May month of 2019. We have Nestle, Royal Dutch. We have Roche Holding, Samsung Electronics, Novartis. We have Unilever, Toyota, BP and a lot of these companies you may be saying I don't really know some of these companies right and that is okay. All you need to know is that there are many many many companies in this fund and it's so so diversified throughout all of these different companies and stocks right. And the market allocation which again is extremely important you want to see what countries what regions is this fund diversified across. We can see here Japan 21% United Kingdom 14.9% Canada 8.8% France 8.5% Switzerland 7.4% and the list goes on and it's very nice to see you know other than Japan and United Kingdom which are the two highest obviously market allocations of this fund is really spread nicely throughout the rest other than the top two. You have you know 8% 8% in France you have 7.7% in Germany and Switzerland 6.4% in Australia and Korea. I think it's very nicely spread you know throughout a bunch of these developed countries and developed markets. So another important thing when looking at exchange traded funds when looking at ETFs is to see the distributions and in this case this ETF another reason why I really like it is it pays a dividend guys a beautiful dividend and for those of you guys that do not know what a dividend is pretty much when a company produces earnings they have the choice to either reinvest those earnings back into the company whether it be in research and development hiring new employees maybe creating and launching new products for marketing or they can take that money and instead of you know reinvesting it back into the company they can take it and pay it out to shareholders in the form of dividends and this happens either quarterly or monthly depending on what it is you're investing in. And another thing I forgot to mention guys is these dividends you can actually reinvest them back into the ETF and therefore the next quarter that rolls around if you reinvest those dividends you'll have more shares and from these more shares you'll get even more dividends because the more shares you have the more dividends you have and this my friends is the beautiful thing about investing long term investing and compound interest. So taking a look at the dividend paying history here for ticker symbol VEA it is quite clear that this is a quarterly paying dividend ETF just take a look here guys at the record date and the payable date one payment was made in March of 2018 another payment in June of 2018 another payment in September and another payment in December hence it being a quarterly dividend ETF because there were four payments throughout the year right and again I own this one in my M1 finance portfolio and if I recall correctly guys it is paying roughly a 2.7 to a 2.8% dividend right now and if you guys actually want to see that portfolio series me creating a portfolio from absolute scratch on M1 finance that playlist is linked down below and I guarantee you guys will find a ton of value in there. So all in all guys I'm really liking the dividend here on ticker symbol VEA. So my whole reasoning behind investing in a developed market ETF a developed international market ETF is to really just get exposure to other countries and you may be telling yourself you may be asking yourself stocks you know aren't some of the stocks you already own don't they already have exposure to international countries sure they do a lot of the companies I own like Apple for example it has business in China right that is another form of international exposure but I personally like getting some direct international exposure with companies that are actually based out of these other foreign countries whether it be you know in Europe whether it be in Asia and so forth and that the guys in my opinion is very important to overall diversity in a portfolio and you know it doesn't have to be an extremely large portion of your portfolio it can literally be 3% 2% of your portfolio 5% of your portfolio but it being there I think is super important again to just benefit from the overall global you know growth of the economies out there and some of the other developed markets so that's pretty much it for today's video guys if you enjoyed it feel free to go down below and hit that like button it really supports me and supports the channel in general if you want to see further content for me consider subscribing hit that notification bell so you're notified every single time that I do make a video I appreciate all you guys watching drop a comment down below let me know what you guys think about this ETF or any other ETFs you guys own or track I would love to know I'll catch you all in the next video thanks again for watching peace out