Vanguard's S&P 500 ETF became the first exchange-traded fund in history to surpass $1 trillion in assets, the investment firm confirmed Wednesday, according to Reuters.
The fund, which trades under the ticker VOO, crossed the threshold on Tuesday. A $1.7 billion inflow in the latest session pushed assets above the mark, according to Bloomberg. Crossing $1 trillion puts VOO in rare company — only a handful of open-ended mutual funds have ever reached that level, and no other ETF has come close.
At 0.03%, VOO's annual expense ratio is one-third that of State Street $STT Investment Management's rival SPDR S&P 500 ETF, which charges 0.09%, according to Reuters. Sitting in second place among S&P 500-tracking ETFs is BlackRock $BLK's iShares Core S&P 500 ETF, which matches VOO's 0.03% fee and has accumulated $860 billion in assets. State Street's fund, a 1993 trailblazer that effectively opened the ETF market to investors, trails with $785 billion.
"This is a key milestone," Todd Rosenbluth, head of research at VettaFi, told Reuters. "Investors continue to turn to low-cost broad market exposure to gain access to the S&P 500 using VOO."
No ETF has pulled in more cash this year than VOO, which has gathered upward of $69 billion through 2026, according to Bloomberg. That tally extends a remarkable streak: the fund posted more than $100 billion in inflows in each of the prior two years and has recorded positive net flows in every calendar year since it began trading in 2010, Bloomberg data show.
VOO had only wrested the title of world's largest ETF from State Street's fund about 18 months earlier, according to Reuters.
"As the US market has been just insanely resilient, most long-term investors are using VOO as the easy button now, not SPY," Dave Nadig, president and director of research at ETF.com, told Bloomberg.
The record also resonates beyond Vanguard, touching an ETF industry that got its start in the early 1990s. Ben Johnson, head of client solutions at Morningstar, captured the moment in remarks to Bloomberg: "This milestone is just the latest sign that ETFs are all grown up. What was once a fringe category has become the default investment wrapper for millions of investors around the world."
The irony is not lost on industry observers: the firm's late founder, Jack Bogle, was a well-known ETF skeptic, according to Bloomberg. Yet Vanguard is now closing in on BlackRock's position as the single largest issuer of ETFs in the world.