Two ETFs for U.S. and overseas gains

Article Excerpt

Pennsylvania-based Vanguard Group is one of the world’s largest investment-management companies. The group administers over $2 trillion U.S. in 170 mutual funds. Vanguard, which went into business in 1975, offers low-fee index mutual funds. Generally speaking, Canadians can’t buy units of mutual funds that are registered in the U.S., because they aren’t registered with provincial securities commissions. For that matter, some Canadian funds aren’t available in all provinces. Canadians can, however, buy Vanguard exchange traded funds (ETFs) that trade on stock exchanges. We don’t recommend all of Vanguard’s ETFs, but here are two we do see as low-fee buys. VANGUARD GROWTH ETF $82.43 (New York symbol VUG; buy or sell through brokers) aims to track the CRSP U.S. Large Cap Growth Index, a broadly diversified index that mainly consists of shares of large U.S. companies. The fund’s MER is just 0.10%. The $32.6-billion Vanguard Growth ETF’s top holdings are Apple, IBM, Google, Coca-Cola, Philip Morris International, Oracle, Comcast, Qualcomm and…