Buy, Hold and Build Wealth: ETFs for Long-Term Investors

The S&P 500’s performance in September underscored the market’s underlying uncertainties. Wall Street is expected to face increased economic uncertainty in the near term, which may weigh on investor confidence.

In such a scenario, adopting a strategy like buy-and-hold to build a resilient investor portfolio is beneficial.

Understanding the Strategy

Buy-and-hold is a classic strategy offering a passive investment approach, ideal for investors seeking sustainable long-term returns. Buy-and-hold investors stay invested, regardless of bull or bear markets, letting their investments grow and compound over the years without being influenced by short-term market developments.

Buy and hold can be an ideal strategy for building wealth and managing risk, benefiting long-term investors who are less concerned about short-term market volatility or like a more hands-off investment approach.

Additionally, implementing a buy-and-hold strategy can be a prudent choice for new investors, as it helps reduce market volatility.

Buy-and-hold helps minimize the impact of investor emotions. It removes emotional behavior from investing, preventing investors from overtrading and making impulsive decisions like panic selling during downturns or overbuying in a rally, which can harm their portfolio. This is especially relevant in the current economic landscape.

Stay Invested, Stress Less

With growing near-term volatility, a complex geopolitical environment, legal uncertainties around tariffs and President Trump’s clashes with the Fed raising questions about its independence, investors are likely to become increasingly risk-averse, turning toward more stable strategies such as buy and hold.

At the same time, rising concerns over the sustainability of the AI boom highlight sector concentration risks and potential systemic vulnerabilities, weighing on investor confidence. Even subtle signals of caution or unexpected news can trigger negative market reactions, sparking investor panic, leading to broad sell-offs.

In such an environment, adopting a long-term passive investment strategy becomes the go-to approach for investors to weather short-term market storms. Riding out volatility with a buy-and-hold strategy removes the challenges of timing the market.

ETFs to Buy and Hold

Using ETFs to implement the strategy gives the additional benefit of instant diversification and tax efficiency. Below, we highlight a few ETFs that investors can buy and hold.

Investors seeking to invest in the U.S. stock market over the long term, while aiming to build a more balanced and diversified portfolio, should consider funds that track major indexes, such as the S&P 500, or broad market funds that cover nearly the entire U.S. market.

S&P 500 ETFs

Investors can consider Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO), the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) and iShares Core S&P 500 ETF (IVV), which track the S&P 500. All three funds areamong the largest in the United States.

Total Stock Market ETFs

Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF VTI, iShares Core S&P Total U.S. Stock Market ETF ITOT and Schwab U.S. Broad Market ETF SCHB can be considered.

Investors willing to take on more long-term risk can increase exposure to growth funds to pursue higher potential returns.

Growth ETFs

Investors can consider Vanguard Growth ETF VUG, iShares Russell 1000 Growth ETF IWF, iShares S&P 500 Growth ETF IVW and SPDR Portfolio S&P 500 Growth ETF SPYG.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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