The universe of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) includes more than 15,000 products worldwide, ranging from sophisticated and tactical funds to rather vanilla index funds tied to tried-and-true benchmarks. Among the latter, few are more popular than S&P 500 ETFs.
The S&P 500 Index is one of the stock market's most widely followed benchmarks, because it's comprehensive, diversified and fairly easy to understand. It tracks the shares of 500 large, predominantly U.S-domiciled companies that trade on the major American exchanges. That's it.
