IVV vs SPY

IVVAiShares Core S&P 500 ETF

SPYAState Street SPDR S&P 500 ETF

In short

IVV The 2000-vintage iShares take on the S&P 500, now a $100B-plus cornerstone holding: roughly 500 large US companies, 0.03% a year, and tracking that stays tight to the index.

SPY The 1993 original, and still the ticker the market trades through. Same roughly 500 S&P 500 names as its cheaper cousins; the edge here is the crowd around it, not the fee.

Stated mandate

IVV The fund seeks to track the investment results of an index made up of large-capitalization U.S. equities.

SPY The fund seeks to track, before expenses, the price and yield performance of the S&P 500 Index.

Why people hold it

• IVV Costs 0.03% a year, a fraction of the typical fee among S&P 500 trackers, and undercuts the category's founding fund (SPY, 0.09%) on the same index.
• Tracking is the whole job, and it does it about as tightly as this peer group gets: roughly 500 large US companies, no manager discretion bolted on.
• A $100B-plus fund that trades heavily all session, which is what keeps bid-ask spreads thin for retail-sized orders and institutional blocks alike.
• Running since 2000 as a registered open-end fund, with quarterly distributions and one of the longest live records in the S&P 500 aisle.ishares.com

• SPY One of the most heavily traded funds in the market, and one of the largest. That depth is why desks treat it as the default way to move S&P 500 exposure.
• Its stated job is to track the S&P 500 before expenses, and it hews to that benchmark about as closely as anything in its peer group.
• At 0.09% a year it still undercuts the typical S&P 500 wrapper in its cohort, and it lands in the upper half of that group overall.

Worth knowing

• IVV Pure US large cap. No mid caps, no small caps, nothing overseas, so it works as one slab of a portfolio rather than the whole thing.
• It rides the index in both directions: when the S&P 500 has an ugly year, this has the same ugly year, minus the fee.
• A near-identical rival shaves a basis point (SPYM at 0.02%). On $10,000 that gap is about a dollar a year, so structure and trading habits matter more.

• SPY That liquidity has a price: VOO, IVV and SPYM track the same index for a few basis points, and the fee gap compounds over a long hold.
• It is a unit investment trust, the older 1993-vintage wrapper: it holds the index as declared and pays dividends out on a quarterly schedule.
• About 500 stocks, cap-weighted, so the largest companies carry the most weight; equal-weight takes on the same index, like RSP, spread it differently.

Full IVV profile⁠

Full SPY profile⁠