VUAA is Vanguard's Irish-domiciled UCITS wrapper around the S&P 500. If you want one fund for US large-cap exposure as a Euro investor, this is the default for a reason: 0.07% TER, accumulating, and physical replication of all 500 names.
What's inside
| Ticker | Name | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| NVDA | NVIDIA Corp | 7.55% |
| AAPL | Apple Inc | 6.64% |
| MSFT | Microsoft Corp | 4.90% |
| AMZN | Amazon.com Inc | 3.62% |
| GOOGL | Alphabet Inc Class A | 2.98% |
The top five — Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Amazon, Alphabet — make up 20.5% of the basket. Add Meta, the second Alphabet share class, Berkshire, Tesla, and Eli Lilly and the top ten clears 28.5%. That's the S&P 500 as it actually is in 2026: roughly a third of the index sitting in ten names, half a dozen of them platform tech. Sector tilt follows from that concentration — technology and consumer discretionary dominate, while staples, utilities, and real estate end up as single-digit weights. If you buy VUAA, you're buying the modern US tech-and-platform economy with 490 other companies along for the ride.
The index itself is committee-curated — the S&P Index Committee selects constituents that meet liquidity, profitability, and float thresholds, so the S&P 500 is not strictly the 500 largest US companies but the 500 that S&P considers representative. For most purposes that distinction doesn't matter; for benchmarking, it's worth knowing why VUAA and a Russell 1000 tracker won't quite line up.
Costs and structure
The ongoing charge is 0.07% — tied with iShares' CSPX for the cheapest S&P 500 UCITS on the market. On a €50k portfolio that's €35 per year, so the fee is genuinely a rounding error and there's no point shopping further on cost alone. Replication is full physical: Vanguard owns every constituent at index weights, no sampling shortcuts. The fund is Irish-domiciled, which is the load-bearing detail for Euro investors — the Ireland/US tax treaty meaningfully reduces US withholding on dividends compared to holding a US-domiciled equivalent like Vanguard's own VOO directly. Dividends are accumulated inside the wrapper, so there's no quarterly cash to redeploy and no tax event until you sell.
Inception was 14 May 2019, share-class assets stand at $20.1 billion as of 30 April 2026, and the full fund across all VUAA share classes is $62.5 billion. The fund's base currency is USD; the share class you'll buy on XETR settles in EUR and on the LSE in USD (as VUAG) or GBP. There's no currency hedge in either case — your real FX exposure tracks the underlying basket, which is essentially 100% US dollars. Full factsheet is on Vanguard's site.
Performance in context
Live data temporarily unavailable for this comparison.
VUAA vs IWDA is the question every Euro investor eventually asks: pure US large-cap, or the broader developed-world basket? Over the past decade the US has won by a wide margin; over any given three months the answer can flip either way. Look at the chart, not the headline — and remember that recent outperformance is what's already priced in.
Who buys it and why
VUAA is the textbook satellite for a Euro investor whose core is a developed-world or all-world ETF. The typical holder is on a Trade Republic or Scalable Capital savings plan, runs IWDA or VWCE as the core position, and uses VUAA to overweight the US relative to global market cap. There's no good reason to hold VUAA and IWDA and VWCE — that's just three different bets on US mega-cap weighting layered on top of each other. Pick a core, then decide separately whether you want a US tilt on top. If you have no view either way, you don't need this fund — VWCE alone is fine and you can revisit the decision in a year.
Alternatives worth knowing
- VWCE — Vanguard's FTSE All-World UCITS. Same issuer, same wrapper, but ~3,700 stocks across developed and emerging markets instead of 500 US names. We covered the head-to-head in VUAA vs VWCE.
- CSPX — iShares' S&P 500 UCITS, also 0.07% TER and Irish-domiciled. Same index, same cost; the choice between them is mostly broker-dependent and ends up being which one has a cleaner savings-plan execution at your platform.
- CNDX — iShares' Nasdaq 100 UCITS if you specifically want the tech tilt without the consumer-staples and energy ballast. We'll compare them directly in CNDX vs VUAA.
- IWDA — iShares Core MSCI World, the €110B developed-markets workhorse. Broader than VUAA, narrower than VWCE.