VOO has dethroned SPY as the world’s largest ETF

SPY got a 17-year head start, but Vanguard’s low-cost S&P 500 tracker now tops the ETF charts, thanks to a legion of loyal Bogle-heads... and their $632 billion.

David Crowther, Claire Yubin Oh

2/19/25 9:26AM

John Bogle, legendary American investor and entrepreneur, famed for popularizing the bedrock of modern-day equity investing — index funds — once said: “Don’t look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack!”

As millions of people took his advice, eschewing their egos and the idea of trying to pick individual winners in the stock market, trillions of dollars have flowed into low-cost index funds and ETFs. And as of this week, the biggest of those is now VOO, the S&P 500 ETF provided by Vanguard — the firm founded by Bogle himself in 1975. VOO now counts some $632 billion in total assets, per data from Bloomberg, finally overtaking its longtime rival, SPDR S&P 500 Trust, the S&P 500 tracker run by State Street.

VOO-doo economics

ETFs have become wildly popular, offering retail and institutional investors the ability to invest in hundreds of America’s largest and most innovative companies through one clean, tradeable security. But VOO was hardly first to the scene, starting only in 2010 — so how did it soar to the top of the rankings? After all, both SPY and VOO aim to do the same thing: track the performance of the S&P 500 Index.

Various arguments could be made, but there’s really only one reason: VOO is cheaper, charging a miniscule 0.03% per year for the privilege of investing in it, considerably less than the 0.09% expense ratio of SPY. No one loves a bargain more than returns-obsessed investors.

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