QQQ vs VOO

Invesco QQQ Trust and Vanguard S&P 500 side by side. Fees, fund size, returns, yield and risk, all from live data. Add a third or fourth ticker to widen the comparison.

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Side-by-side comparison

Growth of $10,000 over the past 10 yearsDividends reinvested

What this shows. How $10,000 would have grown over the past ~10 years in each fund, based on its historical returns and rescaled so every fund starts at $10,000. It is backward-looking: a record of what already happened, not a forecast of future returns and not a forward projection. The dips are real drawdowns along the way; the Max drawdown row above is the single deepest peak-to-trough fall over the period (e.g. −33% means the balance fell to about $6,700 from its prior high before recovering). Dividends reinvested, before tax; representative for the built-in names and computed from actual history for any ticker you add.

Every instrument is computed live from its actual dividend-adjusted price history: price, trailing and since-inception returns, max drawdown, beta, Sharpe, a growth-of-$10k path, and dividend yield from the real distributions paid over the last 12 months. All returns are total returns (dividends and distributions reinvested), which is why a fund that pays large cash distributions (a managed-futures ETF, say) can far outrun its own price chart. Fund-only fields such as expense ratio show for ETFs. "Best" highlights the most favourable value in each row across the selected instruments (lowest fee; highest return, yield or Sharpe; smallest drawdown). Growth of $10,000 is a hypothetical illustration, before tax, and not a live execution quote, so verify numbers with your broker before trading.

About this comparison

Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ) is an Invesco exchange-traded fund in the Nasdaq-100 category, listed in 1999. Vanguard S&P 500 (VOO) is a Vanguard exchange-traded fund in the S&P 500 category, listed in 2010. Both trade through the day like a share and both publish what they hold. The table on this page puts them next to each other and fills in cost, fund size, returns, yield and risk from live market data.

The two do different jobs. QQQ sits in the Nasdaq-100 category, VOO in the S&P 500 category. That gap in scope drives most of what you see further down, so read the category row before the performance rows: a difference in returns between funds that own different things is a difference in what they own, not a verdict on either one.

Frequently asked questions

Which is cheaper, QQQ or VOO?

The expense ratio row in the table above answers it live, and the lower figure carries a best tag. A fee is a yearly percentage of what you hold, taken out of the fund rather than billed to you, which is exactly why it is easy to shrug at over one year and hard to shrug at over thirty.

Which holds more companies, QQQ or VOO?

Holdings counts shift at every index rebalance, so scope is the honest answer. QQQ covers the largest non-financial companies listed on the Nasdaq. VOO covers the large US companies that make up the S&P 500. The wider scope is the one that spreads your money across more positions.

Can I hold both QQQ and VOO?

Nothing stops you and plenty of people do. The question worth asking first is how much the two overlap: funds drawn from the same pool of companies leave you with one bet wearing two tickers, while funds with genuinely different scopes widen what you own. Put the pair through the portfolio backtester and the correlation tool to see which of the two you would actually be doing. General information, not advice.

Which suits a taxable account, QQQ or VOO?

Both are exchange-traded funds, and the structure itself is the part that usually matters: an ETF can hand appreciated shares off in kind when large holders leave, which keeps forced capital-gains distributions rarer than in a traditional mutual fund. What separates two ETFs is how much income each throws off, since dividends and option premiums are taxable in the year they land, and how often the underlying index turns over. Read the dividend yield row with that in mind and check your own tax position before acting.

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