VEA vs VXUS
Vanguard FTSE Developed Markets ETF and Vanguard Total International Stock ETF side by side. Fees, fund size, returns, yield and risk, all from live data. Add a third or fourth ticker to widen the comparison.
| Data | Series | Provider |
|---|---|---|
| Prices and history | Weekly dividend-adjusted price history and fund summaries | Yahoo Finance |
| Stock metrics | Company fundamentals | Finnhub |
| Descriptions | Fund investment objective; company business description | SEC prospectus data; Yahoo Finance; Nasdaq |
| ETF facts | Stored ETF dataset, overridden by valid live fund facts | Issuer and SEC filings |
| Sharpe risk-free rate | 3-month Treasury bill yield, DGS3MO | FRED |
AUM is fund net assets; market capitalization is shown for stocks, and a row that applies to one kind only is left blank for the other. The About row is the first sentence or two of the fund’s stated investment objective or the company’s own business description; the ticker opens the instrument’s own analyzer report. N/A carries its reason on the cell; a dash means the data is unavailable, and missing dividend events do not imply a zero yield. Every instrument with price history is computed live from its dividend-adjusted history: price, trailing and since-inception returns, max drawdown, beta, Sharpe, a growth-of-$10,000 path and the dividend yield from distributions paid over the last 12 months. All returns are total returns with distributions reinvested, which is why a fund paying large cash distributions can outrun its own price chart. Fund-only fields such as expense ratio show for ETFs, and "Best" marks the most favourable value in each row (lowest fee; most years in existence; highest fund size, market cap, return, Sharpe or yield above zero; smallest drawdown) on every column that ties for it. When the live feed gives a fund’s closing prices only, its returns, drawdown and Sharpe come from the stored ETF dataset’s dividend-adjusted figures, dated in its column; a figure that still leaves out dividends reads as a price return, and its row marks no best.
Growth of $10,000 uses only dates with valid adjusted prices for every selected instrument, capped at the last 10 years: each balance is $10,000 × adjusted price ÷ adjusted price on the common start date, with nothing backfilled before inception or carried across missing dates. Lines connect the available weekly observations without smoothing; legend percentages are total returns over the displayed dates, while the table’s trailing returns and full-history drawdown use their own periods. A hypothetical historical illustration before tax, not a forecast.
Quotes refresh about every two minutes while the page is visible, summaries and weekly history about every 15 minutes, with timestamps shown per instrument. During an interruption, dated cached quotes serve for at most 10 minutes and history or summaries for at most 24 hours, marked as delayed and retried; a cache date is not a market observation date. Returns never substitute a live quote for the final historical bar, and Backtester uses monthly observations, so partial-month endpoints can differ.
About this comparison
Vanguard FTSE Developed Markets ETF (VEA) is a Vanguard exchange-traded fund in the Developed ex-US category, with price history going back to 2007. Vanguard Total International Stock ETF (VXUS) is a Vanguard exchange-traded fund in the Total international category, with price history going back to 2011. 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. VEA sits in the Developed ex-US category, VXUS in the Total international 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.
Which is cheaper, VEA or VXUS?
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, VEA or VXUS?
Holdings counts shift at every index rebalance, so scope is the honest answer. VEA covers companies listed in developed markets outside the United States. VXUS covers companies listed outside the United States, in developed and emerging markets alike. The wider scope is the one that spreads your money across more positions.
Can I hold both VEA and VXUS?
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, VEA or VXUS?
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.