Lan Anh Tran: IRA accounts are great options for retirement savers who do not have access to an employer-sponsored 401(k) or 403(b), as well as people who want more investment options than their 401(k) would allow.<\/p>\n
Both types of IRA accounts, Roth and traditional IRA, offer a lot of tax advantages over your brokerage trading account. A Roth IRA takes your aftertax dollars and allows them to grow tax-free. In other words, you pay no tax on any earnings if you withdraw them after 59.5 years old. A traditional IRA takes pretax dollars and allows you to defer tax on your contributions and earnings until you withdraw, presumably when you\u2019re at a lower tax bracket.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re thinking about starting an IRA, here are three solid ETF options to get you on the right track.<\/p>\n
3 Great ETFs for an IRA in 2026Vanguard Total World Stock ETF VT<\/a>iShares Core Universal USD Bond ETF IUSB <\/a>Fidelity High Dividend ETF FDVV <\/a><\/p>\n First up is Gold-rated Vanguard Total World Stock ETF, VT. Regardless of account types, the primary goal for any tax-advantaged retirement account is saving for the long term. And what better way to maximize your upside potential over the long run than to hold the stock market? VT captures the entire global stock market in a single portfolio that costs you only 6 basis points. It is the epitome of diversification and low cost, with a lot of best indexing practices baked into its construction process.<\/p>\n VT tracks the FTSE Global All-Cap Index, which sweeps in the top 98% of each country\u2019s stock market capitalization by their free, float-adjusted market cap. Float adjustment is an important consideration in a global portfolio, given the low level of public float and liquidity in a lot of emerging markets.<\/p>\n The ETF\u2019s vastly diversified portfolio gives investors exposure to all the winning names, while lessening the sting of any single failed bets. Its global reach also provides important geographical diversification, especially as most investors tend to have a strong home bias and overweight the domestic equity market.<\/p>\n These considerations have all contributed to the ETF\u2019s success so far. It beat the average peer in its global large-stock-blend Morningstar Category by 1.9 percentage points annualized in the trailing 10 years ending in December 2025.<\/p>\n Next up, Bronze-rated iShares Core Universal USD Bond ETF, IUSB. Most long-term savings accounts should own more equity than fixed income, but bonds still play an important role in your portfolio allocations. Investors saving for both their retirement and a first-time home purchase, for instance, can leverage IRA penalty exemptions to withdraw a portion of their earnings penalty-free for the down payment. There are other special circumstances that allow savers to withdraw money from their IRA before 59.5 years old without penalty, such as qualified educational expense, birth or adoptions, etc.<\/p>\n A higher-yielding bond ETF like IUSB can help lower the portfolio volatility from a pure stock allocation, while still generating decent income to help grow assets. The ETF tracks the Bloomberg US Universal Index, which captures both the investment-grade and the high-year portion of the US taxable-bond market. Its market value-weighted portfolio still favors safe government bonds and high-quality corporate debts, but the small stake in lower-rated bonds helped boost its yield. Its trailing 12-month yield was 4.2% compared to 3.9% for the Bloomberg US Aggregate Bond Index as of December 2025.<\/p>\n Last but not least, Silver-rated Fidelity High Dividend ETF, FDVV. This ETF threads the needle between income and quality. It scores each dividend-payer on the yield, payout ratio, and dividend growth. While dividend yield still takes the center stage, favoring sustainable payout ratio and healthy dividend growth pulls this ETF away from unstable companies with poor financial health.<\/p>\n The ETF picks out the best-scoring stocks within each sector for its final lineup and weights them based on their market capitalization. This essentially prevents the fund from veering too far from the sector composition of the broader market. It still takes some active sector bets, in the form of reallocating weights from the lowest-yielding sector to the highest-yielding ones.<\/p>\n The resulting portfolio delivers respectable payout while safeguarding itself from value traps that plague lax or dividend strategies. FDVV\u2019s strong process has paid up with consistently higher yields than the Russell 1000 Value Index, as well as stronger risk-adjusted returns as measured by its Sharpe ratio. The ETF beat both its large-value Morningstar Category average and the category index by over 2 percentage points annualized between its 2016 inception and 2025.<\/p>\n Watch 3 Great ETFs Having a Lousy 2025<\/a> for more from Lan Anh Tran<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lan Anh Tran: IRA accounts are great options for retirement savers who do not have access to an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":484020,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[45,49,48,133,131,132],"class_list":["post-484019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-personal-finance","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-finance","tag-personal-finance","tag-personalfinance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=484019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484019\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/484020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=484019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=484019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=484019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}