Supercharge Your Retirement Account With This Powerful ETF

Slow and steady wins the race -- it's generally quite true when it comes to investing. Invest regularly in the overall stock market for many years and you're likely to amass a sizable nest egg.

But what if you want to do better than that? Well, you might add shares of a certain ETF, because it's full of many businesses that are not only strong and growing, but are also, in many cases, trading at lower valuations than they have in a long time, because of the stock market's recent pullback.

Meet the QQQ

The Invesco QQQ ETF (QQQ +0.11%) is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) -- very much like a mutual fund that trades very much like stocks do. (In other words, you can buy as much or as little of it as you want via your regular brokerage account.) The ETF is an index fund, tracking the Nasdaq-100 Index of 100 largest non-financial companies listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange, based on market cap.

The folks at Invesco note that the Invesco QQQ is "rated the best-performing large-cap growth fund (1 of 317) based on total return over the past 15 years by Lipper, as of [March] 31, 2022."

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NASDAQ: QQQ

Invesco QQQ Trust

Today's Change

(0.11%) $0.67

Current Price

$584.98

Key Data Points

Day's Range

$571.92 - $586.05

52wk Range

$402.39 - $637.01

Volume

51M

Avg Vol

66M

Dividend Yield

0.48%

Here are some more reasons you might want to add it to your portfolio:

It has a solid performance record

Data source: Morningstar.com as of June 28, 2022. 

Pretty impressive, right? And those numbers reflect a recent drop in value, too: The ETF's price was recently down more than 28% year to date.

It charges fairly low fees

Many ETFs do charge lower expense ratios (annual fees) than the Invesco QQQ, but the Invesco ETF's fees are still reasonably low, at 0.20%. Invest, say, $10,000 in the ETF and you'll pay about $20 for the year in fees.

You can be instantly diversified

As with most mutual funds and ETFs, the Invesco QQQ will distribute your money across a host of different securities -- in this case, 100 different companies.

You don't have to pick and choose among leading technology-heavy companies

A big advantage of funds is that they do the selection of investments for you, relieving you of the work of studying companies and making buy-and-sell decisions over a long period.

Here are the top 15 companies in the Invesco QQQ -- and the portion of your money that was recently allocated to each:

Data source: Invesco.com. 

Those are the biggest holdings, but among the other 90 stocks are plenty that you might know and might welcome in your portfolio, such as:

• Airbnb 
• CrowdStrike
• Datadog 
• DocuSign
• Intuitive Surgical
• Netflix
• Palo Alto Networks 
• PayPal 
• Qualcomm 
• Starbucks 
• Texas Instruments 
• Vertex Pharmaceuticals
• Zoom Video Communications

You can grab bargains easily

This is an especially auspicious time to invest in this ETF, since so many of its holdings have fallen so sharply lately. Check out a few examples:

Data sources: Yahoo! Finance and author calculations.

If these are the kinds of companies you'd like to own, it's best to buy them at lower prices, which is where they are these days.

You can collect dividends

Since more than a few of the ETF's holdings are dividend payers, the ETF pays a dividend, passing those payouts out to shareholders. It's not an enormous one, though, recently yielding 0.67%.

There's a compelling case for parking some of your money in the Invesco QQQ ETF, in the hope of supercharging your portfolio, but it's not the only game in town. A little digging online will turn up many other great index funds and growth stocks.