An ETF is a basket of investments you can buy as a single share. One fund can hold ten companies or two thousand. Buy one share of it and you own a small slice of every one of them.

It trades on the exchange exactly like a stock. One ticker, one price, buy or sell any time the market is open. "ETF" stands for exchange traded fund, and that first part is the whole difference from an old-fashioned mutual fund.

Why it matters on this page: the companies inside the fund pay their own dividends. The fund collects all of them and passes the cash on to you, as one payment, on its own schedule. So a single purchase can put you on the receiving end of dividends from hundreds of companies at once, without picking any of them.

What you give up. You do not choose what is inside — the fund follows its own rules, and it will hold names you would not have picked. And every fund charges a small annual fee, called the expense ratio, taken out of the fund itself rather than billed to you. It is usually a fraction of a percent, it is real, and this page does not show it. Look it up on the fund's own page before you buy.

A fund is not automatically safer than a single company. It is more spread out, which is a different thing. Everything on this page is a fact the fund reported or arithmetic on it, and none of it is a recommendation.