SPYM ETF Review – A Cheaper Way To Buy the S&P 500 Index?

The SPYM ETF from SPDR tracks the S&P 500 Index and has lowered its fee to 0.02%, making it cheaper than its competitors VOO, IVV, and SPY. Should you switch? I briefly review it here.

Update in November 2025: SPLG is now SPYM. Same fund. Just a name change in the form of a different ticker.

Disclosure:  Some of the links on this page are referral links. At no additional cost to you, if you choose to make a purchase or sign up for a service after clicking through those links, I may receive a small commission. This allows me to continue producing high-quality content on this site and pays for the occasional cup of coffee. I have first-hand experience with every product or service I recommend, and I recommend them because I genuinely believe they are useful, not because of the commission I may get. Read more here.

SPYM ETF Quick Overview

Before we get into specific comparisons, here's the quick overview of SPYM as a fund:

AUM and yield figures from ssga.com as of April 2026. These change daily.

The fund is massive, liquid, and about as boring as a fund should be, which is a compliment. It holds all 504 S&P 500 constituents (yes, technically 504, as some companies have multiple share classes in the index), weighted by float-adjusted market cap.

SPLG ETF Video

Prefer video? Watch it below. If not, keep scrolling to keep reading.

Intro – The S&P 500 Index

Recall that the S&P 500 Index is simply a basket of the 500 largest profitable publicly traded companies in the United States by market capitalization.

The S&P 500 comprises roughly 82% of the total U.S. stock market by weight and spans all market sectors, so it is often used as a sufficient barometer for “the market” as a whole (the US market, at least). Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned investor, the S&P 500 is a reliable cornerstone of a long-term buy-and-hold investment strategy for US large cap stocks. If you've arrived on this page, you likely already know those facts.

SPYM vs. VOO, IVV, SCHX, & SPY

SPYM now provides the cheapest access to the S&P 500. Previously, more popular ETFs like VOO from Vanguard, IVV from iShares, SCHX from Schwab, and SPY from SPDR were the go-to vehicles for the S&P 500. I covered all three of those in a separate post here.

SCHX actually tracks a slightly different index (more on that below). For the S&P 500 funds, the portfolios are essentially identical in terms of holdings and weighting. The differences come down to cost, structure, and who they're designed for. Here's a comparison table:

The eldest SPY, also the most expensive at 0.09%, is still the preferred S&P 500 ETF for day traders due to its comparatively greater liquidity. Buy-and-hold investors don't need to worry about that.

VOO and IVV cost 0.03%. But now SPDR has lowered the fee on its SPYM ETF down to 0.02%, making it cheaper than VOO and IVV.

SCHX from Schwab is worth a brief mention since it offers comparable exposure. SCHX actually tracks the Dow Jones U.S. Large-Cap Total Stock Market Index rather than the S&P 500, which gives it slightly broader coverage (roughly 750 companies vs. 500). It costs 0.03%, the same as VOO and IVV. It's a fine fund, but it's not a pure S&P 500 play, which makes it a different animal for those specifically targeting the S&P 500 benchmark.

SPYM previously tracked the Russell 1000 Index (when it was SPLG) and switched to the S&P 500 Index in 2020. Since SPYM now tracks the exact same index as these competitors, it now seems like the obvious choice for an S&P 500 ETF, as we should prefer the lowest fee whenever possible for any given target exposure. Fees are one of the few aspects of investing that investors can control, and differences in fees can add up over decades.

SPYM actually launched in 2005 and has amassed over $40 billion in assets, but it has not always been this cheap. Its lower fee has attracted new attention and new assets.

SPLG Ticker Change to SPYM

As of November 2025, SPLG changed its ticker to SPYM. Why the change? Basically a rebranding from State Street.

While it will certainly cause some confusion over the short term, I think it's a smart move for name recognition for the long run, as it fits nicely with their lineup of SPY, SPYD, SPYG, etc. It's basically taking the stalwart, easily recognizable SPY and tacking on “M,” presumably for “mini,” as has been done with other examples like QQQ and QQQM, IAU and IAUM, etc.

SPYM's Checkered History

SPYM has had a surprisingly eventful history for a fund that currently looks like the most boring investment imaginable. Here's the full timeline:

The key date is January 2020. That's when this fund became an actual S&P 500 fund. Any performance data before that date reflects different indices and, in some earlier periods, a higher expense ratio. So when you see SPYM's “since inception” performance cited, just know that number is a mashup of several different strategies. The performance data that's actually relevant for evaluating SPYM as an S&P 500 fund starts in January 2020.

This also explains why SPYM's since-inception tracking difference looks a bit wider than its recent numbers – earlier periods are dragging the average. The 1-, 3-, and 5-year tracking difference figures are much more informative.

Why Is SPYM So Cheap?

Essentially, SPYM is so cheap because there's a race to zero for fees to stay competitive and attract assets from investors, who demand and have grown accustomed to lower fees, particularly from providers like Vanguard. The S&P 500 is probably the most famous and most bought index out there, so undercutting VOO from Vanguard and IVV from iShares is huge in this context in terms of attracting assets for SPDR, even with the seemingly small difference of 0.01%.

The longer answer involves a brief history lesson.

When SPY launched in 1993, it charged about 0.115%. That felt cheap at the time. Then iShares launched IVV in 2000 at a lower cost specifically to compete. Then Vanguard launched VOO in 2010 and brought its investor-owned structure to the ETF world. Each move forced a response. By 2023, State Street had cut the fund now known as SPYM all the way to 0.02%, making it the cheapest major S&P 500 ETF available.

Why does State Street care? Because the S&P 500 is the most famous, most bought equity index on the planet. Winning in that product category means billions in assets under management, even at razor-thin margins. The math works if you have enough assets – 0.02% on $123 billion is still about $25 million per year in revenue. Not insignificant for running a fund that basically replicates an index.

State Street is also playing a dual game here. SPY, at 0.0945%, remains a cash cow because traders and institutions are willing to pay up for its unmatched liquidity and options market. SPYM, at 0.02%, targets buy-and-hold retail investors who care about cost efficiency. Rather than cannibalizing SPY's institutional business, SPYM is positioned to grow alongside it, each serving a different client base. Whether that stays true as SPYM reaches $200B+ in assets is a story still being written.

Following this discussion to its natural conclusion, the obvious question is whether or not fees will actually reach zero for the S&P 500 Index. Sue Thompson, head of SPDR Americas distribution, was asked in 2023 whether fees could ever hit 0.00%. Her response was that she doesn't see it happening because of the real operational costs involved in running these funds – index licensing, fund administration, custody, compliance, and so on. So 0.02% may be near the practical floor.

Does Vanguard's Securities Lending Give VOO a Hidden Edge?

I've run into this nuanced discussion a few times, and I actually erroneously thought the comparison would be murkier than it turned out to be, so it deserves explaining.

The argument goes like this: yes, SPYM charges 0.02% while VOO charges 0.03%, but Vanguard has a unique ownership structure – it's owned by its own funds rather than outside shareholders – which means it returns 100% of securities lending revenue back to the fund. Other providers like State Street keep a portion of that revenue. So even if SPYM is “officially” cheaper, maybe VOO is cheaper in practice once you account for lending income.

This is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis. It's also, for S&P 500 ETFs specifically, essentially irrelevant.

The kicker is that securities lending revenue from S&P 500 stocks is approximately zero. Securities lending revenue is generated when institutions want to borrow your fund's shares to sell short. Short sellers pay a fee to borrow. But S&P 500 stocks – Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon – are the most widely held, most liquid securities in the world. Nobody is paying a meaningful fee to borrow a share of Microsoft, because there's no shortage of shares to borrow.

The data confirms this. According to SEC filings, Vanguard's entire 500 Index Fund – on roughly $880 billion in assets – generated just $516,000 in total securities lending income for all of 2023. That's about 0.00006% of assets. On a $10,000 investment, Vanguard's lending advantage works out to about $0.006 per year. You'll lose more than that in the bid-ask spread before the market opens.

State Street's own data is even more direct: their S&P 500 index funds reported zero basis points of securities lending revenue. As in, they didn't bother writing a number with a decimal because there was nothing to report.

Where securities lending does matter is in small-cap funds (certain small-cap stocks are heavily shorted and can generate 5-20 bps of lending income), international equity funds, and sector funds with concentrated bets. But for the S&P 500, the lending advantage is a rounding error at best.

To be clear, Vanguard's structure is genuinely admirable and does provide meaningful benefits in other contexts. And the splits do vary by provider – Vanguard returns close to 95% of gross lending revenue to fund shareholders, State Street returns 85-90%, and BlackRock returns roughly 70-75% for IVV. But applying these percentages to a near-zero revenue base gives you nothing worth discussing.

The salient takeaway is SPYM is the cheapest major S&P 500 ETF on an all-in basis. The stated expense ratio is the real cost difference, and that 0.01% advantage over VOO and IVV is genuine and undiminished by any securities lending offset.

That said, that fee difference is genuinely small. We're talking about $1-3 per year per $10,000 invested. Nobody is getting rich or going broke on a single basis point.

What About Index Tracking Difference?

In the interest of being comprehensive here, since we talked about securities lending, we should probably cover the tracking difference concern too, but I'll go ahead and give away the punchline: it's a non-issue.

Expense ratios get all the press, but they're not the full story. The expense ratio is what the fund charges you on paper. The tracking difference is what you actually lose relative to the index in practice, and those two numbers aren't always the same.

Tracking difference is simple. It's just the annual return gap between the fund and the benchmark index it's attempting to track, as tracking is almost never perfect because these funds are using representative sampling to replicate the index, not recreating it 1:1.

A fund that returns 9.97% when the S&P 500 returns 10.00% has a tracking difference of -0.03%. A fund with a 0.03% expense ratio should theoretically have about a -0.03% tracking difference, all else equal, but all else is rarely equal. Transaction costs, dividend reinvestment efficiency, securities lending income (where it exists), index reconstitution timing, and cash management all nudge the number up or down. Tracking difference is usually a more complete measure of what owning the fund actually costs you.

Here's how SPYM, VOO, and IVV stack up on this metric:

A few observations worth noting from this are:

1. SPYM's 1- and 3-year tracking differences are tight and consistent with its 0.02% expense ratio, running about -0.03% in both windows. The slightly wider 5- and 10-year figures (-0.04% and -0.05%) reflect the fund's earlier life under different indices and a higher expense ratio, neither of which is relevant to evaluating what you're buying today. If you strip out the pre-2020 history and look only at the S&P 500 era, SPYM's tracking is right where it should be.
2. IVV is arguably the most precise tracker of the group, frequently cited as such by Morningstar analysts, with tracking differences that hug its 0.03% expense ratio closely or occasionally beat it. Whether this gives IVV a real-world edge over SPYM is debatable – we're talking about basis point fractions that are indistinguishable from noise at normal investment horizons – but it's worth knowing.
3. VOO's tracking difference runs roughly in line with its 0.03% expense ratio across time periods, with some year-to-year variation. To be fair, some years VOO has actually beaten the index on a return basis (tracking difference turns positive), which reflects Vanguard's efficient operations.

The practical takeaway is that for long-term investors choosing between SPYM, VOO, and IVV, the tracking difference data doesn't flip the cost ranking or reveal any hidden surprises. On the tracking difference consideration, the 3 funds are, for all practical intents and purposes, as near as makes no difference, the same.

SPYM's 1 basis point stated fee advantage over VOO and IVV holds up in the real-world data. The differences among the three are small enough that fund selection criteria beyond raw cost – brokerage relationship, share price convenience, philosophical affinity for Vanguard's ownership structure – are perfectly legitimate tiebreakers.

Should You Switch from VOO to SPYM?

I see this question asked a lot since State Street cut SPYM to 0.02%. The answer depends almost entirely on where you're holding these funds.

In a tax-advantaged account (IRA, 401k, HSA), switching is painless. There's no tax event, and you'd capture the 0.01% annual fee savings going forward. On a $100,000 portfolio, that's $10 per year. I'm not going to pretend that's life-changing, but it's real money and it compounds. Whether the mild inconvenience of rebalancing is worth it is entirely a personal call.

In a taxable account with meaningful unrealized gains, it's probably best not to switch. Here's the math: if you've held VOO for several years and have, say, 50% unrealized gains on a $100,000 position, selling triggers capital gains taxes. Even at the lower 15% long-term rate, that's $7,500 in taxes owed. At 0.01% per year in fee savings, you'd need 750 years to break even, which sounds ambitious.

For new money going forward, SPYM is a perfectly legitimate choice and, on the numbers, the slightly cheaper option. If you already have VOO and are just deploying new cash, there's a reasonable argument for using SPYM to rebalance toward the lower-cost option without triggering taxes on anything. Or just keep buying VOO for consistency. Both are excellent funds.

Bogleheads are often Vanguard purists, and rightfully so, so I'd be remiss not to mention a few other practical considerations:

The Vanguard ownership structure: Vanguard is owned by its funds, which are owned by fund investors. This creates genuine alignment of interests that doesn't exist at publicly traded firms like State Street. It's not easily quantifiable in a fee comparison table, but it's a real reason many people understandably maintain a preference for Vanguard products.

Share price: At the time of writing, SPYM trades around $80 vs. VOO at about $625. If your brokerage doesn't support fractional shares (or you prefer whole shares), SPYM's lower price makes it more accessible for smaller accounts or regular contribution investors.

Brokerage loyalty: If you use Vanguard's brokerage and have your financial life organized there, VOO keeps things tidy and that has real intangible value.

Is SPYM a Good Investment?

So is SPYM a good investment? Sure, assuming you want to buy and hold the S&P 500.

SPYM is exactly what it says it is: the cheapest major way to buy the S&P 500. The 0.02% expense ratio is real, the fund is massive and liquid, the structure is clean (open-end, not a UIT), and the ticker change from SPLG is a complete non-event for anyone who owns it (nothing changed except the name on the box).

Is it meaningfully better than VOO or IVV? Barely. The 0.01% fee difference between SPYM and its two main competitors amounts to $1 per $10,000 invested annually. You've probably lost more than that reading this article (kidding). Still, a lower fee is a lower fee.

The more interesting finding from researching this post is that the somewhat widely circulated idea that Vanguard's 100% securities lending return gives VOO a hidden cost advantage over SPYM is essentially a myth for S&P 500 funds. The lending revenue on large-cap U.S. stocks is so close to zero that the split percentage is irrelevant. If you want to argue Vanguard's ownership structure makes it a better long-term partner for investors, that's a nontrivial consideration, but the securities lending math per se doesn't change the cost ranking.

SPYM may make more sense for:

• Investors who want the lowest stated expense ratio among major S&P 500 ETFs.
• Investors at brokerages without a strong Vanguard or iShares relationship.
• Investors with smaller accounts and/or no access to fractional shares where SPYM's lower share price is practically useful.
• New investors building a portfolio for the first time who want to start cheap and stay cheap.

VOO may make more sense for:

• Investors who already hold VOO with substantial gains in a taxable account (switching would trigger a tax hit that outweighs any small fee savings).
• Investors who value Vanguard's unique ownership structure and long-term investor alignment.
• Investors using the Vanguard brokerage platform where VOO fits naturally into an existing setup.
• Bogleheads who are Vanguard purists and want to maintain that garnet color scheme throughout their portfolio.

SPYM should be available at any major broker, including Vanguard, Robinhood, Fidelity, etc. I've seen social media rumblings about SPLG not being available at one broker or another, but that's because those people didn't realize the ticker changed to SPYM; the specific ticker SPLG would not be found.

My choice is M1 Finance. The online broker has zero transaction fees and offers fractional shares, dynamic rebalancing, and a modern, user-friendly interface and mobile app. I wrote a comprehensive review of M1 Finance here.

What do you think of SPLG / SPYM? Do you own it? Let me know in the comments.

Disclosures:  I am long VOO in my own portfolio.

Interested in more Lazy Portfolios? See the full list here.

Disclaimer:  While I love diving into investing-related data and playing around with backtests, this is not financial advice, investing advice, or tax advice. The information on this website is for informational, educational, and entertainment purposes only. Investment products discussed (ETFs, mutual funds, etc.) are for illustrative purposes only. It is not a research report. It is not a recommendation to buy, sell, or otherwise transact in any of the products mentioned. I always attempt to ensure the accuracy of information presented but that accuracy cannot be guaranteed. Do your own due diligence. I mention M1 Finance a lot around here. M1 does not provide investment advice, and this is not an offer or solicitation of an offer, or advice to buy or sell any security, and you are encouraged to consult your personal investment, legal, and tax advisors. Hypothetical examples used, such as historical backtests, do not reflect any specific investments, are for illustrative purposes only, and should not be considered an offer to buy or sell any products. All investing involves risk, including the risk of losing the money you invest. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Opinions are my own and do not represent those of other parties mentioned. Read my lengthier disclaimer here.