How can I buy these ETFs?
Some of the ETFs you have specified have been delisted and are no longer trading.  If you want to invest in those specific ETFs, you need to find a broker that will let you buy European equities such as those ETFs.  Since you mentioned Merrill Edge, a discount broking platform, you could also consider Interactive Brokers since they do offer trading on the London Stock Exchange.  There are plenty more though.  Beware that you are now introducing a foreign exchange risk into your investment too and that taxation of capital returns/dividends may be quite different from a standard US-listed ETF. In the US, there are no Islamic or Shariah focussed ETFs or ETNs listed.  There was an ETF (JVS) that traded from 2009-2010 but this had such little volume and interest, the fees probably didn't cover the listing expenses.  It's just not a popular theme for North American listings. ETFs trade on specific exchanges. If your broker deals with those exchanges, you should have access to the ETF. If your broker does not deal with that exchange, then you will not have access through that broker. This is different than, say, mutual funds, which don't trade on the exchanges are proprietary to certain brokerages or financial institutions.
Wikipedia has a fairly detailed explanation of ETFs.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange-traded_fund Many brokers offer a selection of ETFs with no transaction costs. TD Ameritrade and Schwab both have good offerings. Going this route will maximize diversification while minimizing friction. Where are you planning on buying this ETF?  I'm guessing it's directly through Vanguard?  If so, that's likely your first reason - the majority of brokerage accounts charge a commission per trade for ETFs (and equities) but not for mutual funds.   Another reason is that people who work in the financial industry (brokerages, mutual fund companies, etc) have to request permission for every trade before placing an order.  This applies to equities and ETFs but does not apply to mutual funds.  It's common for a request to be denied (if the brokerage has inside information due to other business lines they'll block trading, if a mutual fund company is trading the same security they'll block trading, etc) without an explanation.  This can happen for months.  For these folks it's typically easier to use mutual funds. So, if someone can open an account with Vanguard and doesn't work in the financial industry then I agree with your premise.  The Vanguard Admiral shares have a much lower expense, typically very close to their ETFs. Source:  worked for a brokerage and mutual fund company "I'm really surprised more people didn't recommend UGA or USO specifically.  These have been mentioned in the past on a myriad of sites as ways to hedge against rising prices.  I'm sure they would work quite well as an investment opportunity.  They are ETF's that invest in nearby futures and constantly roll the position to the next delivery date.  This creates a higher than usual expense ratio, I believe, but it could still be a good investment.  However, be forewarned that they make you a ""partner"" by buying the stock so it can mildly complicate your tax return." In a word, yes. You can buy very low cost index ETFs, like VTI, VEA, BND, FBND and rebalance in proportion to your age and risk tolerance. Minimal management and low cost. Just saw the update: Here's some ETFs for Canada from Vanguard. Depending on your broker, you can buy these stocks directly at the most liquid local exchanges. For instance, if you are US resident and want to to buy German stocks (like RWE) you can trade these stocks over InteractiveBrokers (or other direct brokers in the US). They offer direct access to German Xetra and other local markets. "Buy the ETF with ticker ""SPY"".  This will give you exposure to exactly the S&P 500 stocks,  This is similar to the mutual fund suggestion by Ben Miller, except that the ETF has several advantages over mutual funds, especially as regards taxes.  You can find information on the difference between ETF and mutual fund in other questions on this site or by searching the web." "Bonds might not be simple, but in general there are only a few variables that need to be understood: bid, coupon (interest) rate, maturity, and yield.  Bond tables clearly lay those out, and if you're talking about government bonds a lot of things (like convertibles) don't apply (although default is still a concern). This might be overly simplistic, but I view ETF's primarily as an easy way to bring somewhat esoteric instruments (like grain futures) into the easily available markets of Nasdaq and the NYSE. That they got ""enhanced"" with leveraged funds and the such is interesting, but perhaps not the original intent of the instrument.  Complicating your situation a bit more is the fee that gets tacked onto the ETF. Even Vanguard government bond funds hang out north of 0.1%. That's not huge, but it's not particularly appealing either considering that (unlike rounding up live cattle futures), it's not that much work to buy US government bonds, so the expense might not seem worth it to someone who's comfortable purchasing the securities directly.  I'd be interested to see someone else's view on this, but in general I'd say that if you know what you want and know how to buy it, the government bond ETF becomes a lot less relevant as the liquidity offered (including the actual ""ease of transacting"") seem to to be the biggest factors in favor. From Investopedia's description: The bond ETF is an exciting new addition to the bond market, offering   an excellent alternative to self-directed investors who, looking for   ease of trading and increased price transparency, want to practice   indexing or active bond trading. However, bond ETFs are suitable for   particular strategies. If, for instance, you are looking to create a   specific income stream, bond ETFs may not be for you. Be sure to   compare your alternatives before investing." Vanguard has just recently started listing its funds in London but it doesn't look like the High Dividend Yield ETF is available yet. You'll need to either get a broker who can trade on the U.S. markets (there might be tax and exchange rate complications), or wait until Vanguard lists this stock on the London exchange. A couple points, first you don't point out what investors you want to invest with, and second BRK.B does not track anything; it is just a very small slice of his entire holdings BRK.A minus the voting rights. One solid way to go would be to buy BRK.B and also a tech ETF like QQQ, or XLK, ..or both. You can look into specific market targeted mutual funds or ETF's. For Norway, for example, look at NORW. If you want to purchase specific stocks, then you'd better be ready to trade on local stock exchanges in local currency. ETrade allows trading on some of the international stock exchanges (in Asia they have Hong Kong and Japan, in Europe they have the UK, Germany and France, and in the Americas they have the US and Canada). Some of the companies you're interested in might be trading there. Sure, but as a retail client you'd be incurring transaction fees on entry and exit. Do you have the necessary tools to manage all the corporate actions, too? And index rebalances?   ETF managers add value by taking away the monstrous web of clerical work associated with managing a portfolio of, at times, hundreds of different names. With this comes the value of institutional brokerage commissions, data licenses, etc. I think if you were to work out the actual brokerage cost, as well as the time you'd have to spend doing it yourself, you'd find that just buying the ETF is far cheaper.  Also a bit of a rabbit hole, but how would you (with traditional retail client tools) even coordinate the simultaneous purchase of all 500 components of something like SPY? I would guess that, on average, you're going to have significantly worse slippage to the index than a typical ETF provider. Add that into your calculation too. "Back in the olden days, if you wanted to buy the S&P, you had to have a lot of money so you can buy the shares. Then somebody had the bright idea of making a fund that just buys the S&P, and then sells small pieces of it to investor without huge mountains of capital. Enter the ETFs. The guy running the ETF, of course, doesn't do it for free. He skims a little bit of money off the top. This is the ""fee"". The major S&P ETFs all have tiny fees, in the percents of a percent. If you're buying the index, you're probably looking at gains (or losses) to the tune of 5, 10, 20% - unless you're doing something really silly, you wouldn't even notice the fee. As often happens, when one guy starts doing something and making money, there will immediately be copycats. So now we have competing ETFs all providing the same service. You are technically a competitor as well, since you could compete with all these funds by just buying a basket of shares yourself, thereby running your own private fund for yourself. The reason this stuff even started was that people said, ""well why bother with mutual funds when they charge such huge fees and still don't beat the index anyway"", so the index ETFs are supposed to be a low cost alternative to mutual funds. Thus one thing ETFs compete on is fees: You can see how VOO has lower fees than SPY and IVV, in keeping with Vanguard's philosophy of minimal management (and management fees). Incidentally, if you buy the shares directly, you wouldn't charge yourself fees, but you would have to pay commissions on each stock and it would destroy you - another benefit of the ETFs. Moreover, these ETFs claim they track the index, but of course there is no real way to peg an asset to another. So they ensure tracking by keeping a carefully curated portfolio. Of course nobody is perfect, and there's tracking error. You can in theory compare the ETFs in this respect and buy the one with the least tracking error. However they all basically track very closely, again the error is fractions of the percent, if it is a legitimate concern in your books then you're not doing index investing right. The actual prices of each fund may vary, but the price hardly matters - the key metric is does it go up 20% when the index goes up 20%? And they all do. So what do you compare them on? Well, typically companies offer people perks to attract them to their own product. If you are a Fidelity customer, and you buy IVV, they will waive your commission if you hold it for a month. I believe Vanguard will also sell VOO for free. But for instance Fidelity will take commission from VOO trades and vice versa. So, this would be your main factor. Though, then again, you can just make an account on Robinhood and they're all commission free. A second factor is reliability of the operator. Frankly, I doubt any of these operators are at all untrustworthy, and you'd be buying your own broker's ETF anyway, and presumably you already went with the most trustworthy broker. Besides that, like I said, there's trivial matters like fees and tracking error, but you might as well just flip a coin. It doesn't really matter." It depends on whether or not you are referring to realized or unrealized gains.  If the asset appreciation is realized, meaning you've sold the asset and actually collected liquidity from it, then Derek_6424246 has provided a good route to follow.   However, if the gains are unrealized, meaning only that the current value of the underlying asset(s) have increased or decreased, then you might want to record this under an Income:Unrealized Gains account.  One of the main distinctions between the two are whether or not you have a taxable event (realized) or just want to better track your net worth at a given time (unrealized).   For example, I generally track my retirement accounts increase in value sans interest, dividends and contributions, as income from an Income:Unrealized Gains account.  I can still reconcile it with my statements, and it shows an accurate picture for my net worth, but the money is not liquid nor taxed and is more for informational purposes than anything.   And no, I don't create an additional Expense account here to track losses.  Just think of Unrealized Gains as an income account where the balance will fluctuate up and down (and potentially even go negative) over time.