They tell you when investing in stocks it’s smart to diversify.

And that’s true … which is why you only need to buy 1. It’s VT, the king of stocks!

OK, to be fair VT, or Vanguard Total World Stock ETF, is not an individual stock–it’s an index-fund-esque ETF (which you buy like a stock) which tracks the FTSE Global All Cap Index. I just liked the headline.

And I must caveat you with the obligatory comment that this one is really not investing advice.

But anyway, VT is great because it’s the distillation of my and a lot of other people’s views on picking public stocks: don’t. It’s basically impossible to beat the market. But this begs the question: if I shouldn’t pick stocks, what stocks do I buy? The answer: all of them. And that’s what VT is. As of today, VT is a basket of 9,473 stocks from all around the world weighted by market cap, or business value. It has Apple, Shopify, and Tesla. But it also has 38 companies in New Zealand you’ve probably never heard of. 5 in Hungary, 17 in Pakistan. And you can buy a piece of almost every public company in the world for the cost of 1 VT share, currently trading for about $90.

But wait, there’s more. In investing, you get what you don’t pay for and that means you keep what you don’t pay in fees. And VT’s fees are low–really low. The expense ratio is 0.07%. That means for every $100 you invest, you’ll pay a grand total of $0.07 per year in fees. That 7 cents, not 7 dollars.

To be clear, VT isn’t the only global stock market index fund and there are other good ones out there. As long as it’s truly diversified, passively managed, and has low fees, the differences are hard to spot.

There’s an old cliche that diversification is the only “free lunch” in investing. So even though it’s strange to think of investing in only 1 thing as being maximally diversified in public stocks, if you want to do that–which you probably should–it’s near-impossible to do better than this.

Let me know what you think in the comments.