The best international shares ETF for 2026 revealed

Vanguard Investments has been named Money's Best International Shares Exchange Traded Fund as part of the 2026 Best of the Best awards.

• Find out how we chose the winners
• Order your copy of the bumper awards issue
• Check out more from Best of the Best 2026

A generation ago, investing in international equities was complex and often costly. Today, Vanguard has transformed the landscape, making it easier than ever for Australians to diversify their portfolios.

Vanguard's MSCI Index International Shares ETF (ASX: VGS) is a titan in the industry and Australia's second-largest ETF. It offers exposure to approximately 1300 securities across developed international markets, including household names such as NVIDIA, Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, Tesla and JP Morgan Chase.

Backed by Vanguard's global scale, client-first culture and nearly 50 years of index fund management expertise, VGS gives investors low-cost access to developed international equity markets in a single product.

Vanguard's global reach means trades are passed to the local team for them to manage during their time zone, helping deliver low-cost execution for investors.

Daniel Shrimski, managing director of Vanguard Australia, says 2025 has been a record year for inflows into ETFs.

"ETFs like VGS have transformed the investment landscape, with cost-effective, liquid and transparent access to diversified portfolios with a single trade," he says.

How do you find the best managed funds and ETFs?

Rainmaker's managed funds and exchange traded funds awards consider a variety of factors to determine winners and finalists.

While overall medium term (five-year) performance is important, it is only one factor among many.

Our quantitative process also considers investment risk, in the form of volatility (standard deviation) and downside volatility (the variability of negative returns generated by the fund).

Accounting for a fund's risk is critically important, because it would be naive to simply award funds with the highest returns if they had also subjected investors to the highest risks.

To further improve our performance insights, we also examined performance persistence (or consistency) relative to the peer group using annual performance in each of the preceding five years.

In other words, performance persistence is more interested in rewarding investment providers that have a time series of annual returns that are competitive against the peer group, rather than just a higher average return for the period.

Finally, in some asset classes such as shares, an adjustment is made depending on whether a product has shown a persistent bias to style factors, such as value, growth and small-caps.

The best managers are chosen for having the most products shortlisted in most categories. The products are ranked in each category, and this ranking determines the number of points given to each product. The manager with the most points determines the winner.

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