iShares STOXX Europe 600 Health Care UCITS ETF (DE)

What this fund is

iShares STOXX Europe 600 Health Care UCITS ETF (DE) is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from iShares, traded under the ticker SXDPEX (ISIN DE000A0Q4R36). One trade buys a whole basket of holdings, so your money is spread out instead of riding on a single company. At its core it is a focused, thematic fund: it concentrates on the health care part of the market, so it lives or dies by that one area rather than the economy as a whole. Underneath, it is about owning small slices of companies, so you share in their growth when they do well — and their falls when they don't. Rather than a manager picking stocks, it simply replicates the STOXX Europe 600 index — the passive, low-cost approach, and its largest holdings include NOVARTIS AG, ASTRAZENECA PLC and ROCHE PS PAR AG.

With about 55 holdings (the ten largest ≈ 74.6%), your money is diversified rather than concentrated in a handful of names. By geography it is weighted towards ~39.7% Switzerland, ~23.7% United Kingdom and ~11.1% Denmark. By industry it concentrates most in ~98.3% Health Care and ~1.1% Materials. A focused fund like this is typically held as a smaller 'satellite' position around a broader core — a way to lean into one theme, not usually a portfolio's only holding. Its ongoing charge (TER) is 0.46% a year — about €46 a year on a €10,000 holding, taken automatically from the fund.

Income such as dividends is paid out to you as cash (a distributing share class), and over the last year it paid out roughly 1.484867% (its trailing yield). It holds the underlying investments directly (physical replication); it is domiciled in Germany and UCITS-regulated, a European standard built to protect everyday investors and trades in EUR. Its price has swung about 17.1% over the past year, which describes how much its price tends to move rather than whether it is good. It launched in 2001. As with any investment, its value can go down as well as up, and past performance is not a guide to future results. (Fund data sourced from iShares.)