iShares STOXX Europe 600 Real Estate UCITS ETF (DE)

What this fund is

iShares STOXX Europe 600 Real Estate UCITS ETF (DE) is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from iShares, traded under the ticker SREEEX (ISIN DE000A0Q4R44). One trade buys a whole basket of holdings, so your money is spread out instead of riding on a single company. In plain terms it is about owning listed property companies (REITs), which earn rent from buildings and usually pass much of it on to investors, focused on the European market. It follows the STOXX Europe 600 index (passive investing): it tracks the market rather than relying on a manager, keeping running costs down, and its largest holdings include VONOVIA SE, SEGRO REIT PLC and SWISS PRIME SITE AG. With about 37 holdings (the ten largest ≈ 59.1%), your money is diversified rather than concentrated in a handful of names.

Its biggest country exposures are ~31% United Kingdom, ~16.6% France and ~16.4% Switzerland. By industry it concentrates most in ~96.2% Real Estate and ~2.6% Communication Services. It is typically held as a diversifier — a slice that behaves differently from mainstream shares — rather than as a portfolio's main engine. 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 2.005542% (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 16.2% over the past year — a gauge of how much the value moves, not a judgement of quality. It launched in 2006. Like any investment, it can lose value as well as gain, and what it did before does not predict what it will do next. (Fund data sourced from iShares.)