iShares Global Water UCITS ETF

What this fund is

iShares Global Water UCITS ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from iShares, traded under the ticker IH2O (ISIN IE00B1TXK627). It lets you buy a basket of holdings in a single trade, spreading your money across them rather than one company. At its core it is a focused, thematic fund: it concentrates on the utilities 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. Its largest holdings include AMERICAN WATER WORKS INC, COMPANHIA DE SANEAMENTO BASICO DE and XYLEM INC.

It holds around 96 positions (the ten largest ≈ 53%), spreading risk so no single holding decides your outcome. Its biggest country exposures are ~60.8% United States, ~10.7% Brazil and ~9.7% United Kingdom. Its heaviest sectors are ~46.5% Utilities and ~42.7% Industrials. 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 0.65% a year — about €65 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 1.43% (its trailing yield). It holds the underlying investments directly (physical replication); it is domiciled in Ireland and UCITS-regulated, a European standard built to protect everyday investors and trades in USD. Its price has swung about 56% over the past year — a gauge of how much the value moves, not a judgement of quality. It launched in 2007. 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.)