iShares J.P. Morgan $ EM Bond UCITS ETF

What this fund is

iShares J.P. Morgan $ EM Bond UCITS ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from iShares, traded under the ticker IEMB (ISIN IE00B2NPKV68). 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 lending to governments and companies in return for regular interest, which tends to be steadier than shares but grows more slowly, spread across its target market. Its largest holdings include ARGENTINA REPUBLIC OF GOVERNMENT, ECUADOR REPUBLIC OF (GOVERNMENT) RegS and ARGENTINA REPUBLIC OF GOVERNMENT.

Spread across roughly 624 holdings (the ten largest ≈ 6.6%), no one position makes or breaks the fund. Geographically it leans ~6.3% Mexico, ~6.2% Saudi Arabia and ~4.8% Turkey. Its heaviest sectors are ~88.4% Government and ~10.9% Corporate. Funds like this are often used as the steadier, lower-swing part of a portfolio — the ballast that cushions the ups and downs of shares. Its ongoing charge (TER) is 0.45% a year — about €45 a year on a €10,000 holding, taken automatically from the fund.

It is a distributing share class — dividends are paid to you as cash rather than reinvested, and over the last year it paid out roughly 5.74% (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 4.6% over the past year — a gauge of how much the value moves, not a judgement of quality. It launched in 2008. 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.)