iShares € Covered Bond UCITS ETF

iShares € Covered Bond UCITS ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from iShares, traded under the ticker ICOV (ISIN IE00B3B8Q275). 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 PROGRAMA CEDULAS TDA FONDO DE TITU, TORONTO-DOMINION BANK/THE MTN RegS and BANKIA SAU. Spread across roughly 1154 holdings (the ten largest ≈ 2.5%), no one position makes or breaks the fund. Its biggest country exposures are ~25.9% France, ~19.6% Germany and ~8% Netherlands. Its heaviest sectors are ~99.8% Securitized and ~0.2% Other. 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 0.2% a year — about €20 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 0.89% (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 EUR. On the standard KID risk scale it is rated 3 out of 7 and its price has swung about 3% over the past year, which describes how much its price tends to move rather than whether it is good. It launched in 2008, and its KID suggests a holding period of medium to long term. 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.)