State Street® SPDR® MSCI Emerging Markets UCITS ETF

What this fund is

State Street® SPDR® MSCI Emerging Markets UCITS ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from SPDR, traded under the ticker EMRD (ISIN IE00B469F816). 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 small slices of companies, so you share in their growth when they do well — and their falls when they don't, spread across its target market. It passively tracks the MSCI Emerging Markets Index index — mirroring that market instead of paying a manager to pick winners, which keeps costs low, and its largest holdings include Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and SK hynix Inc..

Spread across roughly 1191 holdings (the ten largest ≈ 39.4%), no one position makes or breaks the fund. Its biggest country exposures are ~27.3% Taiwan, ~22.8% South Korea and ~11.2% India. By industry it concentrates most in ~44.4% Technology and ~18.6% Financials. Investors often use a broad fund like this as a long-term 'core' holding — a single building block that covers much of a global portfolio in one trade. Its ongoing charge (TER) is 0.18% a year — about €18 a year on a €10,000 holding, taken automatically from the fund; counting the trading costs inside the fund, the all-in figure is around 0.2%. It is an accumulating share class: dividends are rolled straight back in, compounding your returns rather than landing in your account as cash.

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. On the standard KID risk scale it is rated 4 out of 7 and its price has swung about 19.8% over the past year — a gauge of how much the value moves, not a judgement of quality. It launched in 2011, and its KID suggests a holding period of 5 years. 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 SPDR.)