iShares Core MSCI Pacific ex-Japan UCITS ETF

What this fund is

iShares Core MSCI Pacific ex-Japan UCITS ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from iShares, traded under the ticker CPXJ (ISIN IE00B52MJY50). It lets you buy a basket of holdings in a single trade, spreading your money across them rather than one 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 follows the MSCI Pacific Ex-japan index (passive investing): it tracks the market rather than relying on a manager, keeping running costs down, and its largest holdings include BHP GROUP LTD, COMMONWEALTH BANK OF AUSTRALIA and DBS GROUP HOLDINGS LTD.

Spread across roughly 109 holdings (the ten largest ≈ 47.3%), no one position makes or breaks the fund. 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 0.2% a year — about €20 a year on a €10,000 holding, taken automatically from the fund. 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. Its price has swung about 15.4% over the past year, which describes how much its price tends to move rather than whether it is good. It launched in 2010. 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 iShares.)