iShares Dow Jones Global Leaders Screened UCITS ETF

What this fund is

iShares Dow Jones Global Leaders Screened UCITS ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from iShares, traded under the ticker IGSU (ISIN IE00B57X3V84). 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 broadly across markets worldwide. It passively tracks the Dow Jones Global Leaders index — mirroring that market instead of paying a manager to pick winners, which keeps costs low, and its largest holdings include MICROSOFT CORP, TAIWAN SEMICONDUCTOR MANUFACTURING and ASML HOLDING NV. Spread across roughly 608 holdings (the ten largest ≈ 34.3%), no one position makes or breaks the fund.

Its biggest country exposures are ~39.9% United States, ~12.5% Taiwan and ~8% Japan. By industry it concentrates most in ~35.4% Technology and ~20.3% 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 0.6% a year — about €60 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 11.8% over the past year — a gauge of how much the value moves, not a judgement of quality. It launched in 2011. 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.)