UBS MSCI ACWI Universal UCITS ETF hUSD acc

What this fund is

UBS MSCI ACWI Universal UCITS ETF hUSD acc is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from UBS, traded under the ticker AWESGW (ISIN IE00BDQZN113). 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. Rather than a manager picking stocks, it simply replicates the MSCI ACWI index — the passive, low-cost approach, and its largest holdings include NVIDIA CORP, APPLE INC and MICROSOFT CORP. Geographically it leans ~19.3% United States, ~2.5% Taiwan and ~2.4% South Korea.

Its heaviest sectors are ~18.9% Technology and ~3.3% Communication Services. 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 0.26% a year — about €26 a year on a €10,000 holding, taken automatically from the fund. Income such as dividends is automatically reinvested inside the fund (an accumulating share class), so returns compound without you doing anything. 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 35.6% over the past year — a gauge of how much the value moves, not a judgement of quality. It launched in 2017. 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 UBS.)