iShares Core MSCI Japan IMI UCITS ETF

What this fund is

iShares Core MSCI Japan IMI UCITS ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from iShares, traded under the ticker SJPD (ISIN IE00BFM15T99). 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 follows the MSCI Japan index (passive investing): it tracks the market rather than relying on a manager, keeping running costs down, and its largest holdings include MITSUBISHI UFJ FINANCIAL GROUP INC, TOKYO ELECTRON LTD and TOYOTA MOTOR CORP. Spread across roughly 966 holdings (the ten largest ≈ 23.6%), no one position makes or breaks the fund.

Its biggest country exposures are ~99.8% Japan and ~0.5% United States. By industry it concentrates most in ~23.8% Industrials and ~19.8% Technology. It is commonly used to tilt a portfolio towards one market, usually alongside broader, more global funds rather than on its own. Its ongoing charge (TER) is 0.12% a year — about €12 a year on a €10,000 holding, taken automatically from the fund. It is a distributing share class — dividends are paid to you as cash rather than reinvested, and over the last year it paid out roughly 1.5% (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 USD. It launched in 2018. 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.)