iShares MSCI World Materials Sector Advanced UCITS ETF

What this fund is

iShares MSCI World Materials Sector Advanced UCITS ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from iShares, traded under the ticker WMTS (ISIN IE00BJ5JP766). It lets you buy a basket of holdings in a single trade, spreading your money across them rather than one company. At its core it is a focused, thematic fund: it concentrates on the materials part of the market, so it lives or dies by that one area rather than the economy as a whole. Underneath, 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. It passively tracks the MSCI World index — mirroring that market instead of paying a manager to pick winners, which keeps costs low, and its largest holdings include LINDE PLC, BHP GROUP LTD and ECOLAB INC.

With about 106 holdings (the ten largest ≈ 39.6%), your money is diversified rather than concentrated in a handful of names. Geographically it leans ~40.4% United States, ~15% Canada and ~10.6% Australia. By industry it concentrates most in ~99.5% Materials and ~0.5% Other. A focused fund like this is typically held as a smaller 'satellite' position around a broader core — a way to lean into one theme, not usually a portfolio's only holding. Its ongoing charge (TER) is 0.18% a year — about €18 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 1.566293% (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. Its price has swung about 20.7% over the past year, which describes how much its price tends to move rather than whether it is good. It launched in 2022. 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.)