iShares Global Financials ETF

What this fund is

iShares Global Financials ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from iShares, traded under the ticker IXG (ISIN US4642873339). 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.

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 0.41% a year — about €41 a year on a €10,000 holding, taken automatically from the fund. It holds the underlying investments directly (physical replication).

Its price has swung about 13.9% over the past year — a gauge of how much the value moves, not a judgement of quality. It launched in 2001. 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.)