iShares S&P Mid-Cap 400 Growth ETF

What this fund is

iShares S&P Mid-Cap 400 Growth ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from iShares, traded under the ticker IJK (ISIN US4642876068). In a single purchase you get a diversified basket of holdings rather than a stake in just one business. 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. Rather than a manager picking stocks, it simply replicates the S&P Mid-cap 400 Growth index — the passive, low-cost approach.

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 0.17% a year — about €17 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 17.7% over the past year, which describes how much its price tends to move rather than whether it is good.

It launched in 2000. 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.)