iShares MSCI EAFE Value ETF

What this fund is

iShares MSCI EAFE Value ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from iShares, traded under the ticker EFV (ISIN US4642888774). 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 passively tracks the MSCI EAFE index — mirroring that market instead of paying a manager to pick winners, which keeps costs low.

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 0.31% a year — about €31 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 15% over the past year, which describes how much its price tends to move rather than whether it is good.

It launched in 2005. 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.)