iShares Core 60/40 Balanced Allocation ETF

What this fund is

iShares Core 60/40 Balanced Allocation ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from iShares, traded under the ticker AOR (ISIN US4642898674). 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 a ready-made mix of shares, bonds and sometimes other assets in a single fund, so the balance is managed for you, spread across its target market.

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 0.2% a year — about €20 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 8.9% over the past year, which describes how much its price tends to move rather than whether it is good. It launched in 2008. 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.)