iShares MSCI India Small-Cap ETF

What this fund is

iShares MSCI India Small-Cap ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from iShares, traded under the ticker SMIN (ISIN US46429B6149). 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 across its target market. It passively tracks the MSCI India 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 0.74% a year — about €74 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 19.1% over the past year — a gauge of how much the value moves, not a judgement of quality.

It launched in 2012. 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.)