A sound investment process and strong management team underpin iShares MSCI Emerging Markets Sm-Cp ETF's Morningstar Medalist Rating of Silver. The portfolio maintains a cost advantage over competitors, priced within the cheapest fee quintile among peers.  

 The strategy's effective investment philosophy supports a High Process Pillar rating. Independent of the rating, analysis of the strategy's portfolio shows it has maintained a significant overweight position in liquidity exposure and an underweight in quality exposure compared with category peers. High liquidity exposure is attributed to stocks with a high trading volume, lending managers more flexibility. And a low quality exposure is rooted in stocks with higher financial leverage and lower profitability. The strategy’s management team earns an Above Average People Pillar rating. The strategy's parent organization earns the firm an Above Average Parent Pillar rating. People Pillar and Parent Pillar ratings for this strategy are indirectly assigned by a Morningstar analyst rather than algorithmically derived. Please see the notes following each pillar section for more details. The details of assigning methods can be found in each pillar section.

Analyst Rating

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Morningstar's evaluation of this security's process aims to determine the likelihood that it will outperform its Morningstar Category benchmark on a risk-adjusted basis over the long term. iShares MSCI Emerging Markets Sm-Cp ETF earns a High Process Pillar rating. The most significant contributor to the rating is the fund's impressive long-term risk-adjusted performance. This can be seen in its five-year alpha calculated relative to the category index, which suggests that the process was successful over that period. This fund tracks an index, which also increases its process rating. Historical data, such as Morningstar's Active/Passive Barometer, shows that passively managed funds have generally outperformed their active counterparts, especially over longer time horizons. 

The investment strategy as stated in the fund's prospectus is:  The investment seeks to track the investment results of the MSCI Emerging Markets Small Cap Index.  The fund generally will invest at least 80% of its assets in the component securities of the underlying index and in investments that have economic characteristics that are substantially identical to the component securities of the underlying index. The index is designed to measure the performance of equity securities of small-capitalization companies in emerging market countries. 

 The portfolio is overweight in industrials and healthcare relative to the category average by 12.3 and 5.4 percentage points, respectively. The sectors with low exposure compared to category peers are financial services and technology, underweight the average by 11.3 and 6.8 percentage points of assets, respectively. The portfolio is positioned across 1,643 holdings and is diversified among those holdings. In its most recent portfolio, 3.6% of the fund’s assets were concentrated in the top 10 fund holdings, compared to the category average's 25.4%. And finally, in terms of portfolio turnover, looking at year-over-year movements, 43% of the fund's holdings have turned over, whether through increasing, decreasing, or changing a position.

High

Process

iShares’s team is strong compared with others in the industry, resulting in an Above Average People Pillar rating. There are three managers listed on the fund: Greg Savage, Jennifer Hsui, Paul Whitehead. Experience on the team is abundant, with 18 years of average portfolio management experience. Together, they manage a total of 258 strategies, with a Silver asset-weighted average Morningstar Medalist Rating, indicating the potential to deliver positive alpha relative to the category median in aggregate.  

 Note: This People Pillar rating is indirectly assigned by an analyst. Morningstar analysts evaluate the People Pillar for passive products at the brand level and may also differentiate by asset class. There is at least one other passive strategy at the firm that is covered by a Morningstar analyst, so the People Pillar rating of the fund is inherited from the rating that the Morningstar analyst assigned to investment vehicles under the same brand name.

Above Average

People

BlackRock offers compelling options across asset classes and vehicles. It earns an Above Average rating for Parent. 
The firm’s approximately USD 8 trillion in assets under management, as of Sept. 30, 2022, gives it unparalleled scale and influence. It is a market-leading index fund provider globally, and its iShares exchange-traded fund franchise offers a low-cost lineup of core funds that investors can use to build a well-diversified portfolio for dirt cheap. The firm can be more adventurous in its ETF launches than some peers, so not everything it launches is appropriate for the masses. As a result, it is likely to have more ETF closures than peers that stick to the basic building blocks.  
The firm’s active fixed-income and multi-asset efforts also stand out as some of the best in the industry. Those benefit from BlackRock’s commitment to building a first-class risk management system via its Aladdin analytics software. The software is also available for sale to other firms and has proved to be a popular option for competitors, a testament to its usefulness. 
More recently, the firm has shifted its focus to ESG offerings and incorporating ESG across its investment lineup, leading to a political backlash in the United States.
BlackRock isn’t the best at everything it tries to do, but retail investors, financial advisors, and large institutions could all build robust portfolios using BlackRock’s products.

Parent

iShares MSCI Emerging Markets Small Cap ETF

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The Case For Emerging Markets

Emerging market small-cap stocks have performed well in recent years and after the 2009 financial crisis. iShares MSCI Emerging Markets Small-Cap ETF is a good investment option with reasonable fees and unique industry exposure. EEMS provides strong exposure to IT and consumer stocks and has a lower weighting in financials compared to other emerging market ETFs.

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