A strong management team and sound investment process underpin iShares MSCI Taiwan ETF's Morningstar Medalist Rating of Gold. The portfolio maintains a cost advantage over competitors, priced within the least expensive fee quintile among peers.  

 The strategy’s management team earns an Above Average People Pillar rating. The strategy's investment approach stands out and earns an Above Average Process Pillar rating.  Low liquidity risk exposure is attributed to stocks with a low trading volume, limiting managers' flexibility. And low volatility exposure is rooted in stocks that have a lower standard deviation of returns. 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

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 Taiwan ETF earns an Above Average Process Pillar rating. The leading factor in the rating is the fund's strong 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, like Morningstar's Active/Passive Barometer, shows that passively managed funds have generally outperformed their active counterparts, especially over longer time horizons. Lastly, the process is limited by its parent firm's risk-adjusted performance, as shown by the firm's average 10-year Morningstar Rating of 3.1 stars. A lower star rating suggests that the firm has struggled to outperform on a risk-adjusted basis.

The investment strategy as stated in the fund's prospectus is:  The investment seeks to track the investment results of the MSCI Taiwan 25/50 Index.  The fund generally will invest at least 80% of its assets in the component securities of its underlying index and in investments that have economic characteristics that are substantially identical to the component securities of its underlying index. The index is a free float-adjusted market capitalization-weighted index that is designed to measure the performance of the large- and mid-capitalization segments of the equity market in Taiwan. The fund is non-diversified. 

 The portfolio is overweight in technology and basic materials relative to the category average by 48.9 and 3.0 percentage points, respectively. The sectors with low exposure compared to category peers are consumer cyclical and communication services, underweight the average by 19.0 and 14.0 percentage points of assets, respectively. The portfolio is positioned across 99 holdings and is relatively concentrated. In particular, 44.4% of the strategy's assets are housed within the top 10 holdings, compared with the category’s 37.6% average. And finally, in terms of portfolio turnover, this fund trades less frequently than the category’s average, potentially limiting costs to investors.

Above Average

Process

iShares MSCI Taiwan ETF's strong equity team drives the strategy's Above Average People Pillar rating. There are three managers listed on the fund: Greg Savage, Paul Whitehead, Jennifer Hsui. The team is well equipped, with an average of 17 years of portfolio management experience. Together, they manage a total of 258 strategies, with solid long-term prospects. The strategies average a Silver asset-weighted Morningstar Medalist Rating, indicating a position 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.

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 Taiwan ETF

EWT tracks an index of Taiwanese firms, covering the top 85% of the market and weighted by market cap subjected to diversification requirements.

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China's zero-COVID policy has cratered the economy, severely hampering mobility and discouraging consumer spending on services. In addition, it has extended economic uncertainty for businesses and caused significant disruption to supply chains.

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EWT invests in Taiwanese equities; large-caps and mid-caps. The fund's largest position is one of the global leaders in semiconductors.

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Chinese banks are facing increasing pressure on fundamentals after weak earnings growth in the first quarter of this year, dragged down by plunging credit demand amid renewed COVID-19 waves, ongoing property sector struggles, and global macroeconomic uncertainties. While the central government has pledged additional targeted steps to stimulate the economy, uncertainty remains as China pursues its dynamic zero-COVID strategy.

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The latest batch of official PMI data gave a nice boost to Chinese equities and also commodities. While China's supply-side stimulus allows to “mobilize” the official sector fairly quickly, it does not do much for small privately-owned companies.

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The most recent macroeconomic figures show that the Chinese slowdown is much more severe than expected and not only attributable to the Covid-19 lockdowns. It is easy to use the Covid-19 lockdowns as the reason for the weakening of the Chinese economy but that would be a gross simplification.

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Taiwanese export data show the growth rate cooling in the second quarter, corroborating recent PMI survey findings of slower export gains as the global economy cooled amid further COVID-19 waves. Official data showed Taiwan's export orders rising some 31.1% above levels of a year ago in June, marking the sixteenth month of continuous year-on-year expansion.

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A Taiwan country-specific exchange traded fund surged Tuesday, with Taiwanese equities enjoying their best day since March last year, as a rebound in technology stocks helped lift the island country's market. Among the top performing non-leveraged ETFs of Tuesday, the iShares MSCI Taiwan ETF (EWT) increased 5.5%, paring back some of its recent losses.

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News for iShares MSCI Taiwan ETF ETF (EWT)