iShares Morningstar Small-Cap ETF’s Process Pillar rating is Average, but a strong management team still helps this strategy retain its Morningstar Medalist Rating of Bronze. 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 earns an Average Process Pillar rating.  Momentum is the premise that stocks that have recently outperformed will continue to do so. With low momentum exposure, the portfolio is holding stocks that managers believe to be undervalued. And a low quality exposure is rooted in stocks with higher financial leverage and lower profitability. 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 index on a risk-adjusted basis over the long term. iShares Morningstar Small-Cap ETF earns an Average Process Pillar rating. The main driver of the rating is the firm's five-year retention rate of 92% over the 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. Lastly, the process is limited by the fund's weak 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 has struggled over that period.

The investment strategy as stated in the fund's prospectus is:  The investment seeks to track the investment results of the Morningstar® US Small-Cap Extended IndexSM composed of small-capitalization U.S. equities.  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 underlying index measures the performance of stocks issued by small-capitalization companies that have exhibited both “growth” and “value” characteristics as determined by Morningstar and Inc.’s (“Morningstar” or the “index provider”). 

 The portfolio has allocations in its top two sectors, consumer cyclical and healthcare, that are similar to the category. The sectors with low exposure compared to category peers are industrials and energy; however, the allocations are similar to the category. The portfolio is composed of 1,621 holdings and is diversified among those holdings. In its most recent portfolio, 2.8% of the fund’s assets were concentrated in the top 10 fund holdings, compared to the category’s 23.9% average. And in closing, in terms of portfolio turnover, looking at year-over-year movements, 28% of the fund's holdings have changed, whether through increasing, decreasing, or changing a position.

Average

Process

iShares Morningstar Small-Cap ETF benefits considerably from its equity team, earning it an Above Average People Pillar rating. There are three managers listed on the fund: Paul Whitehead, Jennifer Hsui, Greg Savage. The team is well equipped, with an average of 18 years of portfolio management experience. Together, they manage a total of 257 strategies, with a Silver asset-weighted average Morningstar Medalist Rating, demonstrating their 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 Morningstar Small-Cap ETF

ISCB tracks a market-cap-weighted index of US small-cap stocks. The index selects stocks from 90-99.5% of market cap that fall into Morningstar's style categorization.

Designed to provide broad exposure to the Small Cap Blend segment of the US equity market, the iShares Morningstar Small-Cap ETF (ISCB) is a passively managed exchange traded fund launched on 06/28/2004.

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