A sound investment process and strong management team underpin iShares Virtual Work and Life Mltsct ETF's Morningstar Medalist Rating of Silver. The portfolio maintains a sizable cost advantage over competitors, priced within the cheapest fee quintile among peers.  

 The strategy's sensible investment philosophy merits a High Process Pillar rating. Independent of the rating, analysis of the strategy's portfolio shows it has maintained an overweight 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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monday.com

RingCentral

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 Virtual Work and Life Mltsct ETF earns a High Process Pillar rating. The predominant contributor to the rating is that this fund tracks an index. Historical data, such as Morningstar's Active/Passive Barometer, finds that passively managed funds have generally outperformed their active counterparts, especially over longer time horizons. The firm's five-year retention rate of 92% also buttresses the process. The parent firm's five-year risk-adjusted success ratio of 55% strengthens the process. The measure indicates the percentage of a firm's funds that survived and outperformed their respective category's median Morningstar Risk-Adjusted Return for the period. Their respectable success ratio suggests that this firm does well for investors and that this fund may benefit from that.

The investment strategy as stated in the fund's prospectus is:  The investment seeks to track the investment results of the NYSE® FactSet® Global Virtual Work and Life 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 underlying index is composed of equity securities issued by companies that provide products, services, or technologies that support remote work ("Tele-Work") or remote lifestyle ("Tele-Life"), and as determined by the index provider. The fund is non-diversified. 

 The portfolio is overweight in technology and healthcare relative to the category average by 29.1 and 9.4 percentage points, respectively. The sectors with low exposure compared to category peers are communication services and financial services, with communication services underweighting the average portfolio by 46.8 percentage points of assets and financial services similar to the average. The portfolio is positioned across 88 holdings and is less top-heavy than peers. Specifically, 24.6% of the portfolio's assets are concentrated within the top 10 fund holdings, compared to the category average's 64.0%. And finally, in terms of portfolio turnover, looking at year-over-year movements, 47% of the fund's holdings have changed, whether through increasing, decreasing, or changing a position.

High

Process

iShares Virtual Work and Life Mltsct ETF's strong team drives the strategy's 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 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.

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 Virtual Work and Life Multisector ETF

IWFH tracks a market-cap-weighted index that invests in companies around the globe that are involved in supporting individuals virtual and remote way of working and living.

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