A sound investment process and strong management team underpin iShares Global Tech ETF's Morningstar Medalist Rating of Silver. The portfolio maintains a cost advantage over competitors, priced within the lowest fee quintile among peers.  

 The strategy's investment process inspires confidence and earns an Above Average Process Pillar rating. Independent of the rating, analysis of the strategy's portfolio shows it has maintained a significant underweight position in liquidity exposure and an overweight in quality exposure compared with category peers. Low liquidity risk exposure is attributed to stocks with a low trading volume, limiting managers' flexibility. And a high quality exposure is rooted in holding stocks with low financial leverage and strong returns on equity. 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

Microsoft

Apple

NVIDIA

Broadcom

ASML Hld

salesforce.com

Advanced Micro Devices

Adobe

Accenture Plc

Cisco Systems

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 Global Tech ETF earns an Above Average Process Pillar rating. The most significant contributor to the rating is that this fund tracks an index. Historical data, like 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 supports the process. 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 S&P Global 1200 Information Technology 4.5/22.5/45 Capped IndexTM composed of global equities in the technology sector.  The index is designed to measure the performance of global equities in the information technology sector. The fund generally will invest at least 80% of its assets in the component securities of its index and in investments that have economic characteristics that are substantially identical to the component securities of its index and may invest up to 20% of its assets in certain futures, options and swap contracts, and cash and cash equivalents. It is non-diversified. 

 The portfolio is overweight in technology by 20.6 percentage points in terms of assets compared with the category average, and its basic materials allocation is similar to the category. The sectors with low exposure compared to category peers are communication services and consumer cyclical, underweight the average by 9.4 and 4.4 percentage points of assets, respectively. The portfolio is composed of 130 holdings and is quite concentrated. Specifically, 63.1% of the strategy's assets are housed within the top 10 holdings, as opposed to the category’s 52.3% average. And in closing, in terms of portfolio turnover, looking at year-over-year movements, 12% of the fund's holdings have changed, whether through increasing, decreasing, or changing a position.

Above Average

Process

iShares’s equity 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: Paul Whitehead, Jennifer Hsui, Greg Savage. Experience on the team is abundant, with 18 years of average 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.

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 Global Tech ETF

IXN tracks a market-cap-weighted index of S&P Global 1200 technology stocks.

IXN tracks a market cap-weighted index of global technology stocks.

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