iShares JP Morgan EM Local Ccy Bd ETF earns a Morningstar Medalist Rating of Neutral with strength in areas such as People offset by weaker spots such as Process. The portfolio maintains a cost advantage over competitors, priced within the cheapest fee quintile among peers.  

 The strategy receives a Below Average Process Pillar rating. Independent of the rating, analysis of the strategy's portfolio shows it has maintained a significant underweight position in corporate bonds and an overweight in A rated bonds compared with category peers. 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

iShares JP Morgan EM Local Ccy Bd ETF earns a Below Average Process Pillar 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. The process benefits from the firm's five-year retention rate of 92% over the period. However, the rating is held back 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 J.P. Morgan GBI-EM Global Diversified 15% Cap 4.5% Floor Index composed of local currency denominated, emerging market sovereign bonds.  The fund will invest at least 80% of its assets in the component securities of the underlying index, and and the fund will invest at least 90% of its assets in fixed income securities of the types included in the underlying index that BFA believes will help the fund track the underlying index. The index tracks the performance of local currency-denominated sovereign bond markets of emerging market countries. The fund is non-diversified.  

 This strategy's 12-month yield is 1.4%, lower than its average peers' 5.4%. It also has a 6.4% 30-day SEC yield (a measure similar to yield-to-maturity). A lower yield tends to indicate lower credit risk. The portfolio has a higher average surveyed credit quality of BBB, compared with the category average of BB, and 27% of the strategy's assets are rated non-investment-grade compared with its average peers' 22%. Strategies that take on less credit risk can often weather more-adverse market conditions. In terms of long-term interest-rate risk, this strategy is on par with peers. The longer a strategy's duration, the more sensitive it is to shifts in interest rates. This fund, with a 4.8-year duration, is expected to gain 4.8% of its net asset value if interest rates drop by 1 percentage point, and vice versa.

Below Average

Process

iShares’s team is strong compared with others in the industry, resulting in an Above Average People Pillar rating. There are two managers listed on the fund: James Mauro, Karen Uyehara. The team is well equipped, with an average of 13 years of portfolio management experience. Together, they manage a total of 114 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 J.P. Morgan EM Local Currency Bond ETF

LEMB tracks a market-value weighted index of sovereign debt denominated in issuers' local currencies, with limits on country exposure.

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News for iShares J.P. Morgan EM Local Currency Bond ETF ETF (LEMB)