A sound investment process and strong management team underpin iShares MSCI Kokusai ETF's Morningstar Medalist Rating of Bronze. The portfolio maintains a sizable 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 an overweight in liquidity exposure and volatility exposure compared with category peers. High liquidity exposure is attributed to stocks with a high trading volume, lending managers more flexibility. And high volatility exposure is rooted in stocks that have a higher standard deviation of returns. 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

Amazon

Alphabet

Eli Lilly

JPMorgan Chase & Co

Broadcom

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 MSCI Kokusai ETF earns an Above Average Process Pillar rating. The most important driver of 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. Noteworthy risk-adjusted performance also influences the rating. This can be seen in the fund's five-year alpha calculated relative to the category index, which suggests that the process was successful over that period. 

The investment strategy as stated in the fund's prospectus is:  The investment seeks to track the investment results of the MSCI Kokusai Index composed of developed market equities, excluding Japan.  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 index is designed to measure equity market performance in those countries that MSCI Inc. (the "index provider" or "MSCI") has classified as having developed economies, and excluding Japan ("DEEJ"). 

 The portfolio is overweight in technology by 4.0 percentage points in terms of assets compared with the category average, and its financial services allocation is similar to the category. The sectors with low exposure compared to category peers are industrials and consumer cyclical, with industrials underweighting the average portfolio by 4.5 percentage points of assets and consumer cyclical similar to the average. The strategy owns 1,266 securities and its assets are more dispersed than peers in the category. In particular, 22.8% of the strategy's assets are concentrated in the top 10 fund holdings, compared to the category’s 25.7% average. And in closing, in terms of portfolio turnover, looking at year-over-year movements, 3% of the fund's holdings have turned over, whether through increasing, decreasing, or changing a position.

Above Average

Process

iShares MSCI Kokusai ETF's strong equity team drives the strategy's Above Average People Pillar rating. There are three managers listed on the fund: Greg Savage, Jennifer Hsui, Paul Whitehead. Experience on the team is abundant, with 18 years of average 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 Kokusai ETF

TOK tracks a market cap-weighted index of large- and mid-cap developed market stocks outside of Japan.

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