164 UCITS iShares Fund for your 2026 Investment Planning – Investment Moats

I was pondering about some ideas regarding where I would like to deploy some of my excess funds in Crystalys. It is not a strong idea about where I would like to be but where I would not want to be.

But idea generation doesn’t flow so well unless we kind of know what is out there. So I decide to take a look at what BlackRock iShares can offer on the UCITS side.

I look under the funds and my god, they are really a shopping mart for all sorts of funds.

I only screen for USD, ETFs, equities, and I get almost 250 funds. If you prefer other currencies, I am sure there are more.

In a way, we got to appreciate that this is a good thing because it means that you can craft a tax-efficient ideal portfolio with low cost.

I would describe your ideal portfolio to be the one that express your investment philosophy. If you don’t have, then maybe you got to start with someone’s investment philosophy (perhaps mine). That is how I craft my portfolio by expressing my unique philosophy.

If you are value-oriented, you can form a core value oriented one. If you are momentum focused, you have one. If you are very staunch S&P 500, there is also one. If you are more anything but USA, you can also create one.

In this post, I categorize the majority of the funds in a more readable manner to hopefully help you with your year end investment ideal generation. Actually, it is also more for me and my colleagues next time so that if someone are more trigger happy, have more aspirational ideas, we kind of have something to reference to.

All these funds can purchased with Interactive Brokers. If you don’t go too crazy your per transaction cost should be 0.06% or less. There is no ongoing platform fees which means that is what you are going to pay.

Some Standards

All of these funds are denominated in USD. They should all be listed on the London Stock Exchange.

They are all equity funds only.

They are all UCITS funds and if I did not missed out are domiciled in Ireland.

So they are currently exempted from estate taxes for non-residents of Ireland.

As they are ETFs, and there is a dual taxation treaty between Ireland and US, the withholding tax of the dividends from US corporations to the ETFs is taxed at 15% rather than 30%. Note that this is only for US corporations own by the funds and other securities incorporated in other countries will have their own withholding tax. So this is not broad stroke. This is also not the case for Irish domiciled unit trusts like your Dimensional funds because this dual taxation only applies for ETFs. (It likely means that the recently listed UCITS Dimensional ETFs will enjoy better underlying withholding tax treatment than the funds)

You will find the funds listed in tables and here are some of the header explanation:

1. Fund Name / Index: These funds are suppose to track some index. Instead of the fund name, I just listed the index it is suppose to track.
2. Accumulating / Inception Yr: The ticker name of the accumulating class of share if it is available. Accumulating means the fund class does not pay out dividends and reinvest the dividends. The inception year is the year the fund is started.
3. Distributing / Inception Yr: The ticker name of the distributing class of share if it is available. Distributing means the fund class does pay out dividends. The inception year is the year the fund is started.
4. Ann. 5Y Ret: The annualized 5-year return of the fund if available.
5. Ann. 10Y Ret: The annualized 10-year return of the fund if available.
6. TER: The total expense ratio of the fund.
7. PE: The average price earnings of the underlying securities. This is to help you gauge the funds based on value.

What I did not include

I omit the following:

1. Funds that are active. I included systematic active or what people call Smart Beta and Factor funds.
2. ESG related funds.
3. Swap-based funds.
4. 2 Buffer funds.

If these are what you are interested, you can go find them.

Main Index Providers

I shorten some of the index names so as to make the names shorter:

1. If there is no index names, it is automatic from MSCI. For example World will be MSCI World. Taiwan will be MSCI Taiwan.
2. DJ is Dow Jones

Other index providers aside from MSCI are S&P, Nasdaq, Dow Jones, FTSE and STOXX

One thing I noticed is iShares mainly uses a lot of STOXX for their newer implementation. STOXX is own by Deutsche Borse and headquartered in Switzerland.

Good info for MSCI shareholder to take note.

Some Short Forms

• ACWI: All Country World Index. Covers the large and mid-cap developed and emerging markets.
• AC: All Country. Same as above.
• EM: Emerging Markets.
• EMU: Large and mid-cap of European Economic and Monetary Union. Members.
• IMI: Investable market index. Captures large, mid and small cap representation. Basically it means it covers from the very small companies that are liquid enough to invest upwards.
• 35/20 or 20 35: The weight of the largest issuer is constrained to 35% and the weights of all other entities are constrained to a maximum of 20%.
• Select: Selected from an underlying index based on ESG criteria. Exclude based on involvement in specific business activities, as well as ESG ratings and exposure to ESG controversies.
• Advanced Selected in Systematic Active: Basically also ESG criteria in systematic active.

Main Regional Funds

These are funds that should be useful to form the core part of your portfolio:

They are very region focus and they allow you to express your investment philosophy.

If your philosophy is to keep it simple and own everything, then the ACWI funds will be good. If it is USA only, then you can do that. If you want Emerging markets but don’t want China, there are also funds for that.

Single Country Funds

These are funds available if you want specific overweight to some countries:

A lot of the funds are incepted for a while, so you might be interested to review their returns.

Small Cap Country and Regional Funds

I broke out the funds that are specific small cap focus:

I didn’t realize they have small cap funds that cover so specific regions.

Islamic Regional Funds

There are 3 funds under their Islamic Index Series. These are funds that follow Sharia investment principles. I think this may be good discovery for my Muslim readers.

MSCI Islamic Index Series Methodology.

Equal Weighted Regional and Country Funds

I broke out the equal weighted funds. Unlike capitalization weighted, where the better performers will occupy bigger and bigger proportions of the index, an equal weighted one would periodic resized them to equal size.

This means the smaller companies will get more weight and the bigger cap weighted companies will get a smaller weight.

Why do you want to do that?

Well… the performance is actually better sometimes. Here is a chart of the S&P 500 Equal Weighted (RSP Brown line) against the Cap-Weighted (SPY Purple line):

Notice how often the equal-weighted brown line stays above the purple line.

We have some new US and World equal weight.

Quite interesting that they have mid-cap equal-weighted for a while. But there are a lot of mid-caps and they usually end up pretty equal-weighted.

I know there is a non-equal-weighted mid-cap State Street UCITS ETF SPY4 that tracks the S&P 400 index since 2012, so I compared IUSZ’s performance to it:

The brown line is IUSZ and pink is SPY4. Fortunately better for almost the past 10 years.

Systematic Active Funds

These are funds that systematically execute strategies that usually have some empirical backings:

1. Momentum
2. Value
3. Minimum Volatility
4. Quality
5. Dividend

These would be ideal if you identify with taking the independent risks above and would like to position your portfolio that way:

My dividend investing friends might want to research up SEDY which seems to yield 6% now. I have not taken a look at it.

Do note that IFSW, IFSU, UFSD had their methodology changed this year to a STOXX Equity Factor Screened Methodology. The past performance was based on an MSCI multifactor methodology.

Do understand their methodologies:

1. MSCI High Dividend Yield Advanced Select Indexes Methodology.
2. STOXX Equity Factor Screened Methodology – Turn to page 574.
3. MSCI Minimum Volatility Indexes Methodology
4. MSCI Minimum Volatility Advanced Methodology
5. MSCI Emerging Markets Select Value Factor Focus Index Methodology
6. MSCI Enhanced Value Indexes Methodology
7. MSCI Value Advanced Select Screens Indexes Methodology
8. MSCI Momentum Indexes Methodology
9. MSCI Momentum Advanced Select Indexes Methodology
10. MSCI Quality Indexes Methodology
11. MSCI Quality Advanced Select Indexes Methodology

Sector and Thematic

This is the section that I find most speculative and not so useful for portfolio construction mostly because I think you get nowhere with this. It also makes people take big swings but usually their big swings evens out.

But if you would like to speculate in certain themes, you might find the breadth of the funds useful for you.

Kyith is the Owner and Sole Writer behind Investment Moats. Readers tune in to Investment Moats to learn and build stronger, firmer wealth foundations, how to have a Passive investment strategy, know more about investing in REITs and the nuts and bolts of Active Investing.

Readers also follow Kyith to learn how to plan well for Financial Security and Financial Independence.

Kyith worked as an IT operations engineer from 2004 to 2019. Currently, he works as a Senior Solutions Specialist in Insurance Start-up Havend. All opinions on Investment Moats are his own and does not represent the views of Providend.

You can view Kyith’s current portfolio here, which uses his Free Google Stock Portfolio Tracker.

His investment broker of choice is Interactive Brokers, which allows him to invest in securities from different exchanges all over the world, at very low commission rates, without custodian fees, near spot currency rates.

You can read more about Kyith here.