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If you're interested in broad exposure to the Financials - Broad segment of the equity market, look no further than the iShares MSCI Europe Financials ETF (EUFN), a passively managed exchange traded fund launched on 01/20/2010.
While an excellent vehicle for long term investors, passively managed ETFs are a popular choice among institutional and retail investors due to their low costs, transparency, flexibility, and tax efficiency.
Investor-friendly, sector ETFs provide many options to gain low risk and diversified exposure to a broad group of companies in particular sectors. Financials - Broad is one of the 16 broad Zacks sectors within the Zacks Industry classification. It is currently ranked 3, placing it in top 19%.
Index Details
The fund is sponsored by Blackrock. It has amassed assets over $1.84 billion, making it one of the larger ETFs attempting to match the performance of the Financials - Broad segment of the equity market. EUFN seeks to match the performance of the MSCI Europe Financials Index before fees and expenses.
The MSCI Europe Financials Index is a free float-adjusted market capitalization weighted index designed to measure the combined equity market performance of the financials sector of developed market countries in Europe.
Costs
Expense ratios are an important factor in the return of an ETF and in the long term, cheaper funds can significantly outperform their more expensive counterparts, other things remaining the same.
Annual operating expenses for this ETF are 0.48%, making it on par with most peer products in the space.
It has a 12-month trailing dividend yield of 5.36%.
Sector Exposure and Top Holdings
It is important to delve into an ETF's holdings before investing despite the many upsides to these kinds of funds like diversified exposure, which minimizes single stock risk. And, most ETFs are very transparent products that disclose their holdings on a daily basis.
Looking at individual holdings, Hsbc Holdings Plc (HSBA) accounts for about 7.94% of total assets, followed by Allianz (ALV) and Ubs Group Ag (UBSG).
The top 10 holdings account for about 41.13% of total assets under management.
Performance and Risk
The ETF has gained about 0% and was up about 17.12% so far this year and in the past one year (as of 01/01/2025), respectively. EUFN has traded between $20.08 and $25.01 during this last 52-week period.
The ETF has a beta of 1.09 and standard deviation of 22.14% for the trailing three-year period, making it a medium risk choice in the space. With about 95 holdings, it effectively diversifies company-specific risk.