Should Apple be mad it didn’t give this name to its stock a long time ago? Probably.
Instead, iShares is a company that makes and maintains Exchange-Traded Funds, or ETFs. These are indexes that you can buy or sell on exchanges, just like you do shares of company stock. However, ETFs track broad market segments, like stock sectors (tobacco, biotech, oil production, etc.) or different segments of the bond market.
The ETFs provided by iShares are managed by a company called BlackRock. ETFs in general began in the 1990s, with iShares becoming a prominent brand in the early 2000s.
Related or Semi-related Video
![Finance: What is a Country Basket (Index Fund)?](https://media1.shmoop.com/video/thumbnails/COURSE.FINANCE.694_770x433.jpg)
Finance: What is a Country Basket (Index...30 Views
Finance, a la shmoop. What is a country basket index fund?
All right we're picking daisies, marigolds, lilies so uh how do we [Pictures of flowers]
rephrase in Italian? Like, we want to fill a portfolio basket with just stocks [Pouring a glass of red wine]
representing the overall financial health of Italy. Is Italy healthy? While
they smoke a lot they drink a lot of wine they eat a bunch of pasta but there
always seems to be a woman from some small village who's celebrating her [Old woman at a birthday party]
117th birthday over there. Well a country basket is just an index fund of
stocks representing a country. Like we're doing Korea... South we're gonna have
in that basket dunno some Samsung, a load of Daewoo, a hunk of Hyundai and some [Company stocks being added to the basket]
nice barbecue on the side. That'd be our Korean country basket and it's a good
basket to fill if you're just bullish on a country but not really sure which
flower on which to place your bets. It's like instead of trying to decide between [The stocks in the basket turn into flowers]
roulette or poker or slots... Well you just buy stock in Las Vegas
Sands you know you bet on the entire casino, and bueno Fortuna you know good [Someone checking their cards in a casino]
luck there pal, doesn't the house always win? Yeah so why do people keep going there?...
Up Next
What is the difference between mutual funds and index funds? Mutual funds are professionally managed. Those investors trade shares and realize taxa...
How do you judge the performance of an index fund? For index funds, they're really just a reflection of the stocks and bonds they, uh... reflect. S...