iShares Core S&P Small-Cap ETF | IJR

Analyst Report
Morningstar's Take
|05/05/2025

by Zachary Evens
IShares Core S&P Small-Cap ETF and iShares S&P SmallCap 600 ETF’s low fee, broad diversification, and profitability bias make them hard to beat.

These funds track the S&P SmallCap 600 Index, which collects the smallest 600 stocks in the S&P 1500 Composite Index. Each constituent must meet initial market cap, liquidity, and profitability criteria to be eligible. The final portfolio is weighted by each stock’s float-adjusted market capitalization.

Market-cap weighting is an efficient way to allocate the portfolio because it harnesses the market’s consensus opinion of each stock’s relative value. Faster-growing companies take up a larger share of the portfolio, while smaller companies that may be struggling take on a less important role. This helps rein in turnover and associated trading costs.

The S&P SmallCap 600 Index operates on the smaller end of the small-cap market. Its average market cap was USD 2.8 billion as of March 2025, which is smaller than most index competitors. Small-cap stocks tend to be more volatile than their larger peers. However, the fund’s parent index, the S&P 1500 Composite, includes only profitable names. This removes the lowest-quality small-cap stocks and contains volatility.

While the smaller names that constitute this portfolio can be volatile, the strategy’s broad reach ensures that one stock’s misfortune should not derail the entire portfolio. It stashes just 5% of assets in its top 10 holdings. That breadth helped the S&P SmallCap 600 Index return 7.5% annualized in the 10 years through March 2025, about 1.6 percentage points better than the Russell 2000 Index, a common small-cap benchmark. Each fund returned slightly less, owing to its respective fee.

 
Morningstar Medalist Rating™Controls risk in the US small-cap market.
To find out how Morningstar rates a fund click here.
Morningstar Pillars
PessoasAbove Average
ParentAbove Average
ProcessoAbove Average
 
Morningstar Medalist RatingMorningstar assigns the Medalist Rating to funds that are qualitatively and quantitatively assessed through manager research and algorithmic processes. The assessment turns on three key “pillars” – People, Process, and Parent – that yield an estimate of how well a fund will perform before fees but after adjusting for risk.
A fim de prover consistência para todos os relatórios fornecidos por diferentes Asset Managers, os data points calculados apresentados são gerados usando uma metodologia de cálculo proprietária da Morningstar, que pode ser conferida com mais detalhes em(https://www.morningstar.com/research/signature)
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