CNDX is iShares' Irish-domiciled UCITS wrapper around the Nasdaq 100 — the 100 largest non-financial companies listed on the Nasdaq, which in practice means megacap tech and very little else. The honest take: it's a satellite, not a core. You're paying 0.30% for a concentrated, financials-free slice of the US market that you mostly already own through any S&P 500 fund.
What's inside
| Ticker | Name | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| NVDA | NVIDIA Corp | 8.69% |
| AAPL | Apple Inc | 7.64% |
| MSFT | Microsoft Corp | 5.63% |
| AMZN | Amazon.com Inc | 4.58% |
| TSLA | Tesla Inc | 3.80% |
The top five — led by NVIDIA, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon — come to 30.3% of the fund, and the top ten to 46.9%. That's nearly half the portfolio in ten names, far more concentrated than an S&P 500 tracker, because the Nasdaq 100 holds a fifth as many stocks and, by index rule, owns no banks or insurers at all. What's left leans hard into technology and consumer-internet: this isn't a diversified slice of the US market, it's a bet on the specific companies that have driven the last decade of US returns.
Costs and structure
The ongoing charge is 0.30% — €150 a year on a €50k position, and more than four times what the cheapest S&P 500 UCITS charges. You're not paying for active management; the Nasdaq 100 is a mechanical "largest 100 non-financials on the Nasdaq" rule. What the fee buys is the narrowness itself. Replication is full physical — with only ~100 names to hold, iShares owns every constituent at index weight rather than sampling the tail. The fund is Irish-domiciled (ISIN IE00B53SZB19), the detail that matters most for a Euro investor: the Ireland/US tax treaty trims US withholding on the (modest) dividends these growth names throw off. Dividends accumulate inside the wrapper, so there's no cash to redeploy and no tax event until you sell.
CNDX launched on 26 January 2010 and has grown to €23.5 billion as of 12 June 2026 — among the larger tech-focused ETFs available to European investors. Base currency is USD; on the LSE you buy it in dollars (and as SXRV on XETR), with no currency hedge, so your real FX exposure is effectively 100% dollar. The full breakdown is on iShares' factsheet.
Performance in context
Live data temporarily unavailable for this comparison.
CNDX versus VUAA is the whole question in one chart: does megacap tech keep beating the broad US market, or doesn't it? The Nasdaq 100 is most of the S&P 500's largest names with the rest of the index stripped out, so over the last decade — when those names led — CNDX outran VUAA. Whether that continues is the actual bet you're making. Read the chart, not the last decade's headline; outperformance that's already happened is also outperformance that's already priced in.
Who buys it and why
CNDX is a satellite for someone who already owns a core. The typical holder runs a broad US or global position — VUAA, IWDA, or VWCE — and bolts CNDX on top to deliberately overweight megacap tech and growth. It is not a first or only fund: stack it on a VUAA core and you're mostly buying more of names you already hold, just at heavier weights and minus the financials, energy, and healthcare that round out the broad index. Size it like the conviction bet it is, not like a second core — and if you don't hold that conviction specifically, you don't need the 0.30%.
Alternatives worth knowing
- VUAA — the broad US core CNDX is usually a tilt on top of: 500 names, every sector, 0.07%. The direct head-to-head is CNDX vs VUAA.
- VWCE — Vanguard's FTSE All-World, if you want maximum diversification rather than maximum concentration. The opposite end of the same spectrum.
- IWDA — iShares' Core MSCI World, the €110B developed-markets workhorse, for a core that spreads beyond US tech instead of doubling down on it.