IUSQ is iShares' Irish-domiciled UCITS wrapper around the MSCI All Country World index — the whole investable global equity market, developed and emerging, in one fund at 0.20% TER, accumulating. It does the same job as VWCE; the only real question is why you'd pick MSCI's version of "all-world" over FTSE's.
What's inside
| Ticker | Name | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| NVDA | NVIDIA Corp | 4.90% |
| AAPL | Apple Inc | 4.01% |
| MSFT | Microsoft Corp | 2.90% |
| AMZN | Amazon.com Inc | 2.57% |
| GOOGL | Alphabet Inc Class A | 2.25% |
The top five — NVIDIA, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet — make up about 16.6% of the basket, and the top ten clear 24.5% once you add Broadcom, the second Alphabet share class, TSMC, Meta, and Tesla. That's nine US mega-caps and one Taiwanese chipmaker running roughly a quarter of a global all-world fund — cap-weighting doing exactly what it does to any all-world index in 2026. IUSQ is "all-country" by mandate and US-dominant by market reality.
The "All Country" label is the point: MSCI ACWI spans 23 developed and 24 emerging markets, folding China, India, Taiwan, Korea, Brazil and the rest of the emerging-market complex into the same index as the US, Japan and Europe. There's no separate emerging-markets trade to size or rebalance — it's already in here at market weight.
Costs and structure
The ongoing charge is 0.20% — one basis point above VWCE, which is to say identical in any way that matters. On a €50k position that's a €5-a-year difference; it's not a reason to choose either fund.
Replication is physical with optimised sampling — iShares holds a representative subset of the index rather than every name, about 2,340 positions in total. That's fewer than VWCE's ~3,745, because MSCI ACWI stops at large- and mid-caps while FTSE's All-World reaches a little deeper into the small-mid tail. At cap weights those extra names are basis points; the two baskets behave almost identically.
The fund is Irish-domiciled and accumulating — dividends reinvest inside the wrapper under the Ireland/US tax treaty, so withholding on the US dividend share is lower than holding a US-domiciled global fund directly, and there's no cash to redeploy and no tax event until you sell. It has run since October 2011, which makes it older than VWCE and long enough to have compounded through a pandemic and a megacap-tech rally without changing methodology, and it holds around €30B. The base currency is USD; the XETR share class you'll actually buy settles in EUR, but there's no hedge either way — your real FX exposure follows the underlying basket, which is USD-dominated. Full detail is on iShares' factsheet.
The one genuine difference from VWCE is where the index provider draws the developed/emerging line. South Korea is the textbook case: FTSE classes it as a developed market, MSCI still classes it as emerging. In a cap-weighted global fund that shifts a rounding-error slice of weight between buckets — worth knowing, not worth deciding on.
Performance in context
Live data temporarily unavailable for this comparison.
IUSQ against VWCE is the comparison that defines the fund: MSCI ACWI versus FTSE All-World, the same global market read two slightly different ways. Expect the two lines to sit almost on top of each other — any gap is the small methodology and classification differences above, plus tracking noise, not a real divergence in what you own. If you're weighing the two head to head, the full breakdown is in VWCE vs IUSQ.
Who buys it and why
IUSQ is a one-fund core for a Euro investor who wants the whole world in a single holding and is done — no separate EM sleeve, no US-overweight decision, no rebalancing. The typical holder runs it as 100% of their equity allocation on a savings plan and never touches it. The honest reason to hold IUSQ specifically rather than VWCE is rarely the fund itself — it's that your broker or savings plan happens to carry IUSQ, or lists it commission-free, when VWCE isn't offered. At the basket level you're buying the same thing.
Alternatives worth knowing
- VWCE — Vanguard's FTSE All-World, the other one-fund all-world default. Same ambition, different index provider; we put them side by side in VWCE vs IUSQ.
- IWDA — iShares Core MSCI World, developed markets only. Cheaper and simpler if you'd rather leave emerging markets out and size them yourself.
- VUAA — Vanguard's S&P 500 UCITS at 0.07% TER. The choice if you want a deliberate US-only tilt instead of the whole world.