Top 55 London-listed ETFs from iShares – shortlist for 2018

For non-US ETF portfolios, I find it useful to keep handy short lists of ETFs listed on other top ETF exchanges in London, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo.  Here is a short list of the top 55 London-listed ETFs I look at, mostly for my own reference when I need to look this up on my phone, so don’t take this list as investment advice.

US listed stocks and ETFs are very popular with Hong Kong based investors despite the 30% withholding tax on dividends and low death tax exemption on non-US persons.  As an alternative, some Hong Kong based investors and advisors instead make similar ETF portfolios using London-listed accumulating share class ETFs, which benefit from Ireland’s tax treaties and relatively low rates of tax in Ireland.  This is not tax advice, but thought it would be useful to post an updated list of such ETFs here for reference.

Although I always like to compare iShares ETFs with their competitors when I can find one (preferably a cheaper or more liquid one from Vanguard, State Street, or one of the up-and-coming Chinese asset managers), I do give credit to iShares UK for continuing to have the best organization of information on their websites, although the iShares US site remains better.  More broadly, Morningstar has this ETF screener.

In an earlier post I listed 23 useful London-listed ETFs, which were also mostly iShares, but that list had limited data as it was from the London Stock Exchange.