Vanguard, iShares or Amundi: comparing the three big global UCITS funds

Ask a Gulf-based investor which global fund they hold and you will usually get a ticker rather than a reason. VWRA, IWDA and — increasingly since 2024 — WEBN turn up in the same conversations, treated as near-substitutes. They are not quite. They track different indices, sit at different fee levels, and differ in what their providers are willing to put in writing.

This compares the three on what each publishes about itself, as at the most recent factsheets. Where a provider does not publish something, that is stated rather than filled in from a third-party site, a distinction that matters more here than it might sound, because one of the three publishes a figure the other two do not.

The three funds

Taking the accumulating share class in each case, since that is what most Gulf residents hold:

Figures are from each provider's own factsheet at 31 July 2026. The Amundi asset figure is fund-level and appears identically on both share-class factsheets, so it is not the accumulating class's own assets.

The index difference is the first real decision

iShares Core MSCI World tracks developed markets only. The other two include emerging markets. That is not a fee question or a provider question; it is a portfolio question, and it should be settled before anything else on this page matters.

MSCI's own factsheet at 31 August 2026 puts the MSCI World at 1,280 constituents across 23 developed countries, with the United States at 72.14%. MSCI ACWI — the all-country version — carries 2,458 constituents across 23 developed and 24 emerging markets, with the US at 63.59%. FTSE All-World sits in similar territory: Vanguard's factsheet reports a US weight of 61.6% in the fund at 31 July 2026.

So the practical spread is roughly ten percentage points of US exposure between a developed-only fund and an all-country one. Someone holding IWDA and describing it as a global fund is holding something meaningfully more American than the label suggests.

What 13 basis points is worth

Amundi charges 0.07%, Vanguard 0.14%, iShares 0.20% on the Core MSCI World. On AED 500,000 held for twenty years at a 7% gross return, the difference between 0.07% and 0.20% compounds to roughly AED 46,000. That is real money, and it is also the smallest of the differences on this page.

The ongoing charge is not the whole cost. There is also the spread you pay when you buy, the currency conversion if your account is in dirhams, and the difference between what the fund returns and what its index returns. That last one is where the disclosure gap opens up.

Tracking error: who publishes what, and where

Two of the three publish one, and they publish it in different places, which is why this is easy to get wrong.

Amundi prints it on the factsheet itself: an ex-post tracking error of 0.07% over one year and 0.11% since inception for the accumulating class, at 31 July 2026.

Vanguard does not put it on the factsheet, but publishes it on the fund's product page under a "Risk and Volatility" heading — an annualised tracking error of 0.07% over one year, 0.07% over three years and 0.08% over five, at 31 July 2026, shown alongside beta and R².

iShares publishes neither on the factsheet nor on the product pages we checked, which show three-year beta and three-year standard deviation but no tracking error or tracking difference.

So the honest comparison is not that one provider discloses and two do not. It is that Amundi and Vanguard both disclose, Amundi does it in the more findable place, and iShares does not disclose it in the documents we examined. Worth keeping in proportion: Amundi's fund launched in 2024, so its since-inception figure covers a short period, while Vanguard's five-year series covers considerably more ground.

Third-party sites compute tracking differences for all three. Those are the aggregator's calculations, not the provider's disclosure, and we have not reproduced them here.

Holdings against constituents

All three describe themselves as physically replicated. Two of them hold materially fewer stocks than their index contains.

The clearest case is not in the table above. iShares MSCI ACWI — the all-country iShares fund, ISIN IE00B6R52259, ticker ISAC — held 1,695 stocks at 31 July 2026, against an MSCI ACWI index of 2,458 constituents at 31 August 2026. Those are different dates from different sources, because iShares does not publish the index constituent count itself, so the comparison is indicative rather than exact. BlackRock's factsheet says "Physical" and does not use the word sampling, so the observable fact is the gap between holdings and constituents rather than a label the provider has applied. Vanguard's All-World fund holds 3,782 against a benchmark of 4,264, a proportionally smaller gap. Amundi's holds 3,651 against a Solactive index of 3,645 members at 2 September 2026.

None of this is a defect. Optimised sampling is standard practice in broad indices where the smallest constituents are illiquid. It matters because it explains why two funds tracking the same index can diverge slightly, and because it is the sort of thing that only shows up if you read the holdings count.

Domicile, and a correction worth making

There is a widely repeated line that Amundi funds are Luxembourg-domiciled and therefore suffer worse US dividend withholding than Irish ones. For the Prime All Country World fund, that is wrong. It is an Irish ICAV, and its US withholding position is the same 15% treaty rate as Vanguard's and iShares'.

The underlying point about domicile is sound, and it applies elsewhere in Amundi's range. Ireland has a US income tax treaty — Article 10(2) caps source-state tax on dividends at 15% for portfolio holders. Luxembourg funds generally cannot claim that treaty on US dividends and face the 30% statutory rate instead. Amundi's ex-Lyxor products, which sit in the Multi Units Luxembourg umbrella, are where that argument bites. LU1781541179, for instance, was Lyxor Core MSCI World and is now Amundi MSCI World V, a Luxembourg fund carrying a Luxembourg name change.

The practical version: check the ISIN, not the brand. An ISIN beginning IE is Irish. One beginning LU is Luxembourg. On a fund with roughly 60–72% in US equities and an index dividend yield in the region of 1.5%, the fifteen-point difference is worth something in the order of 15 to 18 basis points a year, but we have not pinned a current index yield to a primary source, so treat that as an order of magnitude rather than a figure.

Where you can actually buy them

This is the constraint that catches Gulf investors out, and it is specific to Amundi.

Vanguard's All-World accumulating class lists on the London Stock Exchange in both USD (VWRA) and GBP (VWRP), plus SIX, Euronext Amsterdam, Deutsche Börse and Borsa Italiana. iShares Core MSCI World lists as IWDA in USD and SWDA in GBP on the LSE, plus Amsterdam, Borsa Italiana, SIX and Xetra.

Amundi's factsheets for the accumulating Prime All Country World class list only Xetra (in EUR as WEBN and USD as WEBQ) and Euronext Milan. The distributing class is LSE-listed in GBP, as PACW. If your platform routes you to the London Stock Exchange and you want a USD line, that is a real difference between the three, and it is the reason the cheapest fund on this page is not automatically the most accessible one.

The Gulf tax position

For a UAE-resident individual holding any of these in a personal brokerage account, there is no local tax on the gain or the dividend. UAE Cabinet Decision No. 49 of 2023, effective 1 June 2023, puts a natural person within Corporate Tax only where turnover from business activity exceeds AED 1 million in a calendar year, and Article 2(2) expressly excludes turnover from wage, personal investment income and real estate investment income. Article 1 defines personal investment as activity conducted for one's own account without a licence.

So the withholding leakage inside the fund is the only tax drag a UAE resident faces on these holdings. That is why domicile matters here in a way it would not in a country that taxed the outcome anyway.

One citation note, since this gets repeated incorrectly: the exemption is in Cabinet Decision 49, not in Article 11(6) of Federal Decree-Law 47 of 2022. Article 11(6) only delegates the question to the Cabinet.

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The fee table is the part everyone reads and the least interesting part of this comparison. Thirteen basis points is real money, and on a long enough horizon it is worth roughly a year's worth of a modest salary, but it is dwarfed by the decision about whether emerging markets belong in the portfolio at all, which is a ten-point swing in US exposure rather than a rounding difference in cost.

What stood out doing this work was how much depends on where a provider puts a number rather than whether it publishes one. Amundi prints its tracking error on the factsheet. Vanguard publishes the same measure on the product page, so a reader comparing factsheets alone would not see it. iShares publishes it in neither place, and presents its country weights as a graphic rather than as text. None of that is a reason to choose one fund over another. It tells you which document to open for which figure.

The Luxembourg claim is worth correcting wherever you see it. Checking the first two letters of an ISIN takes a second and settles it.

Common questions

Next steps

1. Settle the emerging markets question first — it is a ten-point difference in US exposure, not a rounding difference in cost.
2. Check the first two letters of the ISIN of anything you already hold. IE is Ireland; LU is Luxembourg.
3. Check which exchanges your platform can actually reach, and in which currency, before choosing on headline fee.
4. Pull the current factsheet yourself rather than relying on a comparison table — every figure on this page carries an as-at date because these move.
5. If you hold a fund whose provider publishes no tracking error, compare its return against the net index rather than the gross one.

Further reading on ExpatWealthPlus

• The total cost of owning an ETF from the UAE
• VWRA or VOO from the UAE
• Accumulating or distributing ETFs for UAE residents
• US estate tax and fund domicile
• Dividend withholding inside a global fund

Official sources

Every figure in this article is checked against the primary source. These are the places to verify the current position for yourself, since rates, rules and product terms change.

• Vanguard — FTSE All-World UCITS ETF factsheet →Ongoing charge, holdings, country weights, as at 31 July 2026
• iShares — Core MSCI World UCITS ETF factsheet →TER, holdings and net assets, as at 31 July 2026
• Amundi — Prime All Country World UCITS ETF factsheet →TER, domicile, listings and the published tracking error
• MSCI — World Index factsheet →Constituent count and country weights at 31 August 2026
• IRS — US–Ireland income tax treaty →Article 10(2), the 15% cap on dividend withholding
• UAE Ministry of Finance — Cabinet Decision No. 49 of 2023 →Article 2(2), the personal investment income exclusion