iShares

Should Apple be mad it didn’t give this name to its stock a long time ago? Probably.

Instead, iShares is a company that makes and maintains Exchange-Traded Funds, or ETFs. These are indexes that you can buy or sell on exchanges, just like you do shares of company stock. However, ETFs track broad market segments, like stock sectors (tobacco, biotech, oil production, etc.) or different segments of the bond market.

The ETFs provided by iShares are managed by a company called BlackRock. ETFs in general began in the 1990s, with iShares becoming a prominent brand in the early 2000s.