iShares Silver Trust (SLV)

iShares Silver Trust — analysis

SLV's headline numbers: $13.5B AUM, 31 bps expense ratio, 2003 inception. Category: Silver. Benchmark: Index Benchmark. iShares Silver Trust is the issuer-titled fund managed against that index since launch.

SLV VMCI-Composite: 62/100. The metric weighs the underlying companies' VMCI by their fund weight (top 10), so it captures whether the index methodology is selecting fundamentally cheaper, higher-quality, or lower-risk names. Read: above-average composite quality.

Trailing total return on SLV: 14.8% 5y CAGR. The Index Benchmark index returned 13.0% per year over the same window, leaving the fund above index by 1.8 pp annualized.

Income line on SLV: 5.30% trailing yield, 2.8% 5-year distribution CAGR. The starting yield combined with the growth rate is the standard back-of-envelope for total-income compounding inside the fund.

Holdings detail for SLV: 29% in top 10 (AAPL 3.42% the largest), with Technology at 29% of the allocation. The remaining sector mix spreads across 11 categories.

For a silver allocation, the comparable trio to SLV is SPY, VOO, VTI. The screener and ETF browse pages on ValueMarkers let you sort all four side-by-side on AUM, cost, return, and yield.