Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
Xtrackers MSCI Germany Hedged Equity ETF
It is an exchange-traded fund that lets investors own a basket of large German stocks while protecting them from swings in the dollar-to-euro exchange rate.
This is a fund, not a company that makes or sells anything. It packs a basket of big German stocks into a single share you can buy on a U.S. exchange, giving American investors a simple way to own names like chemical maker BASF, software giant SAP, and automaker Mercedes-Benz without opening a German brokerage account.
The twist is the "hedged" part. When you own foreign stocks, your return depends on two things: how the shares do and how the currency moves. If the euro falls against the dollar, your German gains shrink once converted back to dollars. This fund uses currency contracts to neutralize that second force, so what you see is essentially the stock performance in euros, translated cleanly into dollars. It follows the MSCI Germany index and holds the large and mid-sized German companies that index tracks. The fund is run by Xtrackers, the ETF arm of DWS, a big German asset manager. In practice, the fund's job is to track that index closely, so it does not pick stocks or try to beat the market—it simply mirrors it.
For investors, this is a niche tool: useful if you want German equity exposure but don't want to bet on the euro at the same time. The trade-off is cost. Hedging currency isn't free, and the fund charges a modest annual fee, so it makes most sense for someone who specifically wants the stocks without the currency rollercoaster.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026