The plan is to do nothing, for thirty years.

One supermarket, four inspectors

Imagine an enormous supermarket holding every company in the world.

You may only shop the halal aisle. But here is the part nobody tells beginners: there isn't one halal aisle. There are four different inspection companies, and each draws the line in a slightly different place. Same supermarket, four different sets of stickers.

So your job was never to pick a stock. Your job was to pick which inspector you trust, and then buy the one basket holding everything that inspector approved.

Why this fund, and not another

Three completely separate lines of reasoning all pointed at the same fund. That convergence is what makes it trustworthy, not any single argument.

Why the fundamentals hold up

When you buy this fund you are not buying a price on a screen. You are buying small pieces of 390 real companies. So the question is simple: are those companies in good financial shape?

There is an answer that does not depend on anyone's opinion, and it is the best thing on this page.

What leaving out the banks does

A normal world fund is about 16% banks and insurers. Banks work by borrowing: for every $1 of their own money they often borrow $10 to $20 more. When things go wrong, that borrowed money is what turns a bad year into going bust. It is why 2008 was a banking crash before it was anything else.

This fund owns none of them. That means less variety, which is a real cost. It also means the most fragile part of the market is simply missing. Both are true at once.

The numbers, including the one that looks bad

What eighteen years actually shows

It has already been through the worst

ISDW launched on 7 December 2007. Not near a crisis. Weeks before the worst financial crisis since 1929.

So imagine the unluckiest person alive: they put their money in at the worst possible moment in modern history, then did nothing. They have still grown their money about 9.3% a year, every year, since.

That is not a guess or a computer simulation. That is what really happened to this exact fund, with the crash already inside the number.

The last four years, including a bad one

Calendar figures above are the EUR share-class basis quoted by justETF. The since-inception 9.3% is USD. Do not compare the two. ISDW returned +5.69% in EUR for 2025 and its index returned +20.20% in USD: a 14.5-point gap that is pure currency. Your currency is USD-pegged, so the USD figures are the ones that describe your experience.

What actually moves the outcome

Every decision available to you, ranked by what it is genuinely worth over thirty years. Fund selection, the thing you spent days researching, comes last.

Nothing happens for fifteen years

This is the most important table here, and the least exciting. At year 10, 65% of your balance is still just your own deposits. The entire payoff lives in years 20–30. That is precisely why "pick one and never touch it" is the highest-value rule you have.

$1,700 to start · $300/month · buying every 3 months · 8% a year · before inflation and before fees

Open the calculator →

Zakat is larger than every fee combined

Your files argued at length about a 0.10% fee gap worth about $8,500 over thirty years. Zakat will cost between 0.6% and 2.5% of your portfolio, every single year, six to twenty-five times everything else combined.

Which rate applies depends on your intention when you bought, not on what you decide later.

This fund can fall by half

A crash right now is good news

This is not comfort. It is arithmetic. Same thirty years, same 8%, one year of −40%, only the timing of that crash changes:

A late crash is 10.85× worse than an early one. Why: a crash now hits a small balance and then you make 119 more purchases at cheap prices. A crash at the end hits everything and there are zero purchases left. $900 buys 9.00 units at $100, 11.25 at $80, 15.00 at $60. A 40% crash raises your buying power by 67% for as long as it lasts.

Every quarter, in twenty minutes

1. Send about $900 to IBKR. Compare ways of sending it first. A $20 bank fee on $900 eats 2.2% before you have bought anything.
2. Search using the fund's ID number, not its short name. It is IE00B27YCN58. Short names get reused; the ID number never does.
3. Pick the dollar version (ISDW), not the pound version (ISWD). Same fund, but the pound one makes you swap currency on every purchase, and you pay for that each time.
4. Set a maximum price you will pay, good for that day only. Never say "buy at any price". Never edit the order once placed, and never let it roll into tomorrow, because IBKR charges its minimum fee all over again. At $900 that minimum is the whole fee, so fiddling can double or triple what you pay.
5. Buy after 14:30 London, when US markets are open and spreads are tightest.
6. Add any dividend cash sitting in the account. It goes in with the same purchase, so it costs you nothing extra.
7. Log it the same day. Close the laptop. Do not look again.

How to check every number here

This page throws a lot of numbers at you. You should be able to check every one of them without trusting whoever wrote this, including in five years when you have forgotten why any of it made sense.

And three things on purpose have no proof behind them, because none exists: 8% a year is a guess, not a fact. The religious conclusions here are not a fatwa. And nobody, anywhere, knows what markets will do over the next three years.

If the answer to "will it go up soon?" would change what you do, the plan is not really in place.

If it would not change anything. You already have your answer, and you do not need anyone else's.

The plan does not need more improvement. It needs a first purchase.

Run the numbers yourself →