Corporatiosn that sell products aroudn the world hedge their currency risk with futures. Recently, because of the volume of issues, some numbers now are letters. The cusip for IBM is 59200102. Depositary refers to the bank that issues ADRs against which the underlying shares are deposited. The main depositaries are Bank of New York, Bankers Trust, Citibank, and Morgan Guaranty.
Distributions create a tax liability for the owners of the fund shares.
When closed-end funds have large unrealized capital gains,t hey may be at discounts to NAV, because if the managers decide to redeply their assets into more interesting investments, their shareholders will have to pay capital gains taxes. An automatic reinvestment of shareholder dividends into more shares of the comapny's stock. Increasingly, depositary banks offer DRIPs on ADRs. It is widely used as the traget to beat for global investing. MSCI also has an emerging markets index.