February 27, 2008
Some of you have asked me to keep you apprised of new ETF offerings which for me is almost an impossibility. There have been hundreds of ETFs that have joined the ETF universe. But recently a couple of new ETFs of note have been introduced that you may want to be aware of in particular. They have to do with India, probably the second fastest growing economy behind China. I know nothing about India, other than what I read. For those of you interested in ETFs, these are the new possibilities.
The following is from Doug Fabian.
WisdomTree Investments launched what the company claims is the investment industry's first exchange-traded fund (ETF) focused on India. The fund, called WisdomTree India Earnings Fund (EPI), began trading on Feb. 22 and is listed on the NYSE. Arch rival ETF provider PowerShares is right behind in readying an Indian ETF, with its PowerShares India Portfolio (PIN) slated to be introduced this week.
WisdomTree India Earnings Fund invests directly in local Indian securities by selecting from a universe of approximately 150 profitable companies that are included in the WisdomTree India Earnings Index. The fund uses a fundamentally weighted-indexing strategy, as do other WisdomTree ETFs, to reduce the potential risks of investing in emerging markets through more commonly used market capitalization-weighted indexes, company officials said. The company's fundamentally weighted-indexing involves anchoring the initial weights of individual stocks to a measure of fundamental value to avoid the disadvantages of capitalization-weighted indexes.
In a capitalization-weighted index, the market value of each holding is used to determine the percentage of an individual stock that should be owned in the fund. A flaw in this approach is that capitalization-weighted indexes tend to overvalue securities or sectors that dominate the market capitalization indexes at a given time, while under-representing undervalued securities or sectors. The Internet bubble in the late 1990s is an example of how a significant overvaluation problem can affect market-capitalization weighting.
The PowerShares India Portfolio is designed to replicate the Indian equity markets as a whole through a proprietary index that company officials contend also is superior to a capitalization market-weighted index. The PowerShares index consists of a diverse group of 50 Indian stocks selected from a universe of 200 of the largest companies listed on the Mumbai Stock Exchange and 200 of the biggest companies listed on the National Stock Exchange.
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