We have talked about the 2013 trend of bleeding assets in two leading Emerging Markets Equity based funds throughout this year in these columns, and with a sudden reversal in activity in the space it is warranted to make comment again.
EEM (iShares MSCI Emerging Markets, Expense Ratio 0.67%) has suddenly reeled in $1.5 billion in fresh new assets via creation activity in recent sessions, and we had noted that prior to this activity the fund had shed more than $8 billion in assets just year to date.
Put buyers remain present in EEM despite the recent positive price action, but given the severe choppiness and volatility in the EM space throughout this year, generally tied to similar volatility in the Chinese equity market (given China has an 18.10% weighting in the MSCI EM Index and is the single largest country allocation).
Also of note is FXI (iShares China Large Cap, Expense Ratio 0.72%) which has also recently reversed course and vaulted impressively above its 200 day moving average in the last couple sessions.
FXI has suffered in terms of asset raising year to date as well, losing $2.1 billion in total in 2013.
Typically when we see creation/redemption flows in EEM, we see similar action in related ETF VWO (Vanguard FTSE Emerging Markets, Expense Ratio 0.18%), but we have not seen creates in VWO in the past couple days this time around.