China equities have been punished this week, seemingly off the radar a bit at least in terms of Asia with Japan stealing all the headlines lately.
However, today is a third consecutive gap down in FXI (iShares China Large Cap, Expense Ratio 0.73%) after a brief breakout above $40. Interestingly, flows have been flat for several days in FXI despite the price pressure in equities in China, as even the recently hot BABA has even come back to Earth to some degree (BABA has a $108 handle this morning after topping out at $120.00 last week.
FXI remains the largest China Equity focused ETF in the U.S. marketplace, with about $5.59 billion in assets under management and robust average daily trading volume of 19.4 million shares. We cannot ignore Hong Kong either, as EWH (iShares MSCI Hong Kong, Expense Ratio 0.51%) which has held up reasonably well since its October lows, has been under pressure this week as well, drifting a bit above its 50 day moving average, a level it has not traded at in nine sessions.
In the greater China Equity space that includes Hong Kong, EWH is the second largest fund here with about $3.4 billion in AUM. MCHI (iShares MSCI China Index, Expense Ratio 0.61%) has pulled in a notable $163 million in new assets thus far in 2014, making it the third largest fund in this category, with north of $1.2 billion in overall AUM currently.
Other notables in the top tier in terms of AUM include GXC (SPDR S&P China, Expense Ratio 0.59%), ASHR (Deutsche Harvest CSI 300 China AShares, Expense Ratio 0.82%), PGJ (PowerShares Golden Dragon Halter USX China Portfolio, Expense Ratio 0.70%, HAO (Guggenheim China Small Cap, Expense Ratio 0.75%), and KWEB (KraneShares CSI China Internet, Expense Ratio 0.68%).
BABA and its 35.9 million shares traded daily on average thus far since its public listing certainly does not hurt the familiarity and popularity of ETFs here that have BABA as a constituent, such as KWEB for example where the stock carries a 10.51% weighting.