Russia has stumbled a bit in recent sessions, with benchmark equity ETF RSX (Market Vectors Russia, Expense Ratio 0.63%) trading back in the $19’s after reaching an intraday high of $20.84 just seven trading sessions ago.
Trading volume has been moderate in the product for a good month now, with below average volume nearly every session since. RSX has pulled in about $265 million in new assets year to date thanks to the impressive rally from its mid-December of 2014 lows, and now stands at about $2.3 billion in total assets under management.
RSX is nearly ten times the size of the next largest fund in the category ERUS (iShares MSCI Russia, Expense Ratio 0.62%), an ETF that has had rather flattish flows in 2015 thus far.
The two leveraged trading vehicles that have become rather popular in 2015 thanks to the immense volatility in Russia are RUSL (Direxion Daily Russia Bull 3X, Expense Ratio 0.95%) and RUSS (Direxion Daily Russia Bear 3X, Expense Ratio 0.95%), which have $255 million and $63 million in assets under management respectively.
RUSL, the long product, trades nearly three times as much daily volume as RUSS, with about 1.2 million shares in ADV versus 473,000 shares. There are two other products in the Russia equity category but they are substantially smaller than the previously mentioned funds, RSXJ (Market Vectors Russia Small Cap, Expense Ratio 0.67%) and RBL (SPDR S&P Russia, Expense Ratio 0.59%) which have $52 million and $33 million in assets under management respectively.