Last week’s news that Vanguard will be abandoning their affiliation with MSCI in terms of serving as the underlying indexes for their ETF products not only shook up the industry, but it brought to attention a greater theme for ETF investors and portfolio managers: What exactly does the underlying index that your ETF tracks look like, and who is the index ETF provider?
This said, we have an opportunity to examine a global ETF that likely flies under the radar or most due to lower average daily trading volume (3,400 shares).
Following an index provided by Standard and Poor’s (S&P), RTR (RevenueShares ADR Fund) is classified in the “Global” category in that its aim is to track the S&P ADR Index, but rank the individual component weightings by top line revenues as opposed to market capitalization which tends to be the most popular way to construct indices.
Global equity exposure breaks out according to the following: Europe (52.28%), Japan (13.03%), Asia-Emerging (11.93%), Latin America (10.09%), Canada (9.00%), Australia (2.63%), and much lesser weightings to areas including Asia-Developed, Africa, and the Middle East. Top individual holdings currently are BP (5.15%), SNP (5.09%), PTR (4.13%), TOT (3.93%), and RDS.A (3.70%).