Yesterday we looked into China based equity ETFs in further depth, as it is quite well known now (or should be) that the oversized weighting in China in broad based Emerging Markets Equity products like EEM (iShares MSCI Emerging Markets, Expense Ratio 0.67%) and VWO (Vanguard Emerging Markets, Expense Ratio 0.18%) has hurt performance YTD.
Another lagging country component in the EM space in 2013 is Russia. Russia as a country makes up 5.31% of EEM and 4.97% of VWO currently. [Emerging Market Dividend ETF Boosts Russia Exposure]
RSX (Market Vectors Russia, Expense Ratio 0.62%) is the largest ETF in the Russia category, with $1.2 billion in assets under management at the moment.
It also trades a very healthy 4.3 million shares on an average daily basis, and is clearly popular across the investment and trading communities.
ERUS (iShares MSCI Russia Capped Index, Expense Ratio 0.61%) has also been steadily growing in size, accumulating nearly $200 million in AUM since its late 2010 debut.
RBL (SPDR S&P Russia, Expense Ratio 0.59%) is yet another “large cap” alternative for exposure to the country, and it should be known that of these three products, all track different underlying indexes and thus have varied weightings and portfolio exposure from both sector and individual equity name standpoints.
RSXJ (Market Vectors Russia Small Cap, Expense Ratio 0.67%) is the lone “small cap” focused ETF play in this space, and is slowly moving along in terms of institutional embracement. For short-term directional traders, there is also RUSL (Direxion Daily Russia Bull 3X, Expense Ratio 0.95%) and RUSS (Direxion Daily Russia Bear 3X, Expense Ratio 0.95%).