The international ETF landscape has become quite popular with investors over the last year. Investors flocked to ex-U.S. equity opportunities over the last 12 months, driven by high domestic valuations and persistent concentration risk. By contrast, emerging and international markets have both offered lower costs and healthy diversification. Fidelity’s FEMR ETF is the latest in the emerging markets ETF category to spike, and it looks compelling right now despite global uncertainty.
Key Takeaways:
- Emerging markets stocks have been an appealing player for investors in recent months, despite inflationary pressures from the energy crisis.
- FEMR is one ETF in that space that takes a strong proprietary, active approach, and VettaFi’s technical analysis of the Fund suggests a buy signal.
- It could help diversify portfolios away from notable U.S. concentration risk.
The Fidelity Enhanced Emerging Markets ETF (FEMR) marries some important positive trends within the ETF space. It offers both an active strategy and an emerging markets strategy in a single fund. The ETF has returned 30.7% YTD and 59% over the last 12 months, according to ETF Database data.
That performance has helped the strategy send a strong buy signal, according to its tech chart. The active, enhanced international ETF’s price has risen above both its 50- and 200-day simple moving averages and has been well above them for some time, per YCharts data. That indicates notable momentum in its price, which has carried it into the end of May.
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What, specifically, does the fund do that has drawn that interest? The strategy charges a 38 basis point fee to actively invest in emerging markets equities. It uses MSCI definitions to identify potential markets. Then, it uses a research-driven, systematic approach to focus on drivers such as growth, valuation, and quality. With a proprietary portfolio construction process, it then finds firms that can meet the ETF’s goals.
So, while that does lead to a notable exposure to popular emerging markets names like Taiwan Semiconductor (2330), it also invests in non-tech names like Petroleo Brasileiro (PBR). The latter firm has spiked this year amid the global energy volatility in the Middle East.
Together, that may position the fund as an appealing offering for a complicated second half. While many investors are well-stocked with domestic equities, foreign firms like those in FEMR could be intriguing. Especially with Fidelity Investments’ proprietary quantitative research, the fund could make for an attractive core equity holding into the appealing international ETF category.
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Fidelity Investments® is an independent company unaffiliated with VettaFi LLC (“VettaFi”). These articles do not form any kind of legal partnership, agency affiliation, or similar relationship between VettaFi and Fidelity Investments, nor is such a relationship created or implied by the articles herein. VettaFi LLC is the author and owner of these articles.
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