today we geographically move a bit north of Australia and into the Asia Pacific region.
There are a handful of ETFs that track Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, some of which are very tenured funds. EWS (Singapore, expense ratio 0.48%, $548 million in AUM) debuted back in March of 1996 and trades about 500,000 shares on an average daily basis. Financials are the dominant sector allocation at 37%, followed by Real Estate (19%), Industrials (18%) and lesser allocations to other sectors.
Malaysia is also represented by an iShares veteran known as EWM (Malaysia, Expense Ratio 0.48%, $418 million in AUM), which also started trading in 1996. Indonesia actually has more than one investment alternative in EIDO (Expense Ratio 0.63%, $485 million in AUM) and IDX (Indonesia, Expense Ratio 0.58%, $82 million in AUM).
Like Singapore, Financials are also the top sector allocation in both Malaysia and Indonesia. EWS is within a few cents of a new 52-week high while EWM, EIDO and IDX still have some work to do.
The iShares MSCI Singapore Index Fund ETF was trading at $23.78 Monday morning, down $0.03 (-0.13%). Year-to-date, EWS has gained 19.32%, versus a 6.89% rise in the benchmark S&P 500 index during the same period.
EWS currently has an ETF Daily News SMART Grade of A (Strong Buy), and is ranked #14 of 75 ETFs in the Asia Pacific Equities Ex-China ETFs category.