Van Eck Global has launched Market Vectors China ETF (NYSE Arca: PEK), the first U.S.-listed exchange traded fund (ETF) designed to give investors exposure to China’s large and fast-growing A-Shares market, which represents….
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all stocks traded on China’s two main exchanges in Shanghai and Shenzhen. PEK seeks to track the performance of the CSI 300 Index, an Index which captured approximately 64 percent of the total market cap of these two exchanges, as of September 30, 2010.
As China’s local A-Share market has historically been restricted to the country’s domestic investors and Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors, many Emerging Market and BRIC funds are not able to include the A-Share market in their country weighting schemes, leading to a fundamental underweighting of China’s true equity market in these funds. For this reason, Van Eck believes that gross domestic product (GDP) – which reflects the size of a country’s economy rather than the size of its available equity market – may be an important factor to consider when investing in international markets. Since 1996, China’s GDP has ranked first among all emerging markets and since June 2010, it has surpassed Japan as the second largest economy in the world (after the U.S.). This illustrates China’s growing dominance within the global economy; a position that many market capitalization weighted products do not capture.
“Because of its size and growth, we believe effective diversification requires investors to have broad exposure to China and this, in turn, requires exposure to A-Shares traded on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Exchanges. Without A-Shares, investors are missing significant exposure to a world economic powerhouse,” said Jan van Eck, Principal at Van Eck Global. “After all, China’s equity market in total currently accounts for 33 percent of the emerging market universe. With PEK, we are pleased to offer investors a way to access the A-Share marketplace—a marketplace that accounts for nearly a quarter of all emerging markets equities and 72 percent of China’s equities.”
Currently, most other U.S funds offering China exposure invest in shares listed on exchanges in Hong Kong (H-Shares) or elsewhere. H-Shares account for just 4% of all emerging market equities and only 13% of China’s total equity market. The lack of access to the A-Share market prevents investors from gaining broad representation of China’s true domestic market. As a result, these funds offer exposure to only a limited selection of companies and sectors of the Chinese economy.
ETFs tracking China A-Shares are already available in Asian markets. As of October 7, 2010, there were 24 China A-Share-based ETFs listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Eight of these track the broad China market while the remaining 16 track specific industry sectors. In addition, the Singapore and Taiwan Stock Exchanges together list three broad market China A-Share ETFs. The Tokyo Stock Exchange has two broad-based China A-Share ETFs. All 29 ETFs use derivative instruments to replicate the performance of their underlying benchmarks.
PEK seeks to replicate as closely as possible, before fees and expenses, the price and yield performance of the CSI 300 Index (CSIR0300), a leading index compiled and managed by China Securities Index Co. Ltd. The Index, which comprises the most actively traded blue-chip shares on the country’s two exchanges, was recently selected as the underlying benchmark for China’s first index futures contracts. The four contracts based on the CSI 300 were introduced on Friday, April 16 after a decade of planning, on the Shanghai-based China Financial Futures Exchange (CFFE). The trading of index futures followed the March 31, 2010 introduction of margin trading and short selling and was another step to further develop and deepen investment options in China.
Consisting of 300 A-Share stocks listed on the Shenzhen and/or Shanghai Stock Exchanges, the CSI 300 is a free-float market capitalization weighted index. As of September 30, 2010, the Index comprised 38 percent small- and mid-cap stocks and 62 percent large-cap stocks. The index is broadly diversified by sector and covered all 10 Global Industry Classification (GIC) sectors with top weightings in Financials (34%), Industrials (17%) and Materials (15%), as of September 30, 2010.
The Fund will not invest directly in A-Shares immediately; instead it expects to invest in swaps and other types of derivative instruments that have economic characteristics that are substantially identical to the economic characteristics of China A-Share stocks. The Fund carries a net expense ratio of 0.72 percent and a gross expense ratio of 0.85 percent.
Source: ETFWorld – Van Eck Global
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