It seems like every week, a new country has an ETF to its name. Last week I had taken a quick look into the difference between investing in a country’s currency or its stock market and while doing that I had the opportunity to take a look at all of the single country ETF’s that are currently traded on US markets. Then, today I noticed that Market Vectors confirmed a new ETF on Egypt would soon be trading, EGPT.

So I decided to take a look at every country that has an ETF to its name. I excluded all regional ETF’s so this means that the Middle East and Africa for example are not very represented. But I thought it would be interesting to take a look. It is stunning to see how Ishares has the top ETF (in terms of market cap) for almost every country available. But as companies like Market Vectors launch ETF’s on countries like Egypt and Vietnam, it will be interesting to see if Ishares can remain on top.

Another trend is for new ETF’s to be launched on subsectors of these single countries. This obviously leaves almost unlimited possibilities. The difficult part will be to get investors to buy such ETF’s.

I was also surprised to see that countries like Taiwan & India have more important ETF’s than major economies such as Germany, France and Spain. I’m not sure to have an explanation. Any ideas?

I would have expected to see higher fees for less developed countries such as Thailand but Ishares seems to have all their ETF’s on single countries at more or less the same fee ratios.

Any thoughts on the table? Do you know of any missing country ETF?

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