New iShares India Trading On BATS Today

BlackRock's BLK iShares unit, the world's largest ETF issuer, continued its torrid pace of new ETF introductions this year with another listing on the BATS Exchange today as the iShares MSCI India Index Fund INDA debuted. While iShares is arguably the dominant purveyor of emerging markets ETFs, the iShares MSCI India Index Fund is the company's first India-specific play. With an expense ratio of 0.65%, INDA tracks an index of 72 stocks. Financials account for almost 25% of the new ETF's weight while technology and energy names combine for another 31%. While INDA may be iShares first India ETF, it will find immediate and established competition as has been the case with several other new iShares ETFs. While the weightings are different, many of INDA's top-10 holdings are the same stocks that are found in the WisdomTree India Earnings ETF EPI and the PowerShares India Portfolio PIN. EPI has over $903 million in AUM while PIN has almost $399 million in AUM. Both of those ETFs are will turn four years old in over the next five weeks. What iShares may be lacking in originality with INDA and some of its other new ETFs is being made up for with favorable expense ratios. At 0.83% for EPI and 0.78% for PIN, INDA is obviously the winner on that front. It can also be said that the timing of INDA is either great or exceptionally late. India ETFs have emerging markets stars to start 2012 and EPI and PIN were among the best-performing non-leveraged ETFs in the month of January. Heading into the start of trading today, EPI was up over 22% year-to-date while PIN was up more than 25%.