This ETF offers exposure to Australian equities, and is the most liquid and most popular option for achieving exposure to the Australian economy. As such, EWA can be potentially useful as a tool for fine tuning the international equity section of a long-term portfolio. It can also be a useful fund for making a short-term bet on Australia, a resource rich economy that might have tremendous appeal in certain environments. Investors building a long-term portfolio may find more broad-based EAFE ETFs such as EFA or VEA to be more efficient from a cost perspective. Like many international equity ETFs, EWA is dominated by large cap stocks, which introduces certain biases into the portfolio. In the case of EWA, financials receive a heavy allocation, while access to the country's potentially desirable natural resources sector is relatively limited. The small-cap focused KROO might be a more appealing means of establishing exposure to Australia (or could alternatively be used to complement the exposure offered by EWA). Another potential alternative for exposure to Australian equities is AUSE; that ETF is linked to a dividend-weighted strategy that may be appealing to certain types of investors.
The adjacent table gives investors an individual Realtime Rating for EWA on several different metrics, including liquidity, expenses, performance, volatility, dividend, concentration of holdings in addition to an overall rating. The "A+ Metric Rated ETF" field, available to ETFdb Pro members, shows the ETF in the Asia Pacific Equities with the highest Metric Realtime Rating for each individual field. To view all of this data, sign up for a free 14-day trial for ETFdb Pro. To view information on how the ETFdb Realtime Ratings work, click here.
The following chart also includes the option to compare the performance of EWA relative to other ETFs and benchmarks or to include indicators such as Bollinger Bands, relative strength, and moving averages.