By Marcus Williams
Russian equity funds surged in the week to March 10, posting their highest inflow in 20 weeks as investor appetite returned to emerging markets.
Russia-dedicated funds registered $411min net inflows last week, according to global fund trackers Emerging Portfolio Fund Resources. This outpaced inflows for other countries in the Brazil, Russia, India and China rainbow of emerging economies, with China reporting inflows of $90m, Brazil funds posting $47m and India funds recording $67m.
The weekly net inflow of $191m into Russian ETFs is the largest on record and may be connected with the launch yesterday by US fund giant State Street Global Advisors of its SPDR S&P Russia ETF which started trading on the NYSE. The ETF tracks the S&P Russia Capped BMI Index with 72 underlying securities.
Mark Robinson, head of equity research at UniCredit Securites, said: “The emergence of new ETFs on Russia is also encouraging, and we expect that the planned Russian ETF launch by the market leader – iShares – later in 2010 might also spur some buying of Russian securities.”
