There are four India-focused equity funds on our top-performers list, including small-cap strategies that own the companies said to be most in tune with domestic themes.
They are:
- iShares MSCI India Small-Cap (SMIN | F-98), up 45 percent YTD
- Market Vectors India Small-Cap (SCIF | D-45), up 41 percent YTD
- EGShares India Small Cap (SCIN | F-47), up 40 percent YTD
- EGShares India Consumer (INCO | F-35), up 39 percent YTD
The Indian stock market has been on a tear this year, fueled largely by a reformist government, and growth-friendly policies promoted by Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan.
Nouriel Roubini, one of the world's most respected macroeconomists, recently told ETF.com he expects this outperformance of emerging markets such as India—relative to developed economies—to continue next year.
“As you know, valuations were a bit depressed in emerging markets,” he said. “If you have more reformist government coming to power in countries from Indonesia to India to other emerging markets, then economic growth in the end could improve, and policymaking could improve as they start to pursue some of the right macro and structural policies.”
Coffee-focused ETPs iPath Dow Jones-UBS Coffee Total Return ETN (JO | B-67) and the iPath Pure Beta Coffee ETN (CAFE | B-98) have been making headlines throughout the year thanks to surging coffee prices in the face of dwindling supplies.
JO is up 64 percent year-to-date, and CAFE is up 60 percent.
Behind the price move—and the performance of these ETPs—is a drought so severe in Brazil that the coffee crop has not only been hindered this year, it is expected to fall short of expectations in 2015 as well.
According to some estimates, Brazil’s drought in the southern region is its worst in some 80 years. Brazil is the largest coffee producer in the world.
Both JO and CAFE invest in coffee futures, but JO tracks a single, front-month coffee futures contract, while CAFE tracks an index of a single coffee futures contract whose expiration date is chosen to mitigate contango. That difference explains the small dispersion in their performance.
