Powershares Goes International With New FTSE RAFI Europe, Asia Funds

PowerShares continued the expansion of its FTSE RAFI lineup of alternatively weighted index products today with the launch of four internationally focused exchange-traded funds. The news follows last week’s launch by PowerShares of three international ETFs tied to the QSG family of quantitatively screened indexes.

The dual launches showcase the fact that PowerShares sees the international space as its next big avenue of growth. But the launches also show what a complicated task PowerShares faces as it markets its increasingly huge array of products, as the two product families have significant overlaps.

FTSE RAFI
The FTSE RAFI indexes follow what they call a “fundamental indexing” strategy. In practice, that means that they weight components based on four quantitative factors: book value, earnings, sales and dividends. FTSE RAFI maintains that this strategy will outperform traditional cap-weighted indexes by not overweighting overvalued stocks and underweighting undervalued stocks.
The new fund covers four of the five big categories in international investing, and are the:

• PowerShares FTSE RAFI Developed Markets ex-U.S. Portfolio (NYSE: PXF)

• PowerShares FTSE RAFI Asia Pacific ex-Japan Portfolio (NYSE: PAF)

• PowerShares FTSE RAFI Europe Portfolio (NYSE: PEF)

• PowerShares FTSE RAFI Japan Portfolio (NYSE: PJO)

The notable gap is in emerging markets; that fund is still in registration, along with an expanding lineup of single-country FTSE RAFI ETFs. PowerShares and FTSE RAFI appear to want to match the iShares international fund lineup one-for-one.

Needless to say, on a back-tested basis, all of these funds have crushed their benchmark indexes. The table below compares the performance, expense ratios and certain fundamental statistics for the two PowerShares international product families, as well as the comparable MSCI benchmark. Unfortunately, direct comparisons were not possible on the fundamental statistics for the benchmark indexes, but generally speaking, they had higher price-to-earnings (P/E) and price-to-book (P/B) ratios than the PowerShares funds.

What’s interesting about this table is how different the two PowerShares fund families are. The FTSE RAFI funds have substantially higher average market capitalizations, as well as significantly higher P/E ratios (and lower return on equity figures) than the QSG funds. As such, we can guess that the QSG funds will be more aligned with mid-cap value indexes, while the FTSE RAFI funds tend toward the large-cap core space.

All the performance figures should be approached with caution, as they are based on back-tested data. It’s very easy to design a strategy that performs well in the rearview mirror; how it does in the future is another thing entirely.