Paulo

New International Dividend ETF from State Street

There was an article on DWX that provided almost exactly the same information. I commented pointing to the currency diversification issue for U.S. investors. Specifically, 52% of DWX is allocated to three countries: Britain (24.91%), Canada (18,29%), Australia (8.79%). Okay, I'm Canadian, so no one is going to listen to me. Let me just direct you to a recently published article entitled 'Global Currency Hedging' published online by Working Knowledge of the Harvard Business School. Let me quote from the executive summary, and you can take it from there: "the euro, the Swiss franc, and a long-short position in the U.S. dollar and the Canadian dollar are negatively correlated with world equity markets. By contrast, other currencies such as the Australian dollar, the Canadian dollar, the Japanese yen, and the British pound are either uncorrelated or positively correlated with world stock markets". This has been true over the period 1975-2005, but whether going long the U.S. dollar and short the Canadian dollar might not work as well this time round.
Anyway, from a Canadian perspective, I would buy DWX if they throw out Canada, Australia, and Britain. That is more what I want (and pleeze, not 25% Japan!!!).

New SPDR International Dividend ETF Offers Lower Costs, Higher Returns

This is a brand new ETF and profound analysis based on experience cannot be expected of anyone, and it will not come from the issuers.
Now, 52% of this ETF is the U.K.(24.91%), Canada (18.29%), and Australia (8.79%). And 22.5% is financials and 21% consumer discretionary (but 38.3 energy and materials).
The Canadian and Australian currencies tend to go up or down more or less at the same time and if the pound sterling decides to decline at the same time, the objective of fully diversifying currency risk might be compromised.
So the currency issues might, given certain alignments of the currency stars, signficantly impact performance.
Also, if there is a severe recession or prolonged slowdown in the U.S., the stock markets in the U.K., Canada, and Australia will not decouple and, believe it or not, the U.S. dollar could actually rise significantly against these currencies (which is not what you want to happen if you buy this ETF) until the U.S. economy went into recovery and good times rolled again.
The volume is not there yet on this new ETF, but it deserves better than that.