State Street Launched Global Real Estate ETF (RWO)

Investing in global real estate just got a little easier.

Early last month, State Street Global Advisors launched yet another global real estate ETF. The SPDR DJ Wilshire Global Real Estate ETF (RWO) is the third REIT exchange-traded fund introduced by SSgA (the other two are DJ Wilshire REIT ETF (RWR) and DJ Wilshire REIT ETF (RWR)), focusing on global commercial and residential real estate markets. In addition to RWO, there are several international REIT ETFs being offered to investors in the past couple of years after the real estate boom in the early part of this decade. In the long-term, investing in real estate helps investors diversify their portfolio and, thus, reduce risk. Diversifying away from the U.S. markets makes even more sense after the collapse of the U.S. housing market.

RWO tracks the Dow Jones Wilshire Global Real Estate Securities Index (RESI), which was incepted on March 1, 2006. The RESI is a float adjusted market capitalization index. Among 25 countries/regions that make up the RESI, the U.S. market has the heaviest weight, at 43.51%, followed by Japan at 11.11%. The breakdown of the rest country weights is as follows:

• Australia: 10.24%
• United Kingdom: 7.29%
• Canada: 5.60%
• Hong Kong: 5.54%
• France: 5.30%
• Singapore: 4.33%
• Austria: 2.42%
• Sweden: 0.69%
• Switzerland: 0.69%
• Belgium: 0.48%
• New Zealand: 0.37%
• Germany: 0.35%
• South Africa: 0.32%
• Italy: 0.17%
• Spain: 0.05%
• China: 0.04%

RWO currently has 223 stock holdings and has an expense ratio of 0.50%. RESI is rebalanced annually.

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