Displaying Country Weights for International ETFs in Google Earth
Google Earth is a great tool for looking at many different types of data. A quick Google search will show hundreds of on-line Google Earth projects which use the tool to display data on everything from the health of marine ecosystems to the status of U.S. airline flights.
I’ve put together a Python script to display the country weights for two international ETFs; EFA is an iShares ETF which tracks the MSCI EAFE index, and VWO is a Vanguard ETF which tracks the MSCI Emerging Markets index. I used red placemarks for EFA and blue for VWO. In both cases, the area of the placemark is proportional to the country’s weight in the respective fund. These weights vary over time with a country’s market cap, so each country weight shown is for a particular date (9/30/2010 for EFA and 11/30/2010 for VWO).
A screenshot of the European section of the map is shown here:
