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• Currency-Hedged BRIC ETFs?
• Choose BRIC ETFs Carefully

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I began thinking along those lines on the train into work this week, when I saw a Bloomberg headline that read:"BRICs Biggest Currency Depreciation Since 1998 Set to Worsen."

Being the ETF geek that I am, the first thing that came to mind was, "Why isn't there a currency-hedged BRIC ETF on the market yet?"

The Bloomberg story I'm referring to not only illustrated just how rough it's been in the past 12 months for the currencies of the four BRIC countries-Brazil, Russia, India and China-it also painted a pretty bleak outlook for them moving forward.

Because Deutsche Bank's U.S. ETF arm, db-X, has already launched a currency-hedged developing markets portfolio -- the db-X MSCI Emerging Markets Currency-Hedged Equity ETF (NYSEArca:DBEM) -- it strikes me as odd that a BRIC counterpart doesn't already exist.

That may change in the coming months, but in the meantime we are left pondering what might have been.

Let's take a look at the currencies of the four BRIC nations over the past year.

What's interesting about this chart is how big a role currency depreciation has played in setting those returns. Each portfolio's weightings to Russia, India, Brazil and China is shown below and, by stripping out the currency returns of each, we get two sets of one-year returns:hedged and unhedged.

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