Two new Copper ETFs debuted in 2010 and both of them focus on copper mining stocks.  GlobalX Copper Miners – COPX is by far the most actively traded of the two.  The purpose of the fund is to track the performance of the Solactive Global Copper Miners index, before fees & expenses.  The first trading date was April 20, 2010 and the mandate is for at least 80% of assets to be invested in securities and depositary receipts that make up the underlying index.


COPX recently had an expense ratio of .65%, average daily trading volume of 180k shares and approximately $45 million in assets.

Daily Chart for COPX Copper ETF as of 12/27/2010

Daily Chart from inception to 12/27/2010

The second Copper ETF that focuses on mining companies that also started trading in 2010 is the First Trust ISE Global Copper Index ETF – CU.  As us the case with COPX this fund also invests in global copper mining stocks.  It’s goal is to replicate the performance of the ISE Global Copper Index (before fees and expenses) with at least 90% of it’s assets invested in companies that make up the underlying index.

Recently CU had an expense ratio of .70% and an average daily volume that was about 1/3 as much as COPX.

ETF Performance comparison between COPX (black bars) and CU (brown line):

Performance Of COPX vs CU as of 12/27/2010

Daily chart starts on CU inception date through 12/27/2010.

Despite the fact that these two ETFs track different copper stock indices you can see the performance of these two Copper ETFs is almost identical over the period of time that they have both been trading.