A New ETF Will Finally Give US Retail Investors Direct Access To The Chinese Stock Market

It's not easy to get access to China's domestic stock market.

China's A-shares, or shares of mainland Chinese companies that trade in renminbi on Chinese stock exchanges such as the Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, have always been closed off to foreigners. Only big institutional investors, with the resources to jump through the Chinese government's hoops, had been given limited access to the A-shares market.

This changed last week, when Deutsche Bank launched an ETF that will give individual investors access to this highly restricted market. The db X-trackers Harvest CSI 300 China A-Shares Fund (with the ticker ASHR) will track the CSI300, which tracks China's 300 largest shares. It's China's version of the U.S.'s S&P 500.

There have been other ETFs that track Chinese A-shares, such as the PowerShares China A-Share Portfolio and the Market Vectors China ETF, but these ETFs have held A-shares futures, not the stocks themselves. The Deutsche Bank ETF will hold the actual stock, as opposed to derivatives.

Here's a look at the CSI 300 over the past one year:

(via Bloomberg)