iShares, the exchange traded funds business of New York-headquartered BlackRock, is listing a dedicated China fund on the NYSE Arca.

The iShares MSCI China Index Fund is designed to track the MSCI China Index, a measure of the performance of the top 85 per cent of Chinese equity securities by market capitalization. The index is biased towards companies with higher total market values, as these receive higher weightings.

A snapshot at the end of February shows the largest sector weightings of the index to be financials (37 per cent), energy (18.4 per cent) and telecomms (11.4 per cent).

While iShares’ latest fund is benchmarked to the large- and mid-cap MSCI universe, the firm also has a China small-cap fund listed on the NYSE Arca, which began trading in September 2010. The new fund is also the firm’s fortieth single country ETF.