Opinion on  Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp (BNI)     Sector: Transportation  >  Industry: Railroads
A Global Railroad ETF Update: A New Way For Investors To Ride The Rails

An article on ETF Trends today by Timothy Hubbard provides a bullish outlook for the future of rail transport and lists the major holdings in the iShares Dow Transports ETF (IYT) from the railroad industry. My new index/ETF idea, Global Railroad BULLISHares, would provide investors with a leveraged and diversified investment vehicle for the global rail transport industry. As illustrated in the accompanying image, the four major US-based railroad companies drove the performance in this index, including Union Pacific (UNP), Burlington Northern (BNI), Norfolk Southern (NSC), and CSX Corp (CSX). These four domestic railroads were all up over 25% in the last year and occupy four of the top five companies by market cap. The China-based railroads were the biggest drag on the index in sympathy with the overall drop in the Chinese stock market; although just three of the 28 total rail companies (representing about 9%) are based in China.