ETF Face-Off in India

When it comes to trading volume, EPI is the more popular of the two funds, with a 674,000 three-month average daily trading volume. EPI has a slightly higher 0.88% expense ratio and is made up of 142 components.

The largest market sector in EPI is energy, which comprises 25.67% of the fund, followed by financials and materials with 13.88% and 13.16% allocations, respectively. While EPI has nearly triple the number of holdings as PIN, Wisdom Tree's offering has 45.19% of the fund's assets concentrated in the top 10 holdings.

As a result of the larger number of holdings, however, EPI's capitalization mix is more diverse than that of PIN. While 93.64% of PIN's portfolio is made up of giant and large cap stocks, just 79% of EPI's portfolio falls into the giant and large cap categories. Wisdom tree uses an earnings based methodology.

The factor that gives PIN the edge over EPI is the concentration in the underlying portfolio. Even though EPI has more holdings, 15.49% of the fund is allocated to a single top holding, Reliance Industries. PIN's top holding, Infosys Technologies, makes up just 9.19%. The very large Reliance Industries stake in EPI makes this fund more vulnerable to the movement of just one of its components, a factor that can have a more pronounced effect in a market that is still emerging. PIN and EPI share many of the same top holdings, including Infosys Technologies, Reliance Industries, Oil & Natural Gas Corp., Reliance Communication and Indian Oil.