I've covered the minimum spanning tree for the MSCI ETFs over the YTD and the entire ETF/CEF market and its categories in past posts, but here is a new MST for the last month of trading (as of last night's close).  As I've discussed before, if you're going to invest in country-specific ETFs as many suggest, make sure you pick countries that are as distant from each other as possible.

    Granted, this is based on correlation over the last month, so this is really more descriptive of market structure than actually useful for long-term investments.  As such a look into the market structure, here are the things I note:

• France and Germany are perhaps the two economies that have seen the most change in the YTD, but the Netherlands MSCI Index continues to be a better country-specific proxy for Europe's growth trend. 
• In the past month, Australia has been moving more in sync with European markets than previously.  Expect this correlation to reverse in a bearish market, especially if commodity prices remain elevated (and the Australian economy is not too badly shaken by drought).
• Malaysia is a good proxy for all of non-China Asia except for Japan, which is more strongly correlated with Canada.
• Every single European fund is more correlated to Malaysia than to the S&P 500.