I was asked the following:

I was wondering how do you judge how well iShares are doing? I was watching EWL, Swiss Ishares and it broke out today. However, since it does not belong to any sector/industry and it is from a different country, thus how do we go about looking at it?

Random “ETF” Roger may be a better person to answer this question but I’ll give it a shot. The first thing that comes to mind for the country specific iShares is to compare them to the ETFs of other countries. In this case I’d probably pick the other European countries. But depending on your goal you may want to compare it to all the countries including the S&P 500.

Here’s a chart that I just built on Yahoo which compares EWL to the S&P 500, EWJ (Japan), EWZ (Brazil) and EWG Germany).

Yahoo’s ETF Browser may be helpful in this regard too.