Strong dollar driving big growth in these ETFs

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
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Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Interest rates around the world are a tiny fraction of those available in America. If you bought a German 10-year note you wouldn't earn as much during the entire 10-year term of that bond as you would earn in a single year with a U.S. 10-year Treasury.

If the outlook for global growth is so poor that interest rates in Europe are nearly zero, how is it that the tide of investor cash flowing into international ETFs turned into a flood earlier this month?

For the first five trading days of April, eight of the 10 ETFs with the greatest inflows were international funds and three of those eight hedged their currency risk for dollar-denominated investors.