A European country is struggling to rein in its swelling budget deficit. It chooses to sell additional treasury bonds to fund its spending needs/desires.

The European Commission doesn’t like the direction its member country is heading with that rising deficit. So the group publicly pressures the member country to act more responsibly.

We previously examined the performance of various country-specific ETFs in 2010 and Japan (EWJ) and Russia (RSX) were standouts. This trend has shown no sign of abating, and may well continue throughout 2010. In particular Japan, which has been a "dead money" market for about 20 years now, may be poised for relative outperformance gains in 2010 vis-a-vis some other major country ETFs.

The other international ETFs profiled in the chart include India (PIN) in purple, Canada (EWC) in white, Australia (EWA) in blue, China (FXI) in green, Germany (EWG) in orange, and Brazil (EWZ) in yellow. Brazil is the laggard of these countries thus far this calendar year.

Below is a table in order of the sum of the 3, 6, and 12 month returns for individual country ETFs. Each column represents returns for various timeframes and the percent each ETF is above (or below) the 200 day moving averages as of January's close. This list is tracked monthly on the right hand side of my blog Scott's Investments.

Note that all country ETFs are above their 200 day moving average except PGJ (China), GXC (China), FXI (China), EWP (Spain), EWG (Germany), and EWI (Italy). This is a significant change versus last month when none of the ETFs were below the 200 day SMA.