The two largest rare earth ETFs are each roughly 30% Chinese companies. Only one fund in this category excludes China at all — and it is small, recently launched, and puts more than a third of its money into two stocks.
None of that is a criticism of any of these funds. Each is tracking its index exactly as designed. It only matters if you bought one expecting exposure to a rare earth supply chain outside China, because in two of three cases that is not what you own.
This guide covers what each rare earth ETF actually holds — with the issuer’s own holdings file cited for every figure — why the gap between the name and the portfolio exists, and how to check any fund yourself in about five minutes.
Short answer: REXC is the only one of these funds that excludes China, and it is the closest to what most people mean by a rare earth ETF — at the cost of concentration, size, and a short track record. REMX is the largest and most liquid, but roughly a third of it is Chinese producers and more of it is lithium than rare earths. EART is a broad critical-materials fund led by copper miners, and it is nearly as Chinese as REMX. Full table below.
What a rare earth ETF actually is
A rare earth ETF — also sold as a rare earth minerals ETF or a rare earth metals ETF — is a fund tracking an index of publicly traded companies with revenue tied to rare earth elements or, more often, to a broader basket the index calls “strategic metals” or “critical materials.” That second phrase — and the difference between rare earths versus critical minerals — is where most of the confusion starts.
Here is the mechanism, and it explains almost everything else on this page. An index fund needs companies it can actually buy — listed, liquid, large enough to take a position in without moving the price. Rare earths are a small industry. Strip out the Chinese state-linked producers and the number of pure-play rare earth companies of investable size anywhere in the world is very small. Not dozens. A handful.
An index built only from that handful would be too concentrated and too illiquid to launch as a mainstream product. So index rules widen the net. “Strategic metals” brings in lithium. “Critical materials” brings in copper, cobalt, nickel, graphite, even carbon fibre. Each addition makes the fund more investable and less about rare earths.
None of this is hidden. It is written in each index methodology and published in the holdings, which anyone can download. The fund’s name is simply doing a lot of work in the meantime.
The rule worth carrying: a fund’s name describes a theme the issuer is selling. The holdings describe what you own. Those are two different documents, and they rarely say the same thing.
Rare earth ETF list: what each fund actually holds
These are the US-listed funds most investors will encounter. They are built on different premises, and the differences matter more than the shared label.
| REMX | EART | REXC | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Issuer | VanEck | Global X | Sprott |
| Inception | Oct 27, 2010 | Jan 24, 2022 | Apr 14, 2026 |
| Expense ratio | 0.53% net (0.57% gross) | 0.59% | 0.65% |
| Net assets | $2.05B | $40.6M | $52.5M |
| Holdings | 37 (incl. cash rows; 30 equities) | 50 | 42 |
| China share | 32.2% | 28.5% | 0% (excluded by index) |
| Rare earth share | 28.1% | 12.8% | 83.5% |
| Top 3 | Albemarle, China Northern Rare Earth, PLS Group | Anglo American, Freeport-McMoRan, Grupo Mexico | Lynas, MP Materials, Neo Performance |
| Top 2 concentration | 15.1% | 10.5% | 38.0% |
REMX ETF — the broad strategic-metals fund
REMX is the oldest and by far the largest fund in this category. It is also far less focused on rare earths than its name implies, and it holds the world’s largest rare earth producer by output — China Northern Rare Earth — in its top three positions.
Lithium accounts for a larger share of the fund than rare earths do. That comparison holds under every reasonable classification, including the most generous possible reading of what counts as a rare earth company, but it depends on judgment calls worth stating openly rather than burying.
Three of those calls matter. Xiamen Tungsten is filed here as tungsten, but it was one of China’s six designated rare earth consolidation groups and runs a substantial rare earth materials business — count it as a rare earth company and the rare earth share rises materially, though not past lithium. Iluka Resources is usually filed under mineral sands, but it is building Australia’s first fully integrated rare earths refinery (opens in a new tab), so it is counted here as a rare earth name. Shenghe Resources is a genuine rare earth company that happens to be Chinese, and is counted in both columns. Lianyou Metals is a Taiwanese tungsten and cobalt recycler — neither Chinese nor a rare earth company, and counted as neither.
The China share moves under none of these readings. That is why it, and not the lithium comparison, is the number to hang a decision on.
EART — the critical-materials fund
EART is the furthest of the three from what its name suggests. Its largest positions are copper and diversified mining companies, and no rare earth company appears among its top holdings at all.
The breadth is disclosed in the fund’s legal name — it is the Rare Earth & Critical Materials ETF — and its index openly covers copper, nickel, cobalt, platinum-group metals, graphite and carbon fibre. It is doing what it says.
What is easier to miss is that EART is nearly as Chinese as REMX, and it gets there differently. REMX concentrates its Chinese exposure in a handful of large positions. EART spreads it across more than twenty smaller ones, most of them well below the top ten, where a reader skimming the headline holdings will never see them. Anyone who checks only the top ten of this fund will badly underestimate what they own.
REXC — the ex-China pure-play
REXC is the only one of these funds built around exclusion. It tracks an index designed to cover companies in rare earth mining, separation, refining and production “while excluding companies domiciled in or primarily operating in China” (opens in a new tab). The result looks like what most people picture when they hear “rare earth ETF”: Lynas, MP Materials, Neo Performance Materials, USA Rare Earth.
It is not a pure rare earth fund either, and the same test applied to the other two has to be applied here. Roughly a sixth of the portfolio is something else — Sunrise Energy Metals, the fund’s fourth-largest position, is primarily nickel, cobalt and scandium; NioCorp is niobium and scandium; Critical Metals Corp is a lithium project; Energy Fuels is a uranium producer with a rare earth line. That is still far more rare earth exposure than either alternative, and it is the fund’s honest number rather than its marketing one.
It is also small, launched in April 2026 with no full market cycle behind it, and by a wide margin the most concentrated of the three. Those are real costs and they get their own section below.
Why rare earth funds hold Chinese companies
Rare earth funds hold Chinese companies because that is where the industry is. As of 2024, China refined roughly 91% of the world’s rare earth output and produced about 94% of its permanent magnets, according to the IEA (opens in a new tab). Any index screening for companies with meaningful rare earth revenue will surface Chinese companies, because a screen for economic activity finds the place the economic activity happens.
There is nothing devious in it. It is arithmetic.
Excluding China is a deliberate methodology decision, and a harder one than it sounds. It means accepting a smaller universe, higher concentration, and a fund that will look worse in any period when Chinese producers outperform. For most of the sector’s history no major index made that choice, which is why the older funds hold what they hold.
The uncomfortable part is what this means for the buyer. The pitch that sells this entire category is a single idea: China controls this supply chain and that is a risk worth hedging. An investor acting on that idea, who buys either of the two established funds, ends up putting close to a third of their money into Chinese producers — including, in one case, the national champion at the center of the concentration they were trying to hedge.
That is not a scandal. Both funds disclose it. But it is close to the opposite of the intended trade, and it is worth saying plainly.
The position at Rare Earth Exchanges is straightforward: the supply chain the West needs to build is an ex-China supply chain, and most of these funds are not it. Some of them are the other side of that trade.
Mining exposure is not supply chain exposure
Owning a rare earth miner is not the same as owning the rare earth bottleneck, and most of these funds own miners.
The four stages, and which ones are actually hard
The rare earth supply chain has four stages, and they are not equally hard.
Mining is the easy one. Rare earth deposits exist on every inhabited continent, and the elements are not geologically rare — what is rare is economic concentration at workable grade. Separation is where it breaks. Pulling seventeen chemically near-identical elements apart takes hundreds of solvent-extraction stages, enormous capital, decades of process know-how, and a tolerance for the waste streams that come with it. The heavy rare earth elements are the hardest of all to separate, and the ones the West is shortest of. After separation comes metal and alloy production, and after that, magnet manufacturing.
China’s advantage is concentrated in the last three stages, not the first. The West has ore. It does not have separation capacity or magnet capacity at anything close to the scale it needs.
Why the funds tilt toward miners anyway
Listed pure-play separators and magnet makers outside China barely exist at investable size. There are a few — and the ex-China fund holds most of the listed pure-plays, as the current magnet producer rankings show. But the universe is thin enough that any index weighted by market cap and liquidity will tilt heavily toward miners.
So a rare earth ETF is, structurally, a bet on the least constrained part of the chain. It is exposure to companies that dig ore, in a market whose actual bottleneck is what happens to the ore afterward.
This is the single most useful thing to understand before buying any of these funds, and it will remain true long after the current lineup changes. When a new fund launches, the first question is not what it is called or what it charges. It is: how much of this portfolio touches separation and magnets, and how much of it just digs?
What ex-China purity actually costs you
Ex-China purity costs you three things: concentration, scale, and fees.
Concentration risk
The ex-China fund’s two largest positions together account for more of the portfolio than the other two funds’ top two combined — see the table. Own the fund and you substantially own two companies. If either has a bad operational quarter, the fund has a bad quarter, and diversification will not save you, because there is not enough of it.
Fund size, liquidity, and closure risk
Both of the newer funds here are small by ETF standards. Small funds carry wider bid-ask spreads, a cost you pay on the way in and again on the way out without ever seeing it on a statement. They also carry closure risk. Issuers shut down funds that fail to gather assets, and when that happens you are returned your money at a time of the issuer’s choosing rather than your own.
This is not hypothetical in this category. Exchange Traded Concepts liquidated the Optica Rare Earths & Critical Materials ETF (opens in a new tab) in early 2025. That is the risk, documented, in this exact corner of the market.
In fairness on the other side: Sprott is a specialist resource issuer with a track record of sustaining niche funds, and REXC gathered its current asset base within months of launch. That is a strong start, not a struggling fund.
Expense ratio
Fees run higher too — see the expense ratio row. A narrower mandate normally costs more, and this one does.
Set against all of that: it is the only one of these funds that gives you what most buyers of a rare earth ETF think they are buying. If your thesis is that Western governments will keep spending to build a supply chain outside China, a fund holding Chinese producers is working against your thesis, and the concentration may be a price worth paying.
The point is not that one fund is right. It is that this is a trade with two sides, and anyone who presents ex-China exposure as free is selling something.
How to check what any rare earth fund holds — a five-minute method
This is the part that outlasts everything else on this page. Funds change. New ones launch, holdings rotate, weights drift. The method does not.
- Go to the issuer’s own holdings file — VanEck (opens in a new tab), Global X (opens in a new tab) and Sprott (opens in a new tab) all publish complete holdings, usually as a downloadable file. Use the issuer, never a third-party aggregator — aggregators lag and they get fields wrong. Note the “as of” date at the top.
- Read the whole file, not the top ten. This is the step that matters most and the one almost everyone skips. Chinese exposure in particular tends to sit in many small positions well below the headline holdings, and a top-ten scan can understate it by several times over.
- Categorize every holding by what the company actually mines or makes — not by the fund’s name, and not by the company’s name either. Lithium is not a rare earth. Copper is not a rare earth. Tungsten, cobalt, graphite and carbon fibre are not rare earths. There are seventeen rare earth elements, and if a company’s revenue does not come from them, it is not a rare earth company no matter which fund holds it.
- Check domicile and primary operations, not the listing exchange. A Hong Kong listing does not make a company non-Chinese, and a Taiwanese company is not a Chinese one.
- Add up two numbers. What share of the portfolio is genuinely rare earths, and what share is genuinely outside China? Those two figures are what you own. Everything else is packaging. They are also the two bolded rows in the table above, which is where any fund comparison should start.
Run that on any fund in this category and you will know more about it than most people who hold it. Run it before you buy, and again once a year — the sector moves fast enough that a fund you checked two years ago may not be the fund you own now.
Does Vanguard, Fidelity, or Schwab offer a rare earth ETF?
No major US brokerage sponsors its own rare earth ETF. Vanguard, Fidelity and Schwab are brokerages, not issuers of these funds — and all three let you buy the ETFs that do exist.
This question comes up constantly, and the confusion has a specific and understandable source. Vanguard hosts a profile page for REMX (opens in a new tab) on its own website, the same way it hosts pages for thousands of third-party funds its customers can trade. To a searcher, a VanEck fund displayed on vanguard.com reads like a Vanguard product. It is not.
The same applies to Fidelity and Schwab. Both offer research pages and quote data for these funds, and both will execute the trade. Neither issues one.
If you are searching for a rare earth ETF at a specific broker, the practical answer is that your broker almost certainly gives you access to every fund on this page. The choice you are making is between the funds themselves, not between platforms.
Frequently asked questions
What is the REMX ETF?
REMX is the VanEck Rare Earth and Strategic Metals ETF, the oldest and largest fund in this category. It tracks a strategic-metals index rather than a pure rare earth index, which is why it holds more lithium than rare earths and why roughly a third of it is Chinese companies.
What is the best rare earth ETF?
There is no single best one, because the three funds are built on different premises. REXC is the only one that excludes China and the closest to a pure rare earth fund, but it is small and highly concentrated. REMX is the largest and most liquid, with substantial Chinese and lithium exposure. EART is the broadest and holds the least rare earths of the three. The right answer depends on whether you are buying the sector or buying the ex-China thesis specifically.
Is a rare earth ETF a good investment?
It depends on what you think you are buying. Two of the three funds hold close to a third Chinese companies and weight heavily toward miners rather than separators and magnet makers, so if your thesis is exposure to a Western rare earth supply chain, they deliver it only partially. Check the holdings against your thesis before deciding. If you want single-name exposure instead, the same holdings test applies to rare earth stocks.
Does Vanguard have a rare earth ETF?
No. Vanguard does not issue one. It hosts a profile page for VanEck’s REMX and lets customers trade it, which is the source of most of the confusion around this question.
Does Fidelity have a rare earth ETF?
No. Fidelity does not sponsor a rare earth fund, though it provides research coverage for the existing ETFs and will execute trades in all of them.
Does Schwab have a rare earth ETF?
No. Like Vanguard and Fidelity, Schwab is a brokerage rather than an issuer in this category and offers access to the third-party funds.
How much of a rare earth ETF is actually Chinese companies?
It varies by fund and changes over time, which is why the table above carries a verification date. Two of the three funds sit close to a third Chinese by portfolio weight. One excludes Chinese companies entirely by index mandate. Always check the current holdings file rather than assuming — and read the whole file, because Chinese exposure often sits well below the top ten positions.
What is the difference between REMX and an ex-China rare earth ETF?
REMX tracks a broad strategic-metals index that includes Chinese producers and significant lithium exposure. An ex-China fund such as REXC tracks an index that excludes companies domiciled in or primarily operating in China and stays closer to rare earths specifically. The trade-off is focus versus diversification and liquidity.
The bottom line
There are only a handful of rare earth ETFs, and the differences between them are larger than their names suggest. Two of the three are roughly a third Chinese companies — one concentrating that exposure in a few large positions, the other spreading it across more than twenty smaller ones. The third excludes China entirely, and charges for it in concentration, size, and fees.
None of that makes any of them a bad fund. It makes them different products than a lot of buyers think they are purchasing. Before you buy any of them, download the holdings file and count what is actually in it — the method above takes five minutes, and it will outlast every fund named here.
Rare Earth Exchanges publishes independent supply chain analysis. Nothing here is investment advice, and we receive no compensation from any fund or issuer named. Fund holdings and figures change continuously; verify current data with the issuer and speak with a licensed financial advisor before making any investment decision.
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