There has been a lot of chatter lately—since John Bogle dropped his "investors are getting fleeced in ETFs" bomb two weeks ago—that the average Joe just isn't going to do very well in ETFs because he'll be getting in when he should get out, and vice versa.

Well, let's see how the "average" ETF investor did in the month of June. We don't have numbers on how asset flows changed during the last 30 days yet, although our friends at the National Stock Exchange are sure to get us that soon. But what we do know is the bets investors, as a mass of men and women leading lives of quiet desperation, made at the beginning of the month.

As a refresher, here were the assets of leading ETFs at the end of May (in billions of dollars):

There are a few interesting things on this list. The first is simply the size of the investments outside core U.S. equity holdings. A total of $35 billion is a lot of gold, and the combined $61 billion in EEM/EFA is also a staggering number. So how'd investors fare against the stodgy old S&P 500 in June?

Before we get into that, it's worth pointing out an interesting divergence just inside the S&P 500. For the month of June, SPY was down 63 basis points. Its largest competitor, the iShares IVV, was down only 50 basis points. The reason, one suspects, is that the dividend date for SPY was June 19, and as a matter of policy, SPY holds its dividends in cash and won't pay those dividends out until the end of July. IVV, on the other hand, marked dividends on June 23 and paid them on the June 29, and reinvested them as a matter of policy during the interim period.

And of course, these distinctions pale in comparison to the performance differences experienced by investors in the non-U.S. equity markets.

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