The pursuit for disruptive innovation, where returns and future themes go hand in hand, continues to draw interest from global pools of investors. The ARK Israel Innovative Technology ETF (BATS:IZRL) is a fund that attempts to track the disruptive innovation originating from Israel’s fast-growing tech sector. How does it do this? By seeking to track the ARK Israeli Innovation Index. This index tries to provide exposure to companies that are leading disruption in Israel and around the world within five innovation platforms: genetic engineering and genomics, healthcare innovation, biotechnology, industrial innovation, and the internet and information technology. The fund does this with an expense ratio of 0.49 percent.
ETF Holdings
One of the nice things about this fund is the way the top holdings are constructed. I, personally, am not familiar with any of these companies except for Wix.com, Teva, and Fiverr, but that’s why you consider ETFs like this. No position makes up more than 2.69% of the fund, which makes this well diversified overall.
Sector Composition and Weightings
The sector composition of IZRL is highly concentrated in information tech, which is the single largest weight in the fund at 56.1 percent. Healthcare at 14.0 percent, Communication Services at 11.4 percent, Industrials at 9.8 percent, Consumer Discretionary at 6.5 percent, and Consumer Staples at 2.0 percent round out the remaining sectors. This broad sector composition can allow the fund to capture benefits from the many aspects of disruptive innovation that I have discussed previously, from medical discoveries to new digital communication and automation for the industrial sector.
One thing worth noting about the sector composition is the market cap weightings overall. The bulk of this fund is in the small-cap range, which, as we know, has been a challenged part of the marketplace since 2021. This can be a good thing should small-caps outperform large-caps in the next cycle.
Peer Comparison
There aren’t any pure play competitors that I could find to IZRL, which is finely targeted for investors looking to gain exposure to Israeli tech. Having said that, we can compare it to the non-Israel specific and more generic ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK). When looking at the price ratio, IZRL has outperformed and looks like it may want to continue to do so.
Pros and Cons of Investing in IZRL
In recent years, Israeli companies have spearheaded many of the world’s tech trends, especially in cybersecurity, medical technology and software development. This is a good fund for exposure to that. Moreover, because its stock allocation is so diversified, IZRL investors aren’t overexposed to any particular specific company. That diversification serves to limit downside idiosyncratic risk.
But there are risks. The major one? Geopolitical instability in the region: Israel’s position at the nexus of a historically unstable region of the world means that political upheaval, or war and conflict, can make IZRL shares less valuable. Investors thinking of buying into it should be prepared for market turbulence and geopolitical risk. The other risk is that investing in a country specific fund like this means you are putting your money in the hands of just one group of innovators and, though Israeli tech could be highly innovative, it is a very small part of the wider market. In other words, the fund’s performance is linked very closely to the performance of entrepreneurs and businesses in Israel. If any bad news hits the Israeli tech sector as a whole, the fund could suffer.
Conclusion
Overall, the ARK Israel Innovative Technology ETF is unique, I’d say. It provides investors with targeted access to Israeli tech stocks. The strategic investment approach of IZRL is likely well-suited to discover future technology trends by focusing on disruptive innovation – in medical technology, cybersecurity, and in software development. This targeted access is further emphasized by the fact that IZRL invests in companies located only in Israel. Given the diversified sector composition and the fairly low fee burden, IZRL may be an interesting candidate for anyone who would like to add some Israeli tech stock exposure to their portfolio.
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