This fund focuses on the market’s most innovative companies and its top holdings have delivered massive gains over the last year. Here are 6 stocks the fund is betting on now.
Cathie Wood’s flagship ARKK Ark Innovation ETF has been getting a lot of attention lately.
It became one of the top-performing ETFs over the last year thanks to the firm’s big bets on disruptive tech stocks like Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA), Square (NYSE: SQ), and Roku (NASDAQ: ROKU).
The fund is up more than 233% over the last 12 months and has raked in more than $7 billion so far in 2021, putting its total beyond $24 billion.
Wood’s focus on these innovative names, however, has seen the ETF decline sharply—it’s down 16% over the last month—amid the recent slide in tech.
But there’s a little-known “copycat” fund that is outpacing the famous ARKK ETF: the MOON Direxion Moonshot Innovators ETF.
MOON is up 38% year-to-date, compared to ARKK’s rise of 2.4% so far this year, and has avoided seeing the same decline that Wood’s fund has seen over the last month by loading up on biotechnology stocks like ImmunityBio (NASDAQ: IBRX), which has gained nearly 162% since the start of the year.
Its other top holdings include Vuzix (NASDAQ: VUZI), Microvision (NASDAQ: MVIS), FuelCell Energy (NASDAQ: FCEL), Nano Dimension (NASDAQ: NNDM), and Vir Biotechnology (NASDAQ: VIR).
All five of these names are up substantially so far this year and over the last 12 month. Vuzix is up 142% year-to-date and 2,033% over the last year, Microvision has gained 224% since the beginning of the year and more than 10,000% over the last 12 months, FuelCell is up 40% year-to-date and 953% over the last year, Nano Dimension is up 22% since January 1 and 1,286% in the last year, and Vir is up 114% since the start of the year.
MOON “has a heavier weight to biotech companies and less on straight technology and internet companies, which are the reason why ARKK has underperformed,” said WallachBeth Capital director of ETFs, Mohit Bajaj.
But it doesn’t focus solely on biotech. The fund tracks the S&P Kensho Moonshot Index of the 50 most innovative companies with sectors ranging from human evolution to smart transportation. And with that focus, MOON is “focusing on multiple themes, as opposed to a narrow theme like cloud computing or genomics or video games,” said CFRA Research’s Todd Rosenbluth.
Since its debut last November, the MOON ETF has gained more than 72%, but still has only gained about $220 million in assets.