Designed to provide broad exposure to the Health Care ETFs category of the market, the First Trust Health Care AlphaDEX ETF (FXH) is a smart beta exchange traded fund launched on 05/08/2007.
What Are Smart Beta ETFs?
Market cap weighted indexes were created to reflect the market, or a specific segment of the market, and the ETF industry has traditionally been dominated by products based on this strategy.
A good option for investors who believe in market efficiency, market cap weighted indexes offer a low-cost, convenient, and transparent way of replicating market returns.
But, there are some investors who would rather invest in smart beta funds; these funds track non-cap weighted strategies, and are a strong option for those who prefer choosing great stocks in order to beat the market.
These indexes attempt to select stocks that have better chances of risk-return performance, based on certain fundamental characteristics or a combination of such characteristics.
This area offers many different investment choices, such as simplest equal-weighting, fundamental weighting and volatility/momentum based weighting methodologies; however, not all of these strategies can deliver superior results.
Fund Sponsor & Index
Because the fund has amassed over $1.41 billion, this makes it one of the larger ETFs in the Health Care ETFs. FXH is managed by First Trust Advisors. This particular fund, before fees and expenses, seeks to match the performance of the StrataQuant Health Care Index.
The StrataQuant Health Care Index employs the AlphaDEX stock selection methodology to select stocks from the Russell 1000 Index.
Cost & Other Expenses
When considering an ETF's total return, expense ratios are an important factor. And, cheaper funds can significantly outperform their more expensive cousins in the long term if all other factors remain equal.
With on par with most peer products in the space, this ETF has annual operating expenses of 0.61%.
It's 12-month trailing dividend yield comes in at 0%.
Sector Exposure and Top Holdings
While ETFs offer diversified exposure, which minimizes single stock risk, a deep look into a fund's holdings is a valuable exercise. And, most ETFs are very transparent products that disclose their holdings on a daily basis.
FXH's heaviest allocation is in the Healthcare sector, which is about 100% of the portfolio.
When you look at individual holdings, Abbvie Inc. (ABBV) accounts for about 2.47% of the fund's total assets, followed by Universal Health Services, Inc. (class B) (UHS) and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (REGN).