After more than a year chucking political bricks and barbs, the two candidates still standing for U.S. president actually agree on a couple of major spends. A big one is the extreme makeover of the country's roads and bridges. But turning those wishes into portfolio gains will take more than simply stashing cash in any infrastructure fund.

At first glance the field -- Lipper counts 106 global (including domestic) infrastructure funds as of August 2016 -- seems abundant with choices. But financial advisors need to pull back the curtains on these funds and study their holdings carefully. For example, companies that lay pipeline for gas and oil companies will come under the heading of infrastructure, but they probably won't be in line for government spending earmarked for roads and bridges. And investments in energy infrastructure funds might even lose money through volatility in the gas and oil markets.

By eliminating utility infrastructure funds, Lipper isolated 34 out of the 106 funds in an industrial-infrastructure subcategory. The subset still has a healthy year-to-date (YTD) return of 14.38 percent, says Lipper. But even within the subset, not all the holdings are sure candidates for government largess.   

For example, The Lazard Global Listed Infrastructure Institutional ETF (GLIFX) with a five-year annualized total return of 15.82 percent and a hefty expense ratio of 0.96 percent, is heavily invested in industrial-infrastructure (56.70 percent) and looks promising at first blush. But its top holding is CSX Corp. (8.54 percent), a freight rail company. Its second largest holding is Vinci SA (8.30 percent), a big construction project company. CSX stock has been doing very well, but it's not obvious how railroads will profit from money spent on roads or bridges. And, while Vinci has done projects on the grand scale that may be required here, the company is based in France and is deep into projects abroad, including a Germany-Denmark tunnel, according to Morningstar. This could be why analysts aren't singling out GLIFX for a highway fund strategy.

There are other examples of close, yet not quite right, funds, and apparently only one fund that analysts we spoke with found appropriate. The top holdings in that one have work boots actually on the roadbeds. The First Trust RBA American Industrial Renaissance ETF (AIRR) holds a portfolio of hard-hat industrials including Granite Construction Inc.(GVA), a U.S. diversified heavy civil contractors and construction materials producer for streets, roads, highways, mass transit facilities, and airports; NV5 Global (NVEE) provides civil engineers to public and private sector clients; and Douglas Dynamics Inc. (PLOW) designs, manufactures and sells snow and ice control equipment for light trucks, consisting of snowplows, sand and salt spreaders.

“[AIRR] has high stakes in machinery, construction and engineering companies,” says Todd Rosenbluth, director of ETF & Mutual Fund Research at S&P Global Market Intelligence. “The fund is expensive compared to other ETFs,” notes Rosenbluth of the 70 basis point expense ratio. “But AIRR's high exposure to economically sensitive small- and mid-cap companies and its niche focus helps to offset the higher cost. With limited else to choose from, investors wanting targeted exposure may have interest.”

The challenge of isolating the right investments for an infrastructure strategy is not new, according to Thomson Reuters' Lipper. “For comparative purposes our analysts reviewed what happened for infrastructure funds with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (“the Stimulus”),” they wrote in an email. The market did not react by launching a flurry of ETFs or funds, they say, and this despite earmarks of about $100 billion for infrastructure projects when the act was signed into law in February 2009. “Only one new infrastructure mutual fund, Columbia Global Infrastructure Fund (RRIAX), IPO'd around the time of the Stimulus.” According to online charts, the share price doubled by the end of 2010, before dipping and recovering into the low $20s in 2011 and reaching the mid-$20s by year-end 2013.

The effort in choosing the best vehicles seems outweighed by the possible gains. “The numbers being talked about now for infrastructure investment are higher (for both Clinton and Trump) than the $100 billion for the Stimulus,” according to Lipper.  

After all, investors may ignore funds altogether. If the new infrastructure spending results from the new administration, Lipper says,”we are more likely to see the impact in the individual stocks than with the launch of new products.”

Kiplinger has singled out stocks its sources expect to see expand, depending on the November victor. They include Vulcan Materials (VMC), the country's largest producer of the basics of roads: stone and gravel. Vulcan has a reasonable price-earnings ratio of 34 and a dividend yield of 0.6 percent. “Roughly half of the company's shipments go to public-sector projects such as highways,” notes Kiplinger. Sounds like a good foundation.