Health-care is going digital, and has been for a while. And because of the pandemic, in many cases it’s become more distant, with telemedicine often taking the place of face-to-face meetings. To a large extent, that trend is likely here to stay.
And so it is that Global X today launched the Global X Telemedicine & Digital Health ETF (EDOC), which tracks the Solactive Telemedicine & Digital Health Index designed to capture companies on the leading edge of global health-care industry trends.
Such companies are involved in telemedicine, health-care analytics, connected health-care devices and administrative digitization.
According to fund literature, index provider Solactive applies a proprietary natural language processing algorithm to an eligible universe of companies. It uses key words that describe an index theme, and the algorithm identifies and ranks companies according to the frequency they are referred to in relation to the specific key words. The 40 highest-ranking companies make it into the index.
As Global X puts it, the EDOC fund’s composition transcends classic sector, industry and geographic classifications by tracking an emerging theme.
The index is free-float market cap-weighted, and no holding will exceed 4% of the portfolio at its semi-annual rebalancing.
The resulting portfolio is heavy on the U.S., with a weighting of roughly 82%. The fund’s expense ratio is 0.68%.
This product seems to be tapped into viable long-term trends in health care. For example, Global X cites McKinsey & Company’s estimate that $250 billion of health-care spending could be virtualized via tele-health methods, and that the Covid-19 pandemic has generated a 50- to 175-fold increase in tele-health visits.
This new Global X fund is a classic example of niche, thematic ETF that holds tantalizing promise but could be too narrow for its own good. Global X now has 20 thematic ETFs. Some, like the Robotics & Artificial Intelligence Thematics ETF (BOTZ) and Cloud Computing ETF (CLOU), have been big hits with investors with more than $1 billion in assets each. And others in this group have also attracted a large chunk of money.
Others, though, such as the Cannabis ETF (POTX) and the multi-themed Thematic Growth ETF (GXTG), are still in search of an audience with assets of $13.5 million and $11.5 million, respectively.