While Google is practically omnipresent on the Internet, when it comes to finding it within exchange traded funds (ETFs), you have to dig a little.
One of the first places you might look is in the Merrill Lynch Internet HOLDRs (HHH). There, you will find Yahoo (YHOO), eBay (EBAY), Amazon (AMZN) and E-Trade (ET), but no Google. To be fair, though, Google had not gone public yet when HHH was created, which explains its absence.
So where can you find Google within the Internet sub-sector?
Google makes a heavy presence in the First Trust Dow Jones Internet Index (FDN) where it is the largest holding at a 10.6% weighting. Gary Gordon of ETF Guide points out that thanks to Google’s domination, FDN outperforms HHH. However, we find that the impressive Merrill Lynch Internet Architecture HOLDRS (IAH), which contains IBM (IBM), Cisco (CSCO), Apple (AAPL) and EMC (EMC), tops FDN. Yet we don’t get a larger picture because Gordon doesn’t mention any other ETFs where you can spot Google.