It has been some time since we could confidently laud AAPL’s relative performance, and significant outperformance recently compared to others in its sector and even the market on the whole.
Trading as high as $604.41 on an intraday basis before regressing with overall market weakness to current levels ($596 handle), AAPL has handily outpaced the broader Nasdaq 100 (+13.89% versus +1.3% in the trailing one month period, and most of that jolt has come from a well-received quarterly earnings report a couple weeks back.
Simply put, the stock has absolutely done its job performance wise recently, which is more than we can say for the Tech sector in general.
It is actually interesting to fathom where the broad market SPX would be currently given AAPL’s 3.13% top weighting in the index (and its 13.13% top weighting in the Nasdaq-100) if the stock perhaps had not behaved so benignly in the past two weeks, with other segments of the market (like Social Media for example, which is down another 3% today on additional weakness there) failing.
Today, instead of concentrating on IYW (iShares U.S. Technology, Expense Ratio 0.48%), XLK (SPDR Technology Select, Expense Ratio 0.18%), and QQQ (PowerShares QQQ, Expense Ratio 0.20%) which have healthy weightings to the stock thanks to its status as having the biggest market cap (and rising lately) across all U.S. listed equities, we quickly examine ETFs that have exposure to AAPL for “fundamental” or “quantitative” reasons.
These particular funds are definitely not household names, and one jumps out at us simply because it has traded good volume in the past week or so versus its typical daily averages, QUAL (iShares MSCI USA Quality Factor, Expense Ratio 0.15%).
With a 5.29% weighting to AAPL, QUAL’s methodology isolates large and mid-cap equities that qualify as “growth” stocks and ranks them according to three fundamentals: return on equity (ROE), year over year earnings stability, and level of financial leverage, with little to no being the desired level.