There are valid reasons to critique some niche exchange traded funds, including the vulnerabilities that come along with excessive allocations to a small number of stocks and what happens to these funds when investors sour on a particular investment theme.
Fortunately for the PureFunds ISE Cyber Security ETF (NYSEArca: HACK), it is not dominated by just one or two stocks. More importantly, the cyber security investment theme continues gaining merit. Case and point: Data out Tuesday from the U.K. indicating that the cost of dealing with online data breaches there has more than doubled over the past year.
“The average cost of the most severe online breaches for large companies now starts at about $2.24 million, up from about $921,000 last year,” reports Rachel King for the Wall Street Journal.
That is bad news for companies and organizations that are victimized by nefarious hacks, but as its Wednesday performance shows, it is good news for HACK. The ETF, which in its brief history has shown a penchant for responding to an array of cyber security-related headlines, is up 2.2% today and earlier touched an all-time high. Volume in HACK is more than double the daily average. [Volume Soars in Cyber Security ETF]
HACK has surged almost 7% over the past three months, nearly tripling the gains offered by the Nasdaq Composite over the same period. Over that time, FireEye (NasdaqGS: FEYE) and Infoblox (NasdaqGS: BLOX), HACK’s second- and third-largest holdings, are each up nearly 9%.