Dallas, Texas 09/13/2013 (Financialstrend) – The big technology news last week was decidedly the iPhone5C unveiling. Most new Apple launches now lack the luster that they had when Steve Jobs headed the technology giant. But recent Apple investors are definitely not complaining. By market value, AAPL is the United States’ largest company and since the beginning of July, the company stock has risen by 24%.
The ETF connection
This news is very relevant for companies like Vanguard Information Technology ETF (NYSEARCA:VGT) since this is one of the ETF’s that has allocations to the AAPL stock. The investors in these ETF’s will definitely be keeping their fingers crossed about the fact that the new iPhone 5 will perform better than its pervious launch. VGT has an expense-ratio that is a little less than that of XLK’s. The former is the cheapest tech-ETF in the current market. Its exposure to AAPL is also much below that of what XLK is.
According to VGT data, it has allocated 12% to the smartphone maker at the Q2 end. The larger ETF weights to AAPL have proved to cut in both directions and when the stock dropped post the iPhone 5 launch, VGT did not suffer as much as XLK did. Year-to-date, VGT former has outpaced the latter by 340 basis points.
Thursday’s trading
In Thursday’s trading, Vanguard Information Technology ETF (NYSEARCA:VGT) dropped by 0.14%. The opening price of the company’s shares was $80.41 which moved to an intraday high of $80.51 and closed at $80.25. More than 2.06 million VGT shares were traded on Thursday while the average-volume of shares traded over 30 days was 0.222 million.
The company
VGT seeks to track investment-performance of the US Investable Market Information Technology 25/50 Index (MSCI). This is the standard benchmark of large, mid-size and small-cap U.S stocks in the country’s information technology sector. These are classified under the GICS or Global Industry Classification Standard.
