(Bloomberg) — America doesnt run on Dunkin’,it runs on drugs. Just look at the best-performing exchange-traded funds of the past decade.
Topping them all, in anysector, industry, or country, is the PowerShares Dynamic Pharmaceuticals Portfolio (PJP), up 420 percent over the past 10 years. A pair of biotech ETFs are a distant second and third.Here are the leading ETFs, their 10- year returns, and their total assets in millions of dollars.
PJP led a blitz of the top 10 list by health-care-related ETFs. Only a couple of years ago, this list was dominated by emerging-markets ETFs, which have since fallen on hard times.
PJP tracks an industry with seemingly endless demand from an aging population looking to live forever. What gave it the edge over its biotech peers is that it is concentrated in only 30 companies. ETFs with such a small number of holdings tend to do really well-or reallypoorly.
The way the smart betaETFweights the stocks in its portfolioalso helped PJP get the most juice out of M&A activity in the pharma industry.Unlike a typical market-cap-weightedETF, PJP selects and weights stocks based on a bunch of fundamental and risk factors. This turns up some mid- and small- cap companies, which are more likely M&A targets. It then gives each of its 30 stocks a roughly a 2 to 5 percent weighting.In a market-weighted fund, great performance from smaller stocks wouldn’t have much of animpact-they’d be overshadowed by the large-cap stocksinthe portfolio.
The table below shows holdings that contributed the most to PJPs performance. The orangecolumn of numbers shows the weighting of the stocks. The nextcolumn, with the heading CTR, shows how much that stock contributed to total return.
The ETF’s 3 percent stake in $112.5 billion Allergan, for example, contributed 16percent of overall return. A 2.3 percent holding in Salix Pharmaceuticals, meanwhile, which had about a $7 billion market cap when it was acquired, contributed 19.2 percent to overall return.
Whether PJP can continue to outperform, and the pharma industry’s momentum stay strong, is anyone’s guess. Details of Hillary Clinton’sdrug plan have roiled the sector recently. One thing PJP does show is what can happen when a smart-beta strategy meets an industry rife withM&A.
