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Finance Friday: U.S. Global Jets ETF

Finance Friday is a periodic series that brings you travel related finance news you can use.  
For the inaugural post, we will be taking a look at the U.S. Global Jets ETF

Finance Friday: U.S. Global Jets ETF
Chances are if you read travel news and follow financial markets pretty closely you probably know that global oil prices are at year-over-year lows and airline stocks have been reporting record earnings.  



If you love to travel and vacation, your mode of transportation will likely involve taking a plane ride on one of several airlines available domestically or internationally.  Examples include Southwest, United, Delta, Cathay Pacific, Emirates, to name a few.  Airline prices can fluctuate drastically based on demand, capacity, location your flying to and a myriad of other reasons.  

This means getting to your travel destination puts you at the mercy of the airlines on how much you're going to be paying or how many miles you'll be redeeming for your flight.  With constant devaluations of airline loyalty programs and sometimes steep mile redemption values you start to think to yourself, "these airlines charge so much money for flights, baggage fees and other miscellaneous fees, and they must be making millions of dollars".  

You start to wonder to yourself, "how can I get in on this and make some money also?"  

You could buy stock in a number of individual airline companies or you could diversify and maybe spread out that risk by buying a fairly new ETF that debuted earlier this year, the U.S. Global Jets ETF.

What is JETS?
U.S. Global Jets ETF (NYSE: JETS) is an exchange traded fund (ETF) that is passively managed and looks to offer exposure to the global airline industry, including airline operators and manufacturers from all over the world.  

The U.S. Global Jets ETF (NYSE Arca: JETS) tracks the U.S. Global Jets Index, which is designed to capture the performance of global companies in the commercial airline, aircraft manufacturing, and airport & terminal services industries.  

If you're unfamiliar with what an ETF is, it is the acronym for an Exchange Traded Fund and 
is a marketable security that tracks an index, a commodity, bonds or a basket of assets like an index fund.  They are similar to mutual funds, but trade like regular stock on a stock exchange and typically have lower investment fees than mutual funds.  Other examples include exchange traded funds that track the Dow Jones Industrial, the S&P 500, the price of oil, and so on.  You can learn more about ETFs at Investopedia.

JETS has an expense ratio (fee) of 0.60% and the ETF is rebalanced quarterly.  More details are shown below:



The JETS ETF consists of each of the four largest U.S. passenger airline companies, as measured primarily by their market capitalization and receive a 12% weighting allocation of the Index.

Each of the next five largest U.S. passenger airline companies receives a 4% weighting allocation of the Index.

The remaining Airline Companies meeting the index criteria are then scored based on multiple fundamental factors.  Each of the four U.S. companies with the highest composite scores receives a 3% weighting allocation of the Index, and each of the twenty non-U.S. companies with the highest composite scores receives a 1% weighting allocation of the Index. 


The full list of the ETF holdings, as of the end of September 2015, is shown below:



If you want to limit your exposure to a particular airline stock or want to try to diversify your investments, the JETS ETF may be worth considering for your portfolio.

Read more about JETS: 

Note: The opinions in this post are my own and I am not a financial planner.  Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal.  You should consider your own financial situation and consult with a certified financial adviser/planner for investment advice.