MOAT concludes its first year of trading with roughly $180 million in assets under management (AUM), securing its place as the fourth most successful U.S.-listed equity ETF launched in the one-year period ending March 31, 2013, according to Morningstar data.
“The result of Morningstar’s analysis is an index comprised of high-quality stocks with the potential for long-term success”
MOAT seeks to replicate as closely as possible, before fees and expenses, the price and yield performance of the Morningstar® Wide Moat Focus IndexSM. Morningstar’s wide-moat analysis, on which the index is based, seeks to identify the 20 most attractively priced companies possessing sustainable competitive advantages derived from sources such as intangible assets, cost advantage, switching costs, network effect and efficient scale.
“The result of Morningstar’s analysis is an index comprised of high-quality stocks with the potential for long-term success,” said Brandon Rakszawski, product manager with Market Vectors ETFs. “It’s a simple idea – take part in the growth of attractively priced companies with the potential to outperform due to structural competitive advantages – but the true value comes in the quality of the underlying research. With MOAT, a liquid, transparent ETF, investors gain access to the companies that Morningstar’s equity analyst team believes to be best-positioned based on the moat criteria.”
As of March 31, 2013, MOAT held Bank of New York Mellon, Berkshire Hathaway, Exelon, General Electric, Intel, Microsoft and other well-known, high-quality companies.