Most money in etf.net's US Thematic category sits in an internet fund that fell 6.2%
First Trust's Dow Jones Internet fund holds 70% of etf.net's 22-fund US Thematic category, and over the year through Nov. 3, 2026, a holder lost 6.2% while the S&P 500 fund returned 11.6%.
Key takeaways
First Trust Dow Jones Internet Index Fund FDN fell 6.2% over the year through Nov. 3, 2026. The fund holds 70% of the assets in etf.net's US Thematic category. The category has 22 funds. It is not the whole field of thematic ETFs listed in the United States.
The fund has not paid a dividend since 2011, so the decline is what a holder received. State Street SPDR S&P 500 ETF SPY returned 11.6% over the same year.
The category holds $6.81 billion. FDN, opened in 2006, is $4.77 billion of it. Invesco NASDAQ Internet ETF PNQI is next, at $514 million, and it fell 11.8% over the same year. Together the two internet funds hold more than three-quarters of those assets.
The largest fund is an internet index that lost money
- FDN $4.77B −6.20%
- PNQI $514M −11.76%
- TECB $485M +17.54%
- LRND $416M +8.13%
- PKB $265M −3.64%
- CRTC $156M +8.45%
- BUZZ $86.4M −12.55%
What the internet fund owns
FDN tracks the Dow Jones Internet Composite Index, an index of the largest and most actively traded U.S. internet companies. It holds 40 of them. The ten largest are 65% of the fund, and Amazon, Meta and Alphabet are 30%. Apple, Nvidia and Microsoft, the three largest stocks in the S&P 500, are not in it.
The fund still owns mostly S&P 500 companies, at very different weights. The companies the S&P 500 fund also holds are 84% of FDN and 13% of SPY.
Over that year, Cisco, the fourth-largest holding, rose 38%. Netflix, 5.6% of the fund, fell 42%. Amazon, Meta and Alphabet each fell between 1% and 3%. Apple's stock rose 23%. Nvidia's was flat, and Microsoft's rose less than 1%.
iShares U.S. Tech Breakthrough Multisector ETF TECB holds Apple, Microsoft and Nvidia. It returned 17.5% over the year. It has $485 million, about a tenth of FDN's assets.
A third-quarter gain that did not last
From June 30 to Sept. 30, FDN rose 9%, against a 2.4% return for SPY. From Sept. 30 to Nov. 3 it fell 7.7%, and it closed Nov. 3 up 0.6% from its June 30 close.
Since Dec. 31, 2025, FDN is down 1%.
The best one-year result in the category was not where the money is. First Trust Bloomberg Inflation Sensitive Equity ETF FTIF returned 34.8%, in a fund with $5.9 million.
FTIF led; the internet funds lost
A reader sorting these funds by the past year's gain would find a fund almost no one holds. A reader sorting by assets would find an internet index that lost money.
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