AMZA vs FTXN

AMZAFInfraCap MLP ETF

FTXNBFirst Trust Nasdaq Oil & Gas ETF

In short

AMZA Most of the oil-and-gas aisle buys drillers through an index. AMZA runs a tight book of energy-infrastructure MLPs (the toll roads hydrocarbons travel on) and pays monthly. The boutique option in its cohort, priced like one.

FTXN Most oil and gas ETFs just hand you the biggest drillers by size. FTXN screens the US oil and gas patch on factor signals instead, holding about 40 names weighted by those scores. A rules-based tilt on a famously cyclical sector.

Stated mandate

AMZA The Fund seeks total return mainly through equity securities of publicly traded MLPs and partnership-taxed LLCs, with at least 80% of assets normally invested in MLPs operating in energy infrastructure.

FTXN The Fund seeks to track the performance of the Nasdaq US Smart Oil & Gas Index before fees and expenses through an indexing strategy.

Why people hold it

• AMZA Mandate keeps at least 80% of assets in MLPs operating energy infrastructure, so the exposure leans toward pipelines and storage rather than the wellhead economics most peers track.
• Distributions arrive monthly rather than quarterly, a cadence income-focused holders tend to want from an MLP sleeve.
• Trading since 2014, so it has run through a full energy cycle instead of showing up after the rebound. The book stays tight, roughly two dozen partnerships.

• FTXN The "Smart" in the index name is literal: holdings are selected and sized by factor ranking, not market cap alone, so the largest producer doesn't automatically get the largest slot.ftportfolios.com
• About 40 holdings, all oil and gas. No utilities, no renewables filler, no diluting the theme you actually came for.ftportfolios.com
• Running since 2016 and it sticks tightly to the Nasdaq index it names in its prospectus. What the documents promise is what the portfolio delivers.
• Trades actively for a niche sector fund, so getting in and out is rarely the hard part.

Worth knowing

• AMZA The fee is the headline trade-off: 1.72% a year, several times the typical charge among oil-and-gas ETFs in its cohort.
• It trades thinly for its size. Limit orders and calm-market execution matter more here than with the cohort's heavily traded index funds.
• Roughly two dozen names in one corner of one sector means single-partnership news lands hard. On our review it sits in the back of its peer group.

• FTXN 0.60% a year is the price of the factor machinery. Plain cap-weighted rivals like XOP (0.35%) and IEO (0.37%) charge roughly half that for the same corner of the market.
• Concentrated, single-sector equity: the ride tends to follow the price of the barrel, with no defensive ballast when energy turns.
• A mid-sized fund, not one of the category's household-name giants, and it pays distributions quarterly rather than monthly.

Full AMZA profile⁠

Full FTXN profile⁠