FPXI vs SPAQ

FPXICFirst Trust International Equity Opportunities ETF

SPAQDHorizon Kinetics SPAC Active ETF

In short

FPXI The IPO trade, minus America. FPXI tracks the IPOX International Index, so recently listed companies from Europe and Asia arrive in one ticker instead of a brokerage scavenger hunt across foreign exchanges.

SPAQ Most equity funds measure themselves against the stock market. This one sets its bar at a bank CD: an actively run basket of SPACs and their warrants, chasing realized gains above short-term interest rates.

Stated mandate

FPXI The fund seeks to track, before fees and expenses, the price and yield performance of the IPOX® International Index.

SPAQ The Fund seeks realized capital gains above short-term interest rates on a risk-adjusted basis. It primarily pursues this objective by investing in SPACs that the sub-adviser expects to generate gains above comparable bank certificate-of-deposit income.

Why people hold it

• FPXI The overseas seat in a corner of the market that is mostly US-focused: its peer shelf is dominated by American IPO and spin-off funds, while this one buys newly public names listed abroad.
• Rules-based, not a stock-picking hunch. An index decides which new listings go in and when they age out, so you are not tracking foreign IPO calendars yourself.
• Launched in 2014, so it has run through several very different IPO cycles, and it carries enough assets and daily volume to be a workable trade rather than a ghost ticker.
• Sits in the upper half of the IPO and spin-off group overall, helped by how smoothly it trades for a fund holding non-US stocks. Pays quarterly.

• SPAQ The mandate is unusually literal: realized capital gains above short-term rates, measured against what a comparable bank certificate of deposit would pay.
• Goes where index products rarely do: roughly 60 positions in SPACs plus the warrants and rights attached to them, chosen by a sub-adviser rather than a screen.
• Its peer group is mostly IPO and spin-off index funds (FPX, CSD, IPO). This is one of the few US ETFs pointed squarely at SPACs, and it has run since 2023.

Worth knowing

• FPXI 0.70% a year is the median price in this niche, but it runs above the fund's US-focused sibling FPX at 0.57%, and it is a thematic-fund fee, not an index-fund fee.
• About 60 stocks, all recently public. Individual names carry real weight, and freshly listed companies tend to move harder in both directions than seasoned large caps.
• Independent data on how closely the fund has hugged the IPOX International Index is thin, so its index fidelity is harder to verify than for mainstream benchmarks.

• SPAQ Active management shows up in the fee: 0.85% a year versus a 0.70% peer median, and SPAC-focused rival SPCK charges no management fee at all.
• A small fund that trades thinly, so spreads can run wider than in the big index names in its category and order size matters more.
• Cash comes back once or twice a year at most, and with no index underneath, outcomes ride on the sub-adviser's deal-by-deal judgment.

Full FPXI profile⁠

Full SPAQ profile⁠