FTXN vs OIH

FTXNBFirst Trust Nasdaq Oil & Gas ETF

OIHBVanEck Oil Services ETF

In short

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.

OIH OIH skips the barrels and buys the picks and shovels: the drillers, equipment makers and service crews that get paid to punch holes in the ground. Roughly two dozen U.S.-listed names, running since 2011, priced below the energy-fund norm.

Stated mandate

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

OIH The fund seeks to track the price and yield performance of an index representing U.S.-listed companies involved in upstream oil services, including oil equipment, oil services, and oil drilling.

Why people hold it

• 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.

• OIH Owns the toolmakers, not the oil: upstream equipment, services and drilling companies. A different engine than a fund stuffed with producers.vaneck.com
• 0.35% a year, a shade under the typical fee in its energy cohort and level with XOP, the broad exploration-and-production alternative.
• A billion-dollar-plus fund whose trading quality rates among the best in its energy peer group, so getting in and out is rarely the expensive part.
• The lineup comes from a published rulebook, the MVIS US Listed Oil Services 25 Index, not a manager's hunch about which driller wins next.vaneck.com

Worth knowing

• 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.

• OIH Roughly two dozen stocks in one slice of one sector. That concentration cuts both ways and makes this the jumpier end of energy.
• You own contractors, not reserves. Their sales track what customers spend on drilling, which is a step removed from the oil price itself.vaneck.com
• Cash comes back once or twice a year at most, so income is a byproduct of the strategy rather than the point of it.

Full FTXN profile⁠

Full OIH profile⁠