KNO vs KOMP

KNOCAXS Knowledge Leaders ETF

KOMPAState Street SPDR S&P Kensho New Economies Composite ETF

In short

KNO Most innovation ETFs buy US tech stories. KNO rebuilds the books instead, treating R&D, brand and training spend as investment, then buying the developed-market companies that rank highest on that knowledge capital.

KOMP Most thematic funds bet on one idea. KOMP buys the whole Fourth Industrial Revolution: 20-plus Kensho subsectors, from robotics to genetic engineering, spread across roughly 500 global stocks for 0.20% a year.

Stated mandate

KNO The Fund seeks long-term capital appreciation by investing primarily in equities of highly innovative knowledge-leader companies. It uses a proprietary quantitative screen emphasizing intangible-adjusted innovation intensity, financial strength, profitability, research and development, earnings growth, and operating cash flow.

KOMP The Fund seeks investment results that generally correspond, before fees and expenses, to the total return performance of the S&P Kensho New Economies Composite Index.

Why people hold it

• KNO The mechanism is the point: spending on R&D, advertising, brand and employee training is treated as capital, not expense, surfacing innovators the usual tech screens miss.axsinvestments.com
• All-sector and global by design, spanning North America, Europe and Asia, which is unusual in a category that leans heavily on US technology names.axsinvestments.com
• Innovation is not the only test. The screen also weighs profitability, financial strength, earnings growth and operating cash flow.
• Live since 2015 under its original Knowledge Leaders name before AXS took it over in 2024, so this is a long-running approach, not a freshly minted theme.prnewswire.com

• KOMP 0.20% a year, under a third of the typical disruptive-innovation fund's fee and below peers like XT (0.46%) and TRFM (0.49%).
• Kensho's language-processing engine scans regulatory filings for context and keywords, so membership rests on what a company discloses it does, not an old sector label.ssga.comspglobal.com
• About 500 global names across 20-plus subsectors, equal weighted within each group with extra weight to 'core' operators. One mega-cap can't run the show.spglobal.com
• Trading since 2018 and now a multi-billion-dollar fund, it sits among the strongest implementations in the disruptive-innovation group.

Worth knowing

• KNO The 0.75% fee sits above the category median across the 31 innovation funds we track, and above peers like KOMP at 0.20% and XT at 0.46%.
• Among the smaller and more lightly traded funds in its group, which can mean wider bid-ask spreads and more price impact on bigger orders.
• Actively managed on a proprietary screen and measured against a broad equal-weighted world index, so the portfolio can look nothing like a US tech fund.sec.gov

• KOMP Equal weighting reaches down into smaller, earlier-stage innovators, so swings run wider than a plain broad-market index fund.spglobal.com
• Subsector weights follow a risk-adjusted-return formula with annual reconstitution, so the mix drifts toward industries that have recently performed well.ssga.comspglobal.com
• Breadth cuts both ways: a pure play on one theme like AI or space gets diluted here across the entire innovation map.spglobal.com

Full KNO profile⁠

Full KOMP profile⁠