October turned out to be a wonderful month for ASX shares and the S&P/ASX 200 Index (ASX: XJO). The ASX 200 managed to clock a healthy gain of 6% over the month just gone.
So any ASX exchange-traded fund (ETF) that tracks the ASX 200 would have given investors a similar gain.
But ASX 200 ETFs like the iShares Core S&P/ASX 200 ETF (ASX: IOZ) weren't even close to the best-performing ETFs on the ASX last month. Want to know what the winner was?
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FUEL-up the best-performing ASX ETF last month
The winner among ASX ETFs last month was none other than the BetaShares Global Energy Companies ETF (ASX: FUEL).
This ETF from BetaShares is not your typical ETF. It is not an index fund, as the most popular ETFs out there are. Rather, it is a sector-specific fund.
The Global Energy ETF does track shares, though. In this case, it is a basket of global companies involved in the exploration, extraction, production, storage, refining, transporting and sale of energy commodities like oil and gas.
It contains mainly US companies (57.1% at the latest count), but also has companies hailing from Canada, Europe, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and China in its portfolio.
Some of its current top holdings include famous names like Shell, Exxon Mobil, BP, and ConocoPhillips.
So the Global Energy ETF started October at a unit price of $5.61. But yesterday, this ETF closed at $6.56 a unit. That translates into a gain of 16.93% for October, almost triple that of the ASX 200.
These kinds of gains can only be put down to the underlying performance of the shares within this ETF to start with.
For example, Exxon Mobil stock, the ETF's second-largest holding, rose a whopping 26.92% over October. Shell was up more than 6%, while ConocoPhillips rose 23.2%.
With gains like that among the Global Energy ETF's portfolio, it's perhaps no wonder it had such a cracking month.
