State Street SPDR S&P Telecom ETF (XTL)

Broadcom is one of the largest semiconductor companies in the world and has also expanded into infrastructure software. Its semiconductors primarily serve computing and networking, with custom AI accelerators now accounting for the bulk of the business. It is primarily a fabless designer, but holds some manufacturing in-house, such as for its best-of-breed film bulk acoustic resonator filters that sell into the Apple iPhone. In software, it sells virtualization, infrastructure, and security software to large enterprises, financial institutions, and governments. Broadcom is the product of consolidation. Its businesses are an amalgamation of former companies like legacy Broadcom and Avago Technologies in chips, as well as VMware, Brocade, CA Technologies, and Symantec in software.

The United States economy is full of innovation. It has to be. Manufacturing industries that dominated the economy decades ago - textiles, televisions, even automobiles to a large degree - have moved overseas, where labor and materials costs are lower. Yet the U.S. economy, even during the pandemic and the recent period of high inflation, has expanded to record levels. If U.S. corporations weren't innovating, creating new products (such as AI and vaccines) and services (such as Zoom calls and Netflix), as well as moving into new markets (clean energy, rare drugs), the domestic economy would not be growing, and capital would not be flooding into the country. Consider that U.S. GDP was approximately $1 trillion in 1930 but was almost $31.5 trillion at the end of 2025. That's growth of 30-times. Meanwhile, the U.S. population has grown less than 3-times during that time span, to 340 million from 120 million. The delta between GDP growth and population growth has been driven, in large part, by innovation.

Netherlands-based ASML Holdings N.V. provides advanced semiconductor capital equipment solutions. ASML manufactures ultraviolet lithography systems critical to the production of integrated circuits. The company, based in Europe's top technology hub near Eindhoven, has operations in Europe, the Americas, and Asia and employs 33,000 people. The company supplies both primary semiconductor companies such as Intel Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. as well as merchant foundry companies such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. Together with its partners, ASML is driving the development of more affordable, more powerful, and more energy-efficient chips and devices.

ASML is the leader in lithography systems for manufacturing semiconductors with 90% market share. Lithography is the process in which a light source is used to expose circuit patterns from a photomask onto a semiconductor wafer. Lithography allows chipmakers to increase the number of transistors in the same area of silicon, with lithography historically representing a high portion of the cost of making cutting-edge chips. ASML outsources the manufacturing of most of its parts, acting like an assembler. ASML’s largest clients are TSMC, Samsung, Intel, SK Hynix, and Micron.