Is Align Technology (ALGN) a 3D Printing Stock?

We’re almost three quarters of the way through the year now and the bull is still charging. Since our focus is on investing in emerging technologies, we can use the NASDAQ 100 Index (the top 100 companies traded on the NASDAQ exchange) as a benchmark for tech stocks. There is a popular exchange traded fund (ETF) that tracks the NASDAQ 100 called the PowerShares QQQ Trust or QQQ. It’s one of the biggest and most traded ETFs in the world, and it’s up +20.5% this year. The ETF is heavily weighted towards technology with the following 9 technology stocks accounting for more than 50% of QQQ’s weight.

If you bought a technology stock at the beginning of this year, it better have outperformed the QQQ ETF otherwise that means you made a bad choice (all things considered). You could have just purchased the “low risk” diversified ETF instead of assuming company-specific risk by just purchasing a single stock. Here are how some of the tech stocks we’ve talked about before have performed since the beginning of this year:

• Ad Technology
  Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) – +19%
• 3D Printing
  Stratasys (NASDAQ:SSYS) – +35%
• Genomics
  Illumina (NASDAQ:ILMN) – +57%
• Artificial Intelligence
  NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) – +60%