Robotic Vacuums Sweep iRobot Shares Higher

It’s been a little over a year since we first wrote about iRobot (NASDAQ:IRBT) a consumer robotics company that largely sells robotic vacuums. Since that article, shares of IRBT have risen +81% compared to just a +10% return for the NASDAQ index as a whole. In the last 3 months alone, IRBT stock has jumped +37% compared to a NASDAQ return of less than +2%. Below you can see the upward trajectory for IRBT:

This means that IRBT is significantly outperforming the market, especially most recently, and we want to understand if this upward surge is due to an increased appetite for robot stocks by investors or if the company just happens to be selling tons of robotic vacuums and generating improved returns for shareholders as a result. In order to gauge investors’ interest in shares of robotics companies, we need to look at an index of companies that either are directly involved in robotics or are using robotics heavily. One such index for robotics is an ETF we discussed before called the Robo Global Robotics & Automation Index ETF (NASDAQ:ROBO). Here’s the performance of that ETF over