Q) Is HMMJ looking for exposure outside of Canada and the USA – namely, Australia or Germany?
A) Right now, holdings are restricted to North American-listed equities. In order to hold other international names, they would need to have a listing on a North American stock exchange. That said, many of the Canadian producers have obtained exporting licenses to other countries outside of North America and one of our Canadian-listed holdings is in fact Uruguay’s largest producer of medical marijuana.
Q) Is there currency risk with HMMJ? With a $0.73 Canadian dollar (vs. U.S. dollar), the units of HMMJ may seem “on sale” to American investors who would then also benefit if the Canadian dollar recovered. Do you find a fair amount of American interest?
A) We do not hedge the Canadian or U.S. currency exposure of the companies currently in HMMJ, so there is currency exposure risk for owners on both sides of the boarder. We’ve had a lot of inquiries from U.S. investors, but we recently surveyed the ownership of HMMJ and found out that less than 3% of the ETF is held by U.S. investors.
Q) CANNAINVESTOR Magazine has emphasized the importance of diversification within one's portfolio and the need to continuously monitor it. It looks as though the HMMJ does most of that for investors already. Is that correct, and if so, how?
A) Diversification is essential in the marijuana investing space and it’s central to the appeal of HMMJ. With one execution, investors can get access to more than 15 stocks involved in different sub-sectors of the marijuana industry.
There’s a strong likelihood that some of the stocks in the industry will fare poorly, while other will thrive, and without doing extensive analysis of the underlying stocks individually, it’s really hard to know which ones will be tomorrow’s winners or losers.
Horizons Medical Marijuana Life Sciences ETF
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