Saxo Bank Launches Equity Theme Basket Focusing on 3D Printing

Saxo Bank recently announced that it has launched its 17th equity theme basket focusing on 3D printing. The new basket on 3D printing companies is the smallest Saxo Bank has done so far with only 16 companies making the cut. 

"We want our baskets to provide as pure exposure as possible to a theme and thus our theme basket is much narrower than the available 3D printing ETFs in the market", said Peter Garnry, Head of Quantitative Strategies at Saxo Bank.

3D printing was a hot and exciting topic back in the years 2010 and 2013 with high expectations that 3D printing would turn into a high growth consumer market with households installing their own 3D printers at home. The future turned out very different and the industry has finally realised that the future is additive manufacturing creating better components for industrial applications. The recent years of standardization, availability of materials, and lower costs have caused some research firms to predict that the industry is at the cusp of seeing a decade of rapid growth.

In terms of risks, Peter Garnry notes that valuations are high and many of the companies in Saxo's basket are small and some have almost no revenue. This means that this is a very high-risk theme despite a potentially promising future.

Another risk for investors is that large industrial firms create in-house additive manufacturing capabilities due to the need of deep integration into existing manufacturing processes and that the companies in the basket thus will not capture the value of 3D printing.

Fazzaco reported that a month ago Saxo Bank announced the launch of its 15th equity theme basket focusing on logistics industry.​