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First Trust United Kingdom AlphaDEX Fund
It is an exchange-traded fund that gives investors a basket of 75 UK companies picked by a rules-based stock-selection method.
This is an exchange-traded fund — a basket of stocks you can buy and sell like a single share. It gives an American investor an easy way to own a slice of the UK stock market without picking individual British companies or opening a foreign brokerage account.
The fund holds 75 UK companies chosen by a system called AlphaDEX. Rather than simply holding the biggest names by size, the method scores stocks on factors like growth and value, then spreads money across the winners in roughly equal amounts. That equal-weighting matters: a giant like HSBC carries about the same weight as a much smaller holding, so the fund leans away from the mega-caps that dominate the plain UK index. The result is a basket tilted toward a wider mix of British businesses — banks, insurers, industrials, consumer names — rather than a handful of oil and pharmaceutical giants. The appeal is simple: one ticker, one trade, instant diversification across the UK. But the trade-offs are real. Because it is equal-weighted, the fund must periodically rebalance, which means extra trading and higher costs than a plain market-cap index fund; its expense ratio sits meaningfully above the cheapest UK trackers. It is also concentrated in a single country and exposed to currency swings between the pound and the dollar, so a British market that looks fine in pounds can still lose an American investor money. And the AlphaDEX scoring is a rules-based bet — it is not magic, and factor strategies can lag a simple index for years.
The fund is run by First Trust, an Illinois-based asset manager, and it is a small, niche product rather than a household name. That means thinner trading volume and wider bid-ask spreads than a giant index ETF, so buyers should use limit orders. In short, it is a specialist tool for someone who specifically wants a factor-tilted, equal-weighted slice of the UK — not a low-cost core holding.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026