Robotics · 23 October 2026 · 4 min read
BlackRock has listed a robotics ETF. On its second day it held about $9.6 million and forty-one stocks
The iShares Future Robotics and Related Technologies Active ETF, ticker RBTX, shows a launch date of 20 October on BlackRock’s own page. The fee is 0.65 percent. More than half the fund, as of 22 October, was in information technology. There is no performance history yet.
BlackRock has listed an actively managed fund, the iShares Future Robotics and Related Technologies ETF, under the ticker RBTX on NYSE Arca. The firm’s own page gives the launch date as 20 October 2026 and the expense ratio as 0.65 percent. On 22 October the page showed net assets of about $9.6 million, 400,000 shares outstanding, a closing price of $24.03, and 41 holdings. Information technology was 57 percent of the fund. Industrials were 24 percent. Consumer discretionary was 10 percent. Health care was listed at zero. Tony Kim, who runs BlackRock’s fundamental technology team, is named among the managers, with Tomas Hamudis, Peter Jegunma and Gowrishankar Subramanian.
Reuters, writing on 21 October, described the fund as another AI-themed product rather than a new category of its own. Jay Jacobs, BlackRock’s US head of equity ETFs, told the wire that recent volatility was a reminder that AI is not a single trade, and that the firm’s conviction in the theme had not changed. The fund’s stated aim is companies that use intelligent machines on repetitive work in places such as transport and manufacturing. That is a mandate. It is not a list of robots. A buyer who wants to know whether the money sits in a humanoid maker, a chip firm or a warehouse operator has to read the holdings, which BlackRock publishes and which will move.
Nine million dollars is a seed, not a market
An active ETF on its second day, with no performance figure on the page, is a product that exists. It is not evidence that public investors have decided robotics is a trade of its own. Nine and a half million dollars is a small fund. The fee is knowable. The theme is not, until the holdings stay in the same place for long enough to see what “related technologies” meant. A reader can look again in a quarter and see whether the industrials share rose, or whether the fund remained a technology portfolio with a robotics name.