I have been playing it safe for a long time...got burnt bad in the late 90's (mostly due to my own ignorance and inexperience) and have invested in established, well run mutual funds ever since. Lately...there is a part of me that feels like I am leaving some money on the table...so I am interested in pushing a little cash to the middle of the table. I've been paying fairly close attention to the Artificial Intelligence industry, and I honestly believe that between the push for synthesis of big data (analytics), the desire for smarter networks (such as self-driving auto infrastructure), and the general trajectory of heuristics / machine learning (think of the various Google and Facebook algorithms) that there is going to be a lot of growth in this sector.

I tend to think its the cutting edge companies in this space that are positioned to find the big break throughs...and for this reason, there aren't a lot of index style funds that have holdings I am interesting in taking some risk with. I found two ETFs that look promising....ARKQ and PNQI. The former is the riskier of the two, but has holdings directly working on the things I have been tracking...and I do think there is growth opportunity here. The latter is more of an index-style fund...primary holdings are along alignment with NASDAQ, and expect for the big players, not too much overlap with the holdings of ARKQ. The NASDAQ index fund looks like it brings less risk, but still plays in the space I am after. Seems like splitting the middle between the two gives a nice balance of risk and reasonable stability.

I've looked at the historical charts for both...did a little homework on the holdings of both...and I feel like I am ready to drop a few bucks on them next week. Wondering if anyone here has any thoughts on either, or might know a way to better evaluate the risk. It was suggest that I pull cash flow statements for the held companies, but given the 'start up' flavor of many of them, I'm not sure that would reveal the whole picture. Also not sure how I would get that info in an easy to digest report.

Here are the holdings for each listed below...very curious to get your thoughts.

ARKQ Holdings:
2U Inc
AeroVironment Inc
Align Technology Inc
Alphabet Inc C
Amazon.com Inc
Autodesk Inc
Baidu Inc ADR
Cornerstone OnDemand Inc
Elbit Systems Ltd
Fanuc Corp ADR
General Electric Co
Materialise NV ADR
Mazor Robotics Ltd ADR
NVIDIA Corp
Organovo Holdings Inc
Proto Labs Inc
Qualcomm Inc
Splunk Inc
Stratasys Ltd
Teradyne Inc
Tesla Inc
The ExOne Co
Toyota Motor Corp ADR
Trimble Inc
Xilinx Inc

PNQI Holdings:
Akamai Technologies Inc
Alphabet Inc C
Amazon.com Inc
Arista Networks Inc
Baidu Inc ADR
CoStar Group Inc
Ctrip.com International Ltd ADR
eBay Inc
Equinix Inc
Expedia Inc
Facebook Inc A
IAC/InterActiveCorp
JD.com Inc ADR
LogMeIn Inc
MercadoLibre Inc
NetEase Inc ADR
Netflix Inc
SINA Corp
The Priceline Group Inc
TripAdvisor Inc
Twitter Inc
VeriSign Inc
Weibo Corp ADR Class A
Yahoo! Inc
Yandex NV

I'm no stock expert but i've done very well. I recognize many of those as public so the info should be online. Ironically use Google or Yahoo to look up their tickers.

Many of those techs, including some of the largest companies, pay no dividends.

I've also been looking at ROBO....a completely different collection of companies focused on robotics and automation. They actual pay an annual dividend, but at a diminimus value...not a factor in my investment decision. I'm now debating between splitting my planned cash dump across three sets of tech companies, or letting it all ride on the riskiest of the three...ARKQ (but with the highest return over the past 12 months)

Safe money wins the long game, but I'm kinda thinking I've played it way too safe for way too long. I've been so risk averse that I do often wonder if I missed out on some gains. On the other hand, its quite possible that I would have lost every time I gambled, and its only because of conservative investments that I got to this position in the first place.

Curious...in terms of index funds...which indices do you guys like to track....DJIA, NASDAQ, NYSE, S&P?
More importantly, over 5-10 years, which index is likely to see the most growth?
While I've been cautious with NASDAQ since the sell-off in the late 90's and earlier 2000's, I recognize that tech is going to be a huge part of the next decade. At the same time, I think many traditional industrials will start to decline and give way to emerging tech and disruptive models.

Thoughts?

Any reason you can't buy the individual AI industry stocks yourself, excluding the big players, overvalued stocks like Tesla, or companies on life support like Yahoo?

From my brief research, many of these tech companies have sky-high P/E, at the same time making no money. I don't get it.