ASAN Up 14.4%; 77 ETFs Affected

Asana, Inc. (ASAN) jumped as much as 14.4% on Friday, a hopeful sign for investors who have seen the stock steadily decline over the past several months.  

Currently, 77 ETFs hold ASAN stock. The ETFs with the most Asana exposure include the Direxion Moonshot Innovators ETF (MOON), with a weighting of 2.12% to the stock, followed by the iShares Virtual Work and Life Multisector ETF (IWFH), which has a 1.41% weighting in the security.

Other thematic funds offering exposure to ASAN include the Franklin Exponential Data ETF (XDAT), at 1.11%; the WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund (WCLD), at 1.04%; and the SPDR FactSet Innovative Technology ETF (XITK), at 0.99%. 

Unsurprisingly, large broad-based ETFs hold the most shares, no matter their degree of exposure to the stock. Currently, 6.8 million ASAN shares are held in ETFs, with the top five spots held by iShares and Vanguard ETFs.

The iShares Russell 2000 ETF (IWM) has the most shares by a wide margin, holding 1.63 million shares, nearly a quarter of the total shares held by U.S.-listed ETFs. The Vanguard Small-Cap ETF (VB) is second, with 663.85K, followed by the iShares Russell 2000 Growth ETF (IWO), with 532.5K shares, the Vanguard Small-Cap Growth ETF (VBK) , with 498.65K shares and the Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (VTI) , with 464.58K shares. 

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When it comes to strategy, cap-weighted vanilla ETFs make up 29 of the 77 ETFs holding ASAN stock. Meanwhile, actively managed ETFs and multifactor ETFs each have nine, followed by growth ETFs and fundamental ETFs, with seven apiece. 

ASAN holders First Trust Active Factor Small Cap ETF (AFSM) and the First Trust Total US Market AlphaDEX ETF (TUSA) have enjoyed the greatest 30-day growth, at 2.39% and 2.25%, respectively. 

About The Company 

Asana is a mobile work organization and project management tool that more than 93,000 companies now use, according to Asana's Fiscal 2021 Report. 

Three weeks ago, Asana's stock dropped more than 23% in after-hours trading after one of its main competitors, Monday.com, reported its fourth-quarter results. Monday.com's revenue rose $4 million than expected, prompting a massive sell-off of ASAN shares by investors. 

The rapid adoption of work-from-home technologies as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic has helped Asana grow significantly since it went public on Sept., 30 2021. It entered the market at $28 per share, but as recently as October 2021, was trading as high as $136. More recently, it’s been trading in the high thirties and low forties.

Concerns about competitor growth, companies investing less money in workplace SaaS (software-as-a-service) products, and lower-than-expected earnings in its own fourth quarter report (released on March 9, 2022) have led to a steady decline in ASAN share price since the end of last year. 

However, Asana CEO Dustin Moskovitz, one of the co-founders of Facebook, made headlines once again in March after he purchased an additional 1.25 million shares. Between December 2021 and February 2022, Moskovitz ought the ASAN dip three times, scooping up an additional $400 million in ASAN stock. He now owns 22.5% of the company and roughly 22 million Class-A shares of the company, according to Barron's. 

Moskovitz's purchase bucks the recent trend of insider trading with growth tech stocks, which saw a sell-off of $69 billion in 2021, according to Nasdaq.  

Despite the stock's decline this year, some speculate that growth concerns in 2022 are exaggerated. After all, the company said in its fiscal report that it still expects to increase revenue from $114.5 million to $115.5 million this year. 

Perhaps Friday's jump in price is a sign that investors are OK with slower growth, or that Moskovitz's faith in his own company is reassuring.