My Best Semiconductor Stock for 2021

It's been quite a year -- actually, quite a few years -- for the semiconductor industry. After coming out of the trade-war induced downturn of 2018, popular semiconductor ETF the VanEck Vectors Semiconductor ETF (NYSEMKT: SMH) is up 64.6% over the past year -- a period that begins before the pandemic -- and is up 132.8% over the past three years -- more than tripling the returns of the overall market in each time period.

Clearly, megatrends of 5G, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and the general move to the digital economy have been a boon to companies that produce the leading-edge chips that power these applications. This is in spite of two massive market downturns over the past three years.