CSB vs SPYD

CSBBVictoryShares US Small Cap High Div Volatility Wtd ETF

SPYDAState Street SPDR Portfolio S&P 500 High Dividend ETF

In short

CSB Most dividend ETFs crowd into mega-cap payers. CSB goes the other way: the 100 highest yielders drawn from profitable US small caps, weighted by volatility instead of size, so the jumpiest names get the smallest slice.

SPYD Most dividend ETFs hunt for companies that keep raising payouts. SPYD skips the courtship and goes straight for the yield: roughly 80 high-dividend names out of the S&P 500, for 0.07% a year.

Stated mandate

CSB The Fund seeks to track, before fees and expenses, the performance of the Nasdaq Victory US Small Cap High Dividend 100 Volatility Weighted Index.

SPYD The fund seeks to provide returns that generally correspond to the total return of the S&P 500 High Dividend Index before fees and expenses.

Why people hold it

• CSB Weights each holding by the inverse of its volatility rather than market cap, and caps any single sector at 25%, which keeps one hot corner from running the portfolio.nasdaqomx.com
• The starting pool has a profitability gate: the 500 largest US companies under $3B in market cap with positive earnings in each of the four most recent quarters.vcm.com
• Live since 2015, holding roughly 100 stocks and paying monthly, with tracking that has stayed close to the index it advertises.
• A small-cap high-dividend sleeve is a rarity in a peer group built mostly on large-cap payers, so it covers ground the household dividend names largely skip.

• SPYD 0.07% a year against a 0.39% median across dividend-screen peers. It undercuts DGRO's 0.08% and sits a hair above SCHD.
• A pure yield screen, not a growth screen. Where VIG and DGRO buy payout raisers, SPYD takes the high-dividend end of the S&P 500. Different flavor of the same food group.
• Running since 2015, now a multi-billion-dollar fund and one of the more actively traded names in its cohort, so getting in and out is rarely the hard part.
• Pays quarterly and has tracked the S&P 500 High Dividend Index closely, which is the whole job for a fund like this.

Worth knowing

• CSB The 0.40% fee sits near the middle of its cohort, but the giants of dividend investing (SCHD, VIG, DGRO) charge a fraction of that for large-cap exposure.
• Small caps swing harder than the blue-chip payers most dividend funds hold. Volatility weighting shapes that risk, it does not remove it.
• It trades lightly next to the cohort's household names, and the index reconstitutes only twice a year (March and September), so the yield roster is set in between.nasdaqomx.com

• SPYD About 80 stocks is a narrow slice. Screening on yield pulls the sector mix away from the broad S&P 500, and the ride can be bumpier than the index it comes from.
• A high yield is a ranking, not a promise. The index sorts on payout size, not on how reliably a company has grown or defended that payout.

Full CSB profile⁠

Full SPYD profile⁠