FTDS vs SPYD

FTDSCFirst Trust Dividend Strength ETF

SPYDAState Street SPDR Portfolio S&P 500 High Dividend ETF

In short

FTDS A yield fund with a bouncer at the door: companies must clear debt, return-on-equity, payout and dividend-growth tests before the index ranks them by yield. The roughly 50 survivors get equal weight, rechecked every quarter.

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

FTDS The Fund seeks to track the price and yield performance of The Dividend Strength Index before fees and expenses.

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

• FTDS Balance sheet first: long-term debt under 40% of market cap, ROE above 10%, payout under 50%, five-year dividend growth above 5%. Yield ranking comes after those gates.nasdaqomx.comftportfolios.com
• Equal weight across roughly 50 names, rebuilt quarterly, so no single mega-cap sets the tone.ftportfolios.com
• Rules-based and passive: a Nasdaq-maintained index drawn from the Nasdaq US Benchmark, with liquidity screens. No manager picking favorites. Pays quarterly.nasdaqomx.com

• 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

• FTDS 0.70% net of a waiver through April 30, 2027 (0.81% gross), above the category median. Big index rivals cost far less: SCHD 0.06%, VIG 0.04%.
• A small fund that trades thinly, so the bid/ask spread is part of the cost of getting in and out.
• The ticker dates to 2006, the strategy does not: it tracked Value Line, then AlphaDEX indexes, before switching to The Dividend Strength Index in April 2022.sec.gov

• 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 FTDS profile⁠

Full SPYD profile⁠