SPDV vs SPYD

SPDVBAAM S&P 500 High Dividend Value ETF

SPYDAState Street SPDR Portfolio S&P 500 High Dividend ETF

In short

SPDV Most high-dividend screens end up a pile of utilities and financials. SPDV takes the five best dividend-plus-free-cash-flow names in every S&P 500 sector, equal-weights them, and pays out monthly.

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

SPDV The Fund passively tracks the S&P 500 Dividend and Free Cash Flow Yield Index. Its rules-based, equal-weighted approach targets S&P 500 constituents with high dividend yields and sustainable dividend distributions while maintaining diversified sector exposure.

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

• SPDV Yield alone can flag a payout about to be cut. This index ranks S&P 500 names on dividend yield times free-cash-flow yield, so the dividend has to be backed by cash the business actually generates.sec.gov
• Top five scorers per GICS sector, equal-weighted, reset each January and July. No single sector or mega-cap gets to run the portfolio.sec.gov
• 0.29% a year, below the median fee among dividend-screen funds, and distributions land monthly rather than quarterly.
• No manager discretion to drift: a rules-based portfolio of roughly 50 stocks that has hewed closely to its stated index.

• 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

• SPDV A smaller, thinly traded fund. Limit orders matter more here than with the category's household names.
• The index giants in this corner (SCHD, SPYD, VIG) charge under a tenth of a percent, so SPDV's fee buys the sector-balanced cash-flow screen, not the cheapest beta.
• Sector balance cuts both ways: when one high-yield corner is hot, SPDV still holds only five names in it, and the semi-annual reset can churn holdings.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 SPDV profile⁠

Full SPYD profile⁠