SPYD vs XUDV

SPYDAState Street SPDR Portfolio S&P 500 High Dividend ETF

XUDVBFranklin US Dividend Booster Index ETF

In short

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.

XUDV Most dividend funds rank stocks by yield and buy the top of the list. XUDV's index is built by an optimizer instead, using risk models and dividend forecasts to assemble about 100 US stocks as one portfolio, at 0.09% a year.

Stated mandate

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.

XUDV The Fund intends to track its underlying index and generally maintain diversification in approximately the same proportion as that index.

Why people hold it

• 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.

• XUDV 0.09% a year against a 0.39% median for US dividend-screen funds. Index-giant pricing on a strategy that only launched in 2025.businesswire.com
• The index is built by New Frontier's optimizer, which uses commercial risk models and dividend forecasts to shape the whole portfolio rather than ranking stocks one by one on yield.businesswire.com
• Tracking has stayed tight to the index since launch, and payouts come quarterly.

Worth knowing

• 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.

• XUDV Thinly traded with a small asset base, so spreads can run wider than on the household names in this category.
• The category giants are cheaper still (VIG 0.04%, SCHD 0.06%, DGRO 0.08%) and carry far longer records than a fund that opened in January 2025.
• The optimizer is proprietary, so the selection logic is less transparent than a published yield screen you can follow line by line.businesswire.com

Full SPYD profile⁠

Full XUDV profile⁠