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Launched on 11/01/2006, the Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight Consumer Staples ETF (RHS) is a smart beta exchange traded fund offering broad exposure to the Consumer Staples ETFs category of the market.
What Are Smart Beta ETFs?
For a long time now, the ETF industry has been flooded with products based on market capitalization weighted indexes, which are designed to represent the broader market or a particular market segment.
Because market cap weighted indexes provide a low-cost, convenient, and transparent way of replicating market returns, they work well for investors who believe in market efficiency.
There are some investors, though, who think it's possible to beat the market with great stock selection; this group likely invests in another class of funds known as smart beta, which track non-cap weighted strategies.
Non-cap weighted indexes try to choose stocks that have a better chance of risk-return performance, which is based on specific fundamental characteristics, or a mix of other such characteristics.
Even though this space provides many choices to investors--think one of the simplest methodologies like equal-weighting and more complicated ones like fundamental and volatility/momentum based weighting--not all have been able to deliver first-rate results.
Fund Sponsor & Index
The fund is managed by Invesco, and has been able to amass over $580.46 million, which makes it one of the average sized ETFs in the Consumer Staples ETFs. Before fees and expenses, RHS seeks to match the performance of the S&P 500 Equal Weight Consumer Staples Index.
The S&P 500 Equal Weight Consumer Staples Index equally weights stocks in the consumer staples sector of the S&P 500 Index.
Cost & Other Expenses
Expense ratios are an important factor in the return of an ETF and in the long-term, cheaper funds can significantly outperform their more expensive cousins, other things remaining the same.
With on par with most peer products in the space, this ETF has annual operating expenses of 0.40%.
RHS's 12-month trailing dividend yield is 2.41%.
Sector Exposure and Top Holdings
It is important to delve into an ETF's holdings before investing despite the many upsides to these kinds of funds like diversified exposure, which minimizes single stock risk. And, most ETFs are very transparent products that disclose their holdings on a daily basis.
Representing 100% of the portfolio, the fund has heaviest allocation to the Consumer Staples sector.
When you look at individual holdings, Kroger Co/the (KR) accounts for about 3.94% of the fund's total assets, followed by Archer-Daniels-Midland Co (ADM) and Altria Group Inc (MO).