In This Article:
The Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF (RSP) made its debut on 04/24/2003, and is a smart beta exchange traded fund that provides broad exposure to the Style Box - Large Cap Blend category of the market.
What Are Smart Beta ETFs?
Market cap weighted indexes were created to reflect the market, or a specific segment of the market, and the ETF industry has traditionally been dominated by products based on this strategy.
Market cap weighted indexes offer a low-cost, convenient, and transparent way of replicating market returns, and are a good option 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.
By attempting to pick stocks that have a better chance of risk-return performance, non-cap weighted indexes are based on certain fundamental characteristics, or a combination of such.
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 $30.27 billion, which makes it one of the largest ETFs in the Style Box - Large Cap Blend. This particular fund, before fees and expenses, seeks to match the performance of the S&P 500 Equal Weight Index.
The S&P 500 Equal Weight Index equally weights the stocks in 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.
Annual operating expenses for this ETF are 0.20%, making it on par with most peer products in the space.
The fund has a 12-month trailing dividend yield of 1.70%.
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.
This ETF has heaviest allocation in the Industrials sector - about 13.90% of the portfolio. Healthcare and Information Technology round out the top three.
When you look at individual holdings, Invesco Government & Agency Portfolio (AGPXX) accounts for about 0.49% of the fund's total assets, followed by Fedex Corp (FDX) and Duke Realty Corp (DRE).