State Street® SPDR® S&P® Emerging Markets Dividend Aristocrats UCITS ETF (Dist)

What this fund is

State Street® SPDR® S&P® Emerging Markets Dividend Aristocrats UCITS ETF (Dist) is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from SPDR, traded under the ticker EDVD (ISIN IE00B6YX5B26). One trade buys a whole basket of holdings, so your money is spread out instead of riding on a single company. In plain terms it is about lending to governments and companies in return for regular interest, which tends to be steadier than shares but grows more slowly, spread across its target market. Rather than a manager picking stocks, it simply replicates the S&P Emerging Markets High Yield Dividend Aristocrats Index index — the passive, low-cost approach, and its largest holdings include Vanguard International Semiconductor Corp, NEPI Rockcastle N.V. and WHA Corporation Public Company Limited NVDR. Spread across roughly 50 holdings (the ten largest ≈ 35.6%), no one position makes or breaks the fund.

Its biggest country exposures are ~29.2% China, ~12.1% Thailand and ~8.5% Saudi Arabia. Its heaviest sectors are ~27.8% Financials and ~14.4% Industrials. Funds like this are often used as the steadier, lower-swing part of a portfolio — the ballast that cushions the ups and downs of shares. Its ongoing charge (TER) is 0.55% a year — about €55 a year on a €10,000 holding, taken automatically from the fund; counting the trading costs inside the fund, the all-in figure is around 0.87%. Income such as dividends is paid out to you as cash (a distributing share class), and over the last year it paid out roughly 2.46% (its trailing yield).

It holds the underlying investments directly (physical replication); it is domiciled in Ireland and UCITS-regulated, a European standard built to protect everyday investors and trades in USD. On the standard KID risk scale it is rated 4 out of 7 and its price has swung about 11.5% over the past year, which describes how much its price tends to move rather than whether it is good. It launched in 2011, and its KID suggests a holding period of 5 years. Like any investment, it can lose value as well as gain, and what it did before does not predict what it will do next. (Fund data sourced from SPDR.)