State Street® Consumer Staples Select Sector SPDR® ETF

What this fund is

State Street® Consumer Staples Select Sector SPDR® ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from SPDR, traded under the ticker XLP (ISIN US81369Y3080). It lets you buy a basket of holdings in a single trade, spreading your money across them rather than one company. At its core it is a focused, thematic fund: it concentrates on the consumer staples part of the market, so it lives or dies by that one area rather than the economy as a whole. Underneath, it is about owning small slices of companies, so you share in their growth when they do well — and their falls when they don't. It passively tracks the Consumer Staples Select Sector Index index — mirroring that market instead of paying a manager to pick winners, which keeps costs low, and its largest holdings include WALMART INC, COSTCO WHOLESALE CORP and PROCTER + GAMBLE CO/THE.

Spread across roughly 38 holdings (the ten largest ≈ 63.5%), no one position makes or breaks the fund. Its heaviest sectors are ~61.1% Consumer Staples and ~16.1% Corporate. A focused fund like this is typically held as a smaller 'satellite' position around a broader core — a way to lean into one theme, not usually a portfolio's only holding. Its ongoing charge (TER) is 0.08% a year — about €8 a year on a €10,000 holding, taken automatically from the fund. It holds the underlying investments directly (physical replication); it is domiciled in the United States and trades in USD.

Its price has swung about 13.6% over the past year, which describes how much its price tends to move rather than whether it is good. It launched in 1998. 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.)