A strong management team and sound investment process underpin SPDR® Nuveen Blmbg ST MunBd ETF's Morningstar Medalist Rating of Bronze. The portfolio maintains a sizable cost advantage over competitors, priced within the lowest fee quintile among peers.  

 The strategy’s management team earns an Above Average People Pillar rating. The strategy's investment approach stands out and earns an Above Average Process Pillar rating.  The strategy's parent organization earns the firm an Above Average Parent Pillar rating. People Pillar and Parent Pillar ratings for this strategy are indirectly assigned by a Morningstar analyst rather than algorithmically derived. Please see the notes following each pillar section for more details. The details of assigning methods can be found in each pillar section.

Analyst Rating

SPDR® Nuveen Blmbg ST MunBd ETF earns an Above Average Process Pillar rating. Morningstar's evaluation of this security's process aims to determine the likelihood that it will outperform its Morningstar Category benchmark on a risk-adjusted basis over the long term. The main contributor to the rating is the parent firm's five-year risk-adjusted success ratio of 58%. The measure indicates the percentage of a firm's funds that survived and outperformed their respective category's median Morningstar Risk-Adjusted Return for the period. The parent firm's superior risk-adjusted performance, as shown by its average 10-year Morningstar Rating of 3.3 stars, also influences the rating. 

The investment strategy as stated in the fund's prospectus is: 

The investment seeks to provide investment results that, before fees and expenses, correspond generally to the price and yield performance of the Bloomberg Managed Money Municipal Short Term Index.  The fund invests substantially all, but at least 80%, and of its total assets in the securities comprising the index and in securities that the Sub-Adviser determines have economic characteristics that are substantially identical to the economic characteristics of the securities that comprise the index. The index is designed to track the publicly traded municipal bonds that cover the U.S. dollar denominated short term tax exempt bond market.  

 This strategy's 12-month yield is 1.2%, lower than its average peers' 2.5%. In addition, it has a 2.5% 30-day SEC yield (a measure similar to yield-to-maturity). A lower yield tends to indicate lower credit risk. The portfolio holds assets with a higher average surveyed credit quality of AA, compared with the category average of A, and it holds no non-investment-grade assets, despite the average peers' 1%. Strategies that take on less credit risk can often shoulder more-adverse market conditions. In terms of long-term interest-rate risk, this strategy is on par with peers. The longer a strategy's duration, the more sensitive it is to shifts in interest rates. This fund, with a 2.6-year duration, is expected to gain 2.6% of its net asset value if interest rates drop by 1 percentage point, and vice versa.

Above Average

Process

SPDR® Nuveen Blmbg ST MunBd ETF's strong tax preferred team drives the strategy's Above Average People Pillar rating. There are two managers listed on the fund: Timothy Ryan, Joel Levy. Experience on the team is abundant, with 15 years of average portfolio management experience. Together, they manage a total of five strategies, with a Bronze asset-weighted average Morningstar Medalist Rating, demonstrating their potential to deliver positive alpha relative to the category median in aggregate.  

 Note: This People Pillar rating is indirectly assigned by an analyst. Morningstar analysts evaluate the People Pillar for passive products at the brand level and may also differentiate by asset class. There is at least one other passive strategy at the firm that is covered by a Morningstar analyst, so the People Pillar rating of the fund is inherited from the rating that the Morningstar analyst assigned to investment vehicles under the same brand name.

People

State Street Global Advisors is under new leadership but continues to move along the positive trajectory established by former leaders. SSGA maintains its Above Average Parent Pillar rating.
Cyrus Taraporevala, who oversaw much of SSGA’s recent transformation, retired from the CEO position in December 2022 and passed the baton to his successor, Yie-Hsin Hung. She inherited a business that’s become more disciplined with its fund lineup. Fees have come down, while product development remains focused on fixed-income and sustainability funds, and many of SSGA’s launches have echoed that intention.
The seeds that SSGA planted over the past several years have been bearing fruit. It built out a low-cost series of portfolio building-block ETFs in the U.S. bearing the “SPDR Portfolio” branding. SSGA launched these later than its industry rivals, so they aren’t as large. But they’re competitive, with solid management and low fees, which helped them consistently take in new money over the past several years.
SSGA continued to overhaul its ETF business in Europe with most of its recent fixed-income and sustainability fund launches. Many of these funds track indexes and charge relatively low fees. With operations in the U.S. and Europe standing on a firm foundation, SSGA will put more focus on its Asia-Pacific business—the smallest regional segment of its business.

Parent

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