A sound investment process and strong management team underpin Xtrackers S&P 500 Value ESG ETF's Morningstar Medalist Rating of Gold. The portfolio maintains a sizable cost advantage over competitors, priced within the cheapest fee quintile among peers.  

 The strategy's effective investment philosophy supports a High Process Pillar rating. Independent of the rating, analysis of the strategy's portfolio shows it has maintained an underweight position in quality exposure and yield exposure compared with category peers. Low quality exposure is attributed to stocks with higher financial leverage and lower profitability. And a low yield exposure is rooted in holding fewer stocks with high dividend or buyback yields -- instead, typically holding stocks in an early stage of development. The strategy’s management team earns an Above Average People Pillar rating. The strategy's parent organization earns the firm an 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

JPMorgan Chase & Co

UnitedHealth Group

Chevron

Walmart

Bank of America

Procter & Gamble

Home Depot

Disney

Merck

Cisco Systems

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. Xtrackers S&P 500 Value ESG ETF earns a High Process Pillar rating. 

The predominant contributor to the rating is that this fund tracks an index. Historical data, such as Morningstar's Active/Passive Barometer, finds that passively managed funds have generally outperformed their active counterparts, especially over longer time horizons. The parent firm's five-year risk-adjusted success ratio of 59% also strengthens the process. The measure indicates the percentage of a firm's funds that survived and beat their respective category's median Morningstar Risk-Adjusted Return for the period. Their commendable success ratio suggests that the firm does well for investors and that this fund may benefit from that. The parent firm's excellent risk-adjusted performance, as shown by its average 10-year Morningstar Rating of 3.2 stars, influences the rating as well.

 This strategy targets smaller plays than its peers’ average in the Large Value Morningstar Category. But in terms of style (value/growth) exposure, it does not have much of a bias and resembles the category's typical portfolio. Examining additional factor exposure, this strategy tilts consistently toward stocks with lower quality or the shares of companies with more financial leverage and lower profitability, compared with Morningstar Category peers over the past few years. Such positions do not tend to provide much ballast for a portfolio. In the latest month, the strategy was also less exposed to the Quality factor compared with Morningstar Category peers. The managers have also tended to underweight yield compared with peers during recent years. Its preference for stocks with lower yields may well lead to a growthier portfolio. However, growth stocks court additional risks if their forecasts do not come to fruition and are often more volatile than companies with stable dividends. Similarly, in recent months, the strategy also had less exposure to the Yield factor than peers. Given the high trading volume of holdings, this fund also tilts toward liquid assets. This gives the managers more flexibility during bear markets to sell without adversely affecting prices. In recent months, however, the strategy had less Liquidity factor exposure over its peers. More information on a fund and its respective category's factor exposure can be found in the Factor Profile module within the Portfolio section. 

 The portfolio is overweight in financial services and consumer defensive relative to the category average by 5.9 and 2.7 percentage points, respectively. The sectors with low exposure compared to category peers are energy and healthcare, underweight the average by 5.5 and 3.5 percentage points of assets, respectively. The portfolio is composed of 245 holdings and is diversified among those holdings. In its most recent portfolio, 23.6% of the portfolio's assets were concentrated in the top 10 fund holdings, compared to the category average's 27.4%. And in closing, in terms of portfolio turnover, on a year-over-year basis, 66% of the fund's holdings have changed, whether through increasing, decreasing, or changing a position.

High

Process

Xtrackers’s team is strong compared with others in the industry, resulting in an Above Average People Pillar rating. There are four managers listed on the fund: Patrick Dwyer, Shlomo Bassous, Bryan Richards, Ashif Shaikh. The team is well equipped, with an average of 17 years of portfolio management experience. Together, they manage a total of 29 strategies, with a Silver 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.

Above Average

People

In the past two years, DWS has been under heavy scrutiny from the SEC and German authorities owing to greenwashing allegations that were initially raised in August 2021 by the firm’s former chief sustainability officer Desiree Fixler. The SEC announced on Sept. 25, 2023, that it has fined DWS USD 19 million for failing to implement procedures to ensure that all investment staff members were following its environmental, social, and governance policies. This relates to funds where ESG factors were analyzed alongside other financially material factors, but where managers retained discretion over ESG outcomes. In addition, the firm was ordered to pay USD 6 million for deficiencies in its anti-money-laundering processes that were uncovered in a separate investigation. The investigation by the German authorities into the firm's ESG disclosures is still ongoing.  
The SEC findings underline that despite strong senior management commitment, it takes a considerable amount of time and resources to embed sustainability across all levels of an organization for firms without a long-standing sustainability heritage. Overconfidence and failure to deal with internal criticism adequately appear to have contributed to DWS' misleading statements on ESG matters. While it's difficult to quantify the financial damage to clients and no misstatements were detected in financial disclosures or prospectuses, we believe the firm’s shortcomings have the potential to adversely affect investor outcomes. Hence, we welcome DWS' efforts to strengthen governance around ESG integration and communicate more conservatively about its ESG capabilities.
Questionable and unsteady leadership has contributed to the DWS' woes. Previous CEO Asoka Woehrmann, who had spearheaded the firm's ESG push, stepped down in June 2022 as a result of the ESG investigations. His credibility had already been harmed following his use of personal email for business purposes and a large payment made to him by a client when he was head of Deutsche Bank's private-client business before being appointed as DWS' CEO in 2018. His successor Stefan Hoops is the firm's sixth CEO in the past 10 years, highlighting the instability in the firm's top leadership. This appointment also shows the continued influence of its parent company, even after the partial IPO in 2018. Hoops has spent most of his career at Deutsche Bank but has no asset-management background.
Despite all these negative headlines and shaky leadership, DWS has managed to remain quite stable in its investment ranks. The firm has also made strides to gain greater independence. For example, since 2020, bonuses have been linked to the firm's own performance rather than to that of the bank as a whole, which supports alignment and talent retention. Variable remuneration takes into account performance of up to five years.
DWS' vast fund lineup covers all asset classes, including passive strategies, which are offered under the Xtrackers brand. Many offerings don't distinguish themselves, but there are genuine areas of strength among active strategies, and fees are competitive across many funds. While the product development process has been streamlined, and although the firm has launched new strategies at a slower pace, lineup turnover remains a concern as a culture of asset-gathering prevails. New offerings are partly related to an expansion of ESG capabilities, but the firm is also building out its thematic equity, multi-asset, alternatives, and exchange-traded fund range. 
At this stage, we continue to believe that DWS' strengths justify a Parent Pillar rating of Average despite several weaknesses in its stewardship practices, but we will closely monitor the company for further disruption.

Average

Parent

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