SPDR® S&P Telecom ETF’s Process Pillar rating is Average, but a strong management team still helps this strategy retain its Morningstar Medalist Rating of Bronze. The portfolio maintains a sizable cost advantage over competitors, priced within the least expensive fee quintile among peers.  

 The strategy’s management team earns an Above Average People Pillar rating. The strategy merits an Average Process Pillar rating. Independent of the rating, analysis of the strategy's portfolio shows it has maintained an underweight position in quality exposure and has a substantial overweight in volatility exposure compared with category peers. Low quality exposure is attributed to stocks with higher financial leverage and lower profitability. And high volatility exposure is rooted in stocks that have a higher standard deviation of returns. 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

Frontier Communications Parent

Applied Optoelectronics

AT&T

Motorola Solutions

Verizon

T-Mobile US

Telephone and Data Systems

Lumen Technologies

Arista Networks

F5 Networks

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. SPDR® S&P Telecom ETF earns an Average Process Pillar rating. The largest 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 63% also bolsters the rating. 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. Their impressive success ratio suggests that the firm does well for investors and that this fund may benefit from that. Lastly, the process is limited by the fund's mediocre long-term risk-adjusted performance. This can be seen in its five-year alpha calculated relative to the category index, which suggests that the process has struggled over that period.

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 total return performance of an index derived from the telecommunications segment of a U.S. total market composite index.  In seeking to track the performance of the S&P Telecom Select Industry Index (the "index"), the fund employs a sampling strategy. It generally invests substantially all, but at least 80%, and of its total assets in the securities comprising the index. The index represents the telecommunications segment of the S&P Total Market Index ("S&P TMI"). 

 The portfolio is overweight in technology by 41.8 percentage points in terms of assets compared with the category average, and its industrials allocation is similar to the category. The sectors with low exposure compared to category peers are communication services and consumer cyclical, underweight the average by 34.3 and 4.2 percentage points of assets, respectively. The portfolio is composed of 43 holdings and its assets are more dispersed than peers in the category. In particular, 41.3% of the strategy's assets are concentrated in the top 10 fund holdings, compared to the category’s 62.2% average. And in closing, in terms of portfolio turnover, this fund trades more frequently than its average peer, potentially racking up additional expenses for investors and creating a drag on performance.

Average

Process

SPDR® S&P Telecom ETF benefits considerably from its equity team, earning it an Above Average People Pillar rating. There are two managers listed on the fund: Karl Schneider, Michael Finocchi. The team is well equipped, with an average of 19 years of 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.

Above Average

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

SPDR S&P Telecom ETF

XTL tracks an equal-weighted index of US telecom companies selected by the S&P Committee.

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News for SPDR S&P Telecom ETF ETF (XTL)