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Best Long-Term Performance Utilities Sector ETFs 1.1

As most portfolio managers know, building a broadly diversified portfolio has one key building block. Low or negatively correlated assets. Ideally, if each of these building blocks has low correlation to the others, one or more will be falling in value while the others are going up in value. This ideal scenario lends itself to arbitrage opportunities and the ability to buy assets when the market has placed them ‘on-sale’. With that said, have you considered diversifying a portion of your portfolio into the Utilities sector? If you want low correlated assets in your portfolio, I would suggest considering the Utilities sector. The utilities sector has maintained a very low correlation to the U.S. Stock Market over the last 19 years, at just 0.39. I wrote more in depth about this low correlation phenomena right here:  Which Equity Asset Class has the Lowest Correlation to the U.S. Stock Market?

Utilities Sector Correlation to U.S. Markets January 1999 – December 2017

Source: Portfolio Visualizer

As you can see in the chart above, the correlation between the Utilities sector and the U.S. Stock Market is 0.39. While maintaining a very low correlation, the Utilities sector did not increase volatility nor subdue performance in a long-term equity portfolio.  A 6.71% CAGR is not stupendous, but the Utilities sector has slightly outperformed the S&P 500 during this same 19-year period.

Up to now I’ve only shown the performance of the Utilities Select Sector SPDR® Fund. But, before I invest in a sector, I’d like to know which are the best performing funds in that sector. I have confined my research to U.S. Utilities sector ETFs that are 10 years old or older. Here are the ETFs I used in this comparison:

Source: Scottrade

I compared each one of these funds head-to-head with each other using Portfolio Visualizer and found that the 3 ETFs that have performed the best were:

We’ve already seen in the first chart that XLU has outperformed the S&P 500 during the last 19 years. But, let’s see how XLU compares with VPU and RYU:

RYU vs VPU vs XLU December 2006 – December 2017

Source: Portfolio Visualizer

As you can see from this chart, RYU does outperform both VPU and XLU, but only slightly. One negative I see with RYU is that it is more correlated to the overall U.S. Market than both VPU and XLU. Additionally, we could see RYU’s outperformance disappear in the future due to its higher expense ratio of 0.40% (VPU expense ratio = 0.10%, XLU expense ratio = 0.14%).

So, what is actually in these Utilities sector ETFs?

Source: Fund family websites

Please notice that RYU obviously has some communications sector companies in it. Also notable, RYU is an equal-weight ETF. Additionally, note that VPU & XLU have nearly the same holdings, although they are weighted slightly different. Next, let’s look at the objectives of each of these funds to  get a better sense of why the holdings are as they are in the chart above.

In this chart, I’ve distilled much of the pertinent data from these funds into one place for ease of comparison.

Source: Morningstar

In conclusion, I believe investors who want to be invested in the Utilities sector would be wise to utilize any of these 3 funds. (RYU, VPU, RYU) When deciding, it may just boil down to whether your brokerage house offers commission-free trading on one of these securities.

Thank you for taking time to read this article.

Respectfully yours, Micah McDonald (aka the Deep Value ETF Accumulator)

Disclosure: We own shares of RYU and intend to accumulate more shares in the future. I’m not a registered investment adviser. Please perform your own due diligence before investing in any security mentioned in this article.

 

 

 

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