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The case for active dividends

With a long-standing index-tracking approach to dividends, State Street Investment Management has expanded its ETF capabilities to include a new fundamental active dividend exposure.

tempo di lettura 6 min
Senior Equity ETF Strategist

European investors have significantly increased their use of actively managed ETFs. In fact, European active ETF AUM has grown at a 73% compound annual growth rate since 2020.1 So far, most assets have gone into systematic exposures. But State Street Investment Management recently introduced a high-conviction fundamental active dividend exposure to complement our industry-leading Dividend Aristocrats index solution.

Managed by our Fundamental Active Equity team, this new active ETF—Global Dividend Spotlight Active Equity—is based on a strategy with a strong 10-year track record.2

We now offer two routes to dividend investing:

Dividend Aristocrats strategy

For clients seeking a simple rules-based, transparent, dividend strategy targeting quality income, our Dividend Aristocrat approach uses an objective indexing approach—in partnership with S&P Dow Jones Indices—to focus on companies with a consistent track record of paying and growing cash dividends. The methodology emphasises quality, sustainability, and discipline.

Global Dividend Spotlight Active Equity strategy

This new Global Dividend Spotlight Active Equity ETF is tailored for clients seeking alpha through concentration on the best ideas, identified through an established process from State Street Investment Management’s Fundamental Research Team.

Dividends: a proven source of steady return

Dividends are intended to provide shareholders with regular income from company earnings. Companies with strong earnings generation, disciplined operational management, and prudent reinvestment are better positioned to sustain dividend payouts.

Dividend distributions can help provide consistent returns, provided they can deliver a stable income premium. To establish a track record of paying regular cash dividends, a company needs to generate sustainable earnings, manage existing operations effectively, and invest prudently for future growth. Failure in any one of these areas can threaten a company’s ability to distribute cash to investors. This is why our indexed approach focuses on a 10-year history of paying regular cash dividends. Quality income is defined by a record of sustained income premium.

Our new active ETF—Global Dividend Spotlight—is based on our existing dividend yield strategy, which has consistently delivered an attractive dividend yield over time and impressive growth in capital relative to its benchmark. 

Figure 1: Historical income premium of dividend strategies compared to the MSCI World Index

Yield premium

The current dividend asymmetric opportunity

Dividends have provided downside protection for equity investors as income has helped provide a floor to total return during market volatility. Today, investors are collectively:

  • Overweight equities relative to historic levels, as global markets near all-time highs
  • Underweight dividend stocks (Figure 2), which are currently trading at a significant discount to the market benchmark (Figure 3).

This combination of attractive valuations and underweight positioning may offer a compelling asymmetric risk opportunity for investors. 

Figure 2: Investors are underweight dividend stocks

Figure 3: Global dividend stocks trading at a significant discount to the market benchmark

Global Dividend relative valuation (last 5 years)

Diverse approaches to dividend investing

Some strategies focus exclusively, or with factor overlays, on the highest-yielding stocks. Others target stocks which have been able to grow dividends in the near term.

There are merits and risks to any index strategy. So how does a Dividend Aristocrats strategy, with its unique approach to quality stock selection, and Dividend Spotlight, a high-conviction active strategy, differ?

  • Dividend Aristocrats

    The ethos behind Dividend Aristocrats’ quality income approach, is a focus on long-term track record in stock selection. Dividend Aristocrats are companies with a history of paying uninterrupted dividends. An Aristocrat must have maintained or increased the total dividend per share amount every year for at least 10 consecutive years. Additional components of the methodology, such as weighting scheme and holdings concentration, will help influence the specific exposure in each geographic region. Within the global equity universe, the methodology has delivered strong sector diversification. 

  • Global Dividend Spotlight Active Equity

    The Global Dividend Spotlight Active Equity approach is a high-conviction strategy designed to identify the most attractive dividend opportunities, within a valuation framework, designed to deliver active alpha return. The entire fundamental value process aims to mitigate overpaying for stocks or incurring excessive factor risk. The team seeks to construct a concentrated 30-40 stock portfolio primarily investing in high-dividend-yielding global equities. They apply a fundamentally driven and bottom-up research process to identify shares which are distributing a sustainable dividend yield but are trading at a discount to their intrinsic value. The team’s experienced sector analysts conduct in-depth company and industry research to evaluate the future cashflow generation of a business and determine its intrinsic value.

    Research focus includes overall industry structure; competitive dynamics and growth levels; the company’s competitive position, moat, growth prospects; and the management team’s strategy and experience, governance, and financial resilience. Balance-sheet strength is assessed to evaluate the sustainability of dividend prospects.

    A portfolio is constructed by selecting companies which can offer an attractive yield to create a diversified exposure and generate capital growth in the long term, aided by mispricing identified in the investment process. This consistent, disciplined approach to yield portfolio construction assesses each stock individually for its fit and purpose within the portfolio.

An unconstrained approach to yield

Our global dividend funds take a relatively unconstrained approach to yield factor investing. Some diversification guidelines are applied but the Aristocrats’ methodology allows exposure to follow opportunity where it arises. As a result, sector, country, and factor bias (Figures 4, 5 and 6) can vary versus the market—a potential core benefit of the approach, rather than a limitation.  

Figure 4: Sector exposure of the Global Dividend strategies

GICS sector exposure

Figure 5: Country exposure of the Global Dividend strategies

Country exposure

Figure 6: Risk factor exposure of the Global Dividend strategies

Defensive characteristics during the market cycle

The past decade’s structurally low interest rates created a strong environment for growth stocks and a challenging one for dividend (and value) strategies. Market-cap benchmarks benefitted from becoming more concentrated in growth stocks. The United States exemplifies this trend.

Companies that demonstrate sustained dividend growth are often regarded as defensive investments. A growing dividend can signal earnings growth exceeding capital expenditure opportunities, or reflect a management team that has built an economic moat to shield shareholders from volatility. Historically, index strategies like Dividend Aristocrats have delivered outperformance in risk-off markets (Figure 7). 

Figure 7: Index strategies like Dividend Aristocrats have delivered outperformance in risk-off markets

Average historical excess returns (last 5 years)

Why invest for dividend exposure through ETFs ? 

ETFs offer an efficient way to access dividend exposure with:

  • Broad exposure in a single trade
  • Transparent holdings,updated daily
  • Intraday liquidity in both primary and secondary exchanges.

This combination of efficient access and clear visibility into underlying exposures makes ETFs a powerful tool for implementing dividend strategies within a broader portfolio. As always, investors should evaluate the index methodology or active investment process behind any ETF to ensure it aligns with their objectives.

For more insights on active ETFs, Click here.

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