Dallas, Texas 09/24/2013 (Financialstrend) – Utilities SPDR (ETF) (NYSEARCA:XLU) is an Exchange traded fund. It has seen a really choppy last five days of trading. It started at a low of $37.49 on September 17 and tallied up 3.8% increase in its value to record a week high price of $38.8 on September 19. The company share price then dropped 3.3% to bottom out at $37.5 on September 20 before making a 1.21% recovery during trading on September 23 post its dividend payout.
As of close of business on September 23, the ETF share was trading at $37.98 representing an 8% dip from its 52 week high price of $41.44 and a 12% appreciation on its prior 52 week lowest valuation. It has a market capitalization of $5.3 billion with total outstanding shares of 142 million. Yesterday the ETF attracted a lot of investor interest with over 15 million shares getting traded in comparison to its average daily volume of 10.6 million. The overall dividend yield per annum is 3.89%. It last paid out dividend of $0.37 on September 20.
In terms of top holdings of this fund, Duke Energy tops the list representing over 9% of portfolio followed by Southern Co, Nextera Energy and Dominion Resources which constitute roughly 7% portfolio individually. Exelon makes up5.5% of the ETF fund portfolio and American Electric, Sempra, PG&E form major part of the portfolio.
The ETF was in its previous avatar known as “Utilities Select Sector SPDR Fund”. Its charter is to make profits from investments into Utilities companies and measures its profitability performance against the S&P 500 Index. Over the last five trading sessions, the ETF has outperformed the S&P 500 index by a big margin. While the ETF clocked 1.4 percent the S&P index went up by only 0.1% in the same period.
