Forget SPY: This Shareholder Yield ETF Has Beaten It by 12 Points This Year
Most S&P 500 investors assume they own the market, but one overlooked mechanism quietly determines how much cash actually flows back to shareholders, and ignoring it this year has carried a measurable price.
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If you own SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY) or a similar low-cost S&P 500 index fund, you own the U.S. market’s largest companies in proportion to their size. That is a perfectly reasonable way to invest, and it has crushed almost every active strategy over the past decade. But SPY-style ownership has one blind spot: it does not care how much cash a company actually hands back to shareholders. In 2026, that blind spot is costing SPY holders real money, and a small, unfamiliar ETF has been quietly exploiting it.
The Cambria Shareholder Yield ETF (NYSEARCA:SYLD) is up 20.58% year to date through July 24, versus 8.36% for SPY. Over the trailing year, SYLD has returned 26.46% against SPY’s 16.47%. That is a roughly 12-point YTD gap and a 10-point one-year gap, from a fund most investors have never heard of.
What Shareholder Yield Actually Measures
Dividend yield captures one channel of cash returns. Shareholder yield captures all three: dividends, net share buybacks, and debt paydown. Buybacks are often the larger channel. When a company retires stock, your slice of future earnings grows without a tax event. A pure dividend screen ignores that entirely. A market-cap-weighted S&P index rewards a company for getting bigger, not for returning cash.
Launched by Cambria in 2013, this fund ranks the U.S. equity universe on combined dividend and buyback yield (adjusted for debt), then holds roughly the top names in a broadly equal-weighted portfolio. The current book is 127 equity positions with about $960 million in net assets, tilted toward financials, energy, industrials, and consumer cyclicals. SYLD’s focus on shareholder yield sets it apart from traditional dividend-focused funds.
How the Portfolio Delivers the Edge
Look at what the holdings are actually doing. D.R. Horton, 1.06% of the fund, returned $742.8 million to shareholders in its June quarter alone, repurchasing 4.2 million shares for $615.7 million alongside its $0.45 quarterly dividend. The dividend has climbed from $0.30 in early 2024 to $0.45 today, but the buyback is doing more of the work.
ConocoPhillips is targeting 45% of operating cash flow returned to shareholders in 2026, repurchased $1.0 billion of stock in the first quarter, and pays a $0.84 quarterly dividend that yields 2.7%. Cigna bought back 11.9 million shares for roughly $3.6 billion last year and raised its dividend to $1.56 quarterly. Citizens Financial Group repurchased $225 million of stock in the second quarter and lifted its dividend to $0.46.
These are mid- and large-cap value companies with maturing cash flows and management teams that would rather buy their own stock than empire-build. That is the mechanism: SYLD systematically overweights this profile, and SPY systematically underweights it because these companies are not the biggest weights in the index.
The Tradeoffs
The annual cost here is 0.59%. SPY charges roughly 0.09%. That 50-basis-point gap is real, and it compounds. SYLD is also a value-and-size tilt in disguise. When mega-cap growth leads, as it did in 2020 and 2023, SYLD lags. Over the past five years, this fund has returned 53.53% against SPY’s 67.96%. Over ten years, SYLD’s 251.14% narrowly edges SPY’s 240.91%, but that lead was built almost entirely in the current value rotation.
This is a factor bet, not a replacement core holding. If the AI-driven mega-cap trade re-accelerates, SYLD’s edge disappears fast.
How to Think About the Swap
The cleanest way to use SYLD is as a sleeve, not a substitute. Keeping SPY as the low-cost core and adding a 10% to 20% SYLD sleeve gives you exposure to the shareholder-yield factor without abandoning market beta. In a taxable account, swapping the whole position triggers capital gains and locks in SPY’s low-fee loss for a much higher one, so partial reallocation from new contributions or inside a tax-deferred account is usually the more efficient path.
What to Take From This
The interesting question is whether you want any exposure to the cash-return factor in your portfolio. If the answer is yes, SYLD is a reasonable, transparent way to get it, and the 2026 numbers show what that exposure can do when value leads. If you believe mega-cap growth will resume its dominance, SPY on its own may still be the preferable exposure. The concept is worth knowing either way. Most index investors are unknowingly betting against it.
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David Beren has been a Flywheel Publishing contributor since 2022. Writing for 24/7 Wall St. since 2023, David loves to write about topics of all shapes and sizes. As a technology expert, David focuses heavily on consumer electronics brands, automobiles, and general technology. He has previously written for LifeWire, formerly About.com. As a part-time freelance writer, David’s “day job” has been working on and leading social media for multiple Fortune 100 brands. David loves the flexibility of this field and its ability to reach customers exactly where they like to spend their time. Additionally, David previously published his own blog, TmoNews.com, which reached 3 million readers in its first year. In addition to freelance and social media work, David loves to spend time with his family and children and relive the glory days of video game consoles by playing any retro game console he can get his hands on.
