Hello, Does anybody have an opinion on the XLF financial etf? I looked at the holdings. I thought it made sense. The big giant US companies made up about 52% of the fund. Then there were a bunch of mid-size financial companies that made up maybe 30%. Then the remainder was scattered across many smaller financial companies. Expense ratio is .14%.
It's a diversified portfolio of financial stocks. There is no "particular risk" issues with XLF other than market risk. What is your concern? If you think "financials in general are going up from here", buy it.
XLF is the most widely used financial ETF, by far. It includes major banks, midsize banks, insurance companies and brokerage firms. If you want a purge play on banks use the KBE etf, or for a pure play on midsize banks use the KRE etf.
Hello. Thank you for your response. What is a "purge play"? The midsize bank one sounds cool. They are supposed to benefit from the new tax rates (assuming these are USA midsize banks). I'll have to look into that.
Thank you for your reply. I'm new at ETFs, so I wasn't sure if it was a strange one or a mainstream one. The SPY is easy to understand because it is the S&P 500. This one seemed to be something that was put together as a kind of giant shopping list. It looked reasonable to me. But when it gets down to dozens of small banks, I don't know one from the other. The fund probably does not include every small bank in America, so somebody made a decision as to what goes in the ETF, and how much. So I was just seeing if the basket of companies and how they are weighted in the ETF made sense.
You may want to spend some time at this website: https://us.spdrs.com/en And look into ETFs which are called "sector ETFs". You will see that there is an ETF available for most US industry sectors. You are not limited to State Street however. Other companies, such as iShares and VanEck, also offer ETFs which focus on an industry sector (e.g. IBB, SMH).
A Google search will turn up a number of ETF sites. Two that I have used for their database info are ETF.com and ETFdb.com . You can also go to the issuer sites: State Street, Blackrock, Vanguard, SPDR, etc.