SPDR ETFs Compared: Costs, Structure, Distributions, Valuation, and Style

Educational content only. This article compares factual, dated characteristics of several SPDR-branded funds — it is not investment advice, not a performance comparison, and not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any fund named below.

The SPDR family, run by State Street Global Advisors (also referred to in newer materials as State Street Investment Management), spans funds that look similar on the surface but differ in ways that matter once you get past the ticker. Our companion piece, SPDR ETFs Explained, walks through what each fund actually is — legal structure, history, and mechanics — one at a time. This article takes the same set of funds and lines them up side by side across a fixed set of characteristics: cost, structure, income, the valuation of what they hold, and index-methodology style. It's organized as a comparison because that's often how people actually research these funds — "how does SPY's cost compare to SPYM's," "how does a sector fund's payout compare to the broad index" — and a table answers that faster than prose.

How to read this comparison

Every characteristic below is a factual, dated attribute reported by the fund issuer or a third-party data provider, cited inline. Nothing here is presented as better or worse, and nothing is a suitability judgment about which fund fits which investor — that depends on an individual's own goals, time horizon, tax situation, and risk tolerance, which is a question for that person or a licensed financial professional, not a blog article.

One thing this comparison deliberately leaves out: how any of these funds' prices or returns have moved historically, or any projection of how they might move in the future. There's a dedicated section below explaining that omission, because it's the point most likely to get misread if left implicit. In short — ranking funds by past price performance would read as a signal about which one is "better," and neither an educational article nor a portfolio-tracking platform that is not a registered investment adviser is positioned to make that kind of claim.

The funds compared at a glance

Figures below are drawn from each issuer's own fund pages and fact sheets, cross-checked against third-party data providers, and cited beneath the table. They are historical or "as of" a specific date — not projections, not a performance comparison, and not a recommendation. Expense ratios, yields, and valuation figures change; verify current numbers against each fund's own fact sheet or prospectus before relying on them, and consider speaking with a licensed financial professional.

A few notes on reading this table: "Index Dividend Yield" and forward "FY1" P/E figures come directly from State Street's own fact sheets and reflect the fund's stated methodology (a forward P/E uses analyst consensus estimates of next-year earnings, which are not guaranteed and can be revised). The SPYG and SPYV figures instead come from third-party trailing (backward-looking, based on actual reported earnings) calculations because a directly comparable SSGA-published forward figure for those two funds wasn't available in the sources checked for this article — that's a real difference in what each number measures, not just a formatting choice, and it's flagged here rather than presented as if the two were computed the same way.

Expenses compared

Expense ratios across this family span a wide range: SPYM's 0.02% at the low end, up to GLD's 0.40% at the high end, with most of the equity funds clustered between 0.02% and 0.16% ^{2 6 8 12 13 16 17}. Two of these funds — SPY and SPYM — track the identical S&P 500 index yet carry different costs (0.0945% versus 0.02%) because they are organized under different legal structures with different operating models, not because one replicates the index more accurately than the other ^{1 5}. State Street itself frames SPYM (and its predecessor ticker, SPLG) as a lower-cost building block within the "SPDR Portfolio" line, distinct from SPY's positioning around trading liquidity and options-market depth ¹⁸.

As a matter of pure arithmetic, a lower expense ratio is a smaller ongoing deduction from a fund's assets relative to its benchmark, all else equal, and that gap compounds the longer a position is held. That is a description of how costs accumulate mechanically — it is not a claim, estimate, or projection about what any fund's underlying index will actually return, which cannot be known in advance, and it is not a statement that a lower-cost fund is a better choice for any individual.

Distributions and income compared

Distribution schedule and trailing yield figures below are drawn from issuer distribution calendars and third-party dividend trackers, cited above and below. They describe historical or trailing payments only — not a projection or guarantee of any future distribution. Distributions are declared by each fund's trustee or board and can rise, fall, or be skipped entirely.

Every fund in this comparison that holds dividend-paying stocks passes those dividends through to shareholders on a set schedule — quarterly for SPY, SPYM, the Select Sector SPDRs, SPYG, and SPYV, and monthly for DIA ³. GLD is the one exception: because it holds physical gold bullion rather than income-producing securities, it has no income to distribute and pays no dividend at all; the trust instead periodically sells a small amount of its gold holdings to cover its own operating costs, which means the amount of gold represented by each GLD share gradually declines over time, independent of any cash paid to shareholders ^{13 14}.

Trailing yield varies meaningfully across the family, and the pattern is informative on its own terms: sector composition and style-index selection criteria both drive how much a fund's underlying companies pay out. Among the Select Sector SPDRs, the Utilities fund (XLU) has shown a materially higher trailing yield than the Technology fund (XLK) ^{9 10} — utilities companies, as a group, have historically tended to pay out a larger share of earnings as dividends than growth-oriented technology companies, which more often reinvest earnings into the business. That same pattern shows up in the SPYG-versus-SPYV comparison: SPYV's trailing yield has run higher than SPYG's, consistent with "value" stocks, as a group, historically including more mature, dividend-paying businesses, while "growth" stocks, as a group, more often skip or minimize dividends in favor of reinvestment ^{16 17}. None of this is a statement about which fund's total return has been or will be higher — a trailing distribution yield measures income paid out, not price appreciation, and the two are separate things.

"Earnings": what the underlying valuation numbers actually measure

It's worth being precise about a word that gets used loosely: none of these ETFs has "earnings" of its own, the way an operating company like Apple or Chevron does. SPY, SPYM, the Select Sector SPDRs, DIA, SPYG, and SPYV each hold a basket of stocks issued by companies that generate revenue and report earnings; the fund itself simply holds those shares, collects whatever dividends the underlying companies choose to pay, and passes that cash through — it isn't running a business or generating profit of its own. GLD holds physical gold, a commodity that produces no earnings, revenue, or dividend at all, so the concept doesn't apply to it in any form ¹³.

What each equity fund's fact sheet does publish is an aggregate valuation metric across its underlying holdings — most commonly a price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio. SPY's and DIA's fact sheets report a forward P/E (labeled "FY1" on State Street's fact sheets), built from analyst consensus estimates of the underlying companies' next-fiscal-year earnings ^{4 12}. That is an important qualifier: a forward P/E is only as good as the analyst estimates behind it, those estimates are not guaranteed, and they get revised — sometimes substantially — as actual results come in. The trailing P/E figures cited above for SPYG, SPYV, and XLK, by contrast, are backward-looking, based on the underlying companies' already-reported earnings over the trailing twelve months ^{16 9}. A trailing and a forward P/E are answering slightly different questions (what happened versus what analysts currently expect), so a side-by-side comparison of any two figures in the table above should account for which type each one is rather than treating them as identical measurements.

Reading across the table, SPYG's trailing P/E (~29.96) sits well above SPYV's (~23.86) ^{16 17} — a direct, mechanical consequence of how each style index selects its constituents, discussed further below, and not a judgment about which valuation level is more or less attractive. A higher P/E means the market is pricing a dollar of trailing earnings more expensively across that basket of companies; whether that reflects justified growth expectations, general market conditions, or something else is a question of investment analysis and opinion that this article, as general education, is not positioned to answer.

Growth vs. value: a style-index methodology, not a claim about growing money faster

SPYG tracks the S&P 500 Growth Index, and SPYV tracks the S&P 500 Value Index — both subsets of the same S&P 500 universe SPY and SPYM track in full, split using published, rules-based selection criteria rather than a manager's discretionary judgment ^{15 19}. The S&P 500 Growth Index selects constituents using growth-related factors, including sales growth, earnings-to-price momentum, and price momentum; the S&P 500 Value Index selects constituents using value-related factors, including book-value-to-price, earnings-to-price, and sales-to-price ratios ^{19 20}. A stock can, in principle, be excluded from both, included in only one, or (under S&P's methodology) split with partial weight across both indices — it is a classification of financial characteristics at each periodic rebalance, not a permanent label.

It's worth stating plainly why the word "growth" here doesn't mean what it sounds like it means. "Growth" in "S&P 500 Growth Index" is the name of an index-construction methodology — a set of selection factors applied to a fixed universe of stocks — not a claim, promise, or prediction that the fund, or the money invested in it, will grow faster than any alternative. A company can be classified as a "growth" stock under this methodology and still see its share price fall, and a company classified as a "value" stock can rise. The label describes how the constituents were selected, not how the resulting fund has performed or will perform.

Fund size (AUM) as a neutral fact

Assets under management (AUM) is a snapshot of how much money is currently invested in a fund — it reflects a combination of net investor flows into and out of the fund and the market value of what it holds. It is not a performance measure, a ranking, or a signal about fund quality, and it is not a comparison of which fund has "grown" more; a fund's AUM can rise or fall for reasons entirely unrelated to how its underlying holdings have performed.

As of the sources checked for this article, SPY's reported assets were roughly $793 billion in mid-July 2026, according to a third-party asset tracker ²¹. SPY was, for years, described as the largest ETF in the world by assets; Vanguard's S&P 500 ETF (VOO) passed SPY in total assets in February 2025, a shift driven by fund flows and cost competition between two funds tracking the same index — not by any difference in investment performance between them ²².

SPYM's reported assets were roughly $159.3 billion as of July 20, 2026, per State Street's own fund page ⁶ — substantially larger than the fund's asset base before its October 2025 name and ticker change from SPLG to SPYM ²³. One documented driver of that growth: State Street has stated, in its own July 1, 2026 press release, that the U.S. Treasury selected SPYM as the exclusive default exchange-traded fund for a new federal savings-account program known as "Trump Accounts" ²⁴. That is a factual account of why the fund's asset base changed, not a statement about the fund's investment merits — and selection as a program's default fund is an administrative and cost-related decision made by the program's designers, not an endorsement of the fund's investment quality, a suitability determination for any individual saver, or an indication that the fund is risk-free or government-guaranteed.

Other reported figures as of the sources checked: DIA's assets have been reported in a range of roughly $43 billion to $46 billion depending on the data provider and reporting date ^{25 26}; GLD's assets have been reported at roughly $150 billion, a figure that moves with both fund flows and the market price of gold itself ²⁷; SPYG's assets have been reported at roughly $53 billion and SPYV's at roughly $33–35 billion ^{16 17}. Data providers disagree on exact AUM figures more often than they disagree on expense ratios, because AUM changes daily with flows and market prices — treat any specific number here as a snapshot, not a fixed fact, and check a live source for a current figure.

What this comparison does not include, and why

This article deliberately does not compare, rank, or discuss how any of these funds' share prices or total returns have moved historically, and it does not project how they might move going forward. That's a deliberate choice, for two related reasons:

1. Past performance does not predict future results. A fund's historical price movement — even over a long period — is not a reliable indicator of what it will do next. Presenting historical return figures side by side, even with that disclaimer attached, tends to function as a ranking regardless of the surrounding caveats, because readers naturally read a "which went up more" table as "which is better."
2. Ranking funds by return would cross from education into something that reads as a recommendation. Zydhra is a portfolio-tracking and analytics tool, not a broker-dealer and not a registered investment adviser, and providing personalized investment advice — including implicit signals about which fund an individual should prefer — is a regulated activity under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 and related state law. A "growth" or "increase" comparison framed around historical price movement would risk functioning exactly like that, even inside an article that otherwise reads as educational.

What this article compares instead — cost, legal structure, income mechanics, underlying valuation, and style-index methodology — are factual, dated characteristics that don't carry that same risk, because none of them implies which fund an investor should prefer.

For a deeper look at how each of these funds is legally built — including the mechanical consequences of SPY's and DIA's unit-investment-trust structure — see SPDR ETFs Explained. For how a narrow, single-theme fund is constructed differently from any of the broad or style-based funds above, see our explainer on the Defiance Quantum ETF (QTUM).

Reading a comparison table like this one

A table like the one above is a starting point for research, not a conclusion. Every figure in it changes — expense ratios shift with competition, yields move with both distributions and share prices, valuation ratios move with both earnings and prices, and AUM moves daily. The most useful habit when comparing funds like these isn't picking whichever number looks best in isolation; it's understanding what each figure actually measures (a forward estimate versus a trailing calculation, a fund-level cost versus an underlying-holdings valuation, income versus size) so that whatever conclusion you draw is based on the right comparison in the first place. Which characteristics matter more for a given situation — cost, income, valuation exposure, or style tilt — depends on an individual's own goals, time horizon, and tax situation, and that's a question for that person, or a licensed financial professional working with them, to weigh.

Disclaimer: This article is for general educational and informational purposes only. It is not investment advice, and nothing in it should be construed as a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold SPY, SPYM, any Select Sector SPDR (including XLC, XLY, XLP, XLE, XLF, XLV, XLI, XLB, XLRE, XLK, or XLU), DIA, GLD, SPYG, SPYV, or any other fund or security discussed above. This article does not compare or rank these funds' historical price performance or total returns and does not project future performance for any fund. Zydhra is a portfolio-tracking and analytics tool — it is not a broker-dealer and is not a registered investment adviser. Expense ratios, assets under management, yields, valuation ratios, and fund structures discussed above change over time and were current as of the dates and sources cited; they may no longer be accurate by the time you read this. Past performance does not guarantee or predict future results. Before making any investment decision, review the relevant fund's official prospectus in full and consider consulting a licensed financial professional.

Sources cited