Under The Hood: WisdomTree LargeCap Dividend Fund

Income investors certainly have plenty of options to choose from in the ETF arena and that's a good thing these days when its almost pointless to be involved with money markets and low-yielding bonds. Dividend ETFs have done a decent job of giving investors exposure to small caps, international dividend divas and high yielders, but the dominant form of dividend ETF is the one that focuses on standard fare such as members of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. With that, let's go under the hood with the WisdomTree LargeCap Dividend ETF DLN. At first glance, DLN looks a lot like the Vanguard Value ETF VTV as both count venerable Dow dividend payers like AT&T T, Chevron CVX, Exxon Mobil XOM, General Electric GE, Merck MRK and Pfizer PFE among their top-10 holdings. Both ETFs hold a huge number of stocks. DLN lists 295 holdings while VTV holds a whopping 421. Not surprisingly, VTV's assets under management are far larger than DLN's. VTV has over $11 billion AUM while DLN has almost $476 million. That's decent and enough to keep DLN around because the ETF does suffer from weak volume. In addition, DLN does yield 2.86% compared to VTV's 2.71% and that's something to consider in an environment where every penny of yield matters. At the sector level, DLN is the better bet as well. Consumer staples lead the way with a weight of 19.35% and energy, healthcare and industrials all get double-digit weights. On the other hand, VTV allocates a dangerous amount to financials, almost 26%, nearly triple DLN's weight to the same sector. DLN would be the preferred choice here to avoid the big exposure to financials and to grab some extra yield, but VTV's has expense ratio of 0.14% and that's better than DLN, which is saying something because DLN is no rip-off at 0.28%. Pick and choose because you don't need both of these ETFs in your portfolio at the same time. Beat the market consistently by receiving real-time trade alerts from the ETF Professor!