Standard & Poor’s Fund Services today rated the SPDR S&P/ASX 200 Fund (STW) as ‘very strong’.
The rating reflects a combination of very low direct and indirect costs, a highly liquid secondary market, a simple and transparent portfolio-construction approach and historical performance that has been very true to style.
The manager State Street Global Advisors Australia Ltd. designed the exchange-traded fund (ETF) product to closely track the returns of the S&P/ASX 200 Accumulation Index. Specifically, consistent with this objective, STW uses a full-replication portfolio-construction method, with the fund holding each of the 200 constituents stocks of the benchmark at market weight.
Additionally, STW has proven, and will likely to continue to be, a highly tax-efficient investment vehicle. In a comparative sense, it may generate superior after-tax returns for investors with anything other than a zero percent marginal tax rate.
S&P Fund Services analyst Rodney Lay said: “STW represents a highly efficient vehicle to gain exposure to the broader Australian equities market, and it is the only domestically listed ETF that provides exposure to the S&P/ASX 200 Accumulation Index”.