ETF Spotlight: iShares Dow Jones U.S. Telecom (IYZ)

December 9th at 2:00pm by Tom Lydon

ETF Spotlight on iShares Dow Jones U.S. Telecom (NYSEArca: IYZ), part of a weekly series.

Assets: $508million

Holdings: Some of the best-known names in the telecommunications sector can be found in this fund, including AT&T (NYSE: T), Qwest (NYSE: Q), Sprint (NYSE: S) and Verizon (NYSE: VZ).

Objective: IYZ tracks the Dow Jones U.S. Select Telecommunications Index, which is a subset of the Dow Jones Wilshire 2500 Index.

What You Should Know

IYZ is up 22.7% year-to-date, and up 11% in the last month
The fund has an expense ratio of 0.48% and 33 holdings
Yields 4.3%
The fund is primarily broken down into fixed line telecommunications, 76.6% mobile telecommunications, 23%

The Latest News

Competition in the sector is tight – the major providers are always scrambling to offer new services at better and better prices
More consumers are snapping up new smartphones tied to the 3G network, and using data providers held in telecom ETFs (Four ways to play the smartphone battle)
While consumers are shutting down their land lines, other areas of telecom continue to grow, according to BusinessWeek: wireless, data and video are all hot
Revenue in the sector is growing faster than the costs are (Reasons to watch global telecom)
Telecom has a reputation for dividends, and some of them have the highest yields available in the S&P 500 (The next big telecom growth spot)