Late last week we saw some investors express caution into the recent vault higher in the U.S. Utilities Equity sector via puts in XLU (SPDR Utilities Sector, Expense Ratio 0.16%), specifically with the March 47 puts trading in decent size.
XLU has had a rather prosperous 2014 in terms of pulling in assets, with this senior fund (debuted back in 1998), pulling in north of $1.5 billion in new assets year to date.
Notably, even at current levels and hitting new highs daily lately, the sector ETF still boasts a >3.2% yield versus say an S&P 500 tracker like SPY (SPDR S&P 500, Expense Ratio 0.09%) with a yield of approximately 1.78%. XLU is by far the largest Utility specific ETF in the category in terms of asset size, with a base of about $7.3 billion.
Next in line in the U.S. equity sector is VPU (Vanguard Utilities, Expense Ratio 0.14%) which has accumulated approximately $1.9 billion, along with IDU (iShares U.S. Utilities Sector, Expense Ratio 0.46%) and FXU (First Trust Utilities AlphaDEX, Expense Ratio 0.70%), both of which are increasingly used by ETF model managers in regular sector rotation strategies.
Some lesser known U.S. concentrated strategies at least judging by fund asset size include RYU (Guggenheim S&P 500 Equal Weight Utilities, Expense Ratio 0.40%), FUTY (Fidelity MSCI Utilities, Expense Ratio 0.12%), PUI (PowerShares DWA Utilities Momentum, Expense Ratio 0.63%), and PSCU (PowerShares S&P SmallCap Utilities, Expense Ratio 0.29%).