The new Communication Services Select Sector SPDR Fund (NYSEArca:XLC) has been in the spotlight due in large part to Facebook Inc.’s recent slide. Last week, the social media giant suffered its worst intraday loss as a public company after reporting disappointing second-quarter results.
The news hampered XLC, which entered last Friday with a weight of over 20% to Facebook, one of the largest weights to that stock among all exchange traded funds. Facebook is still the largest holding in XLC, but there is much more to this ETF.
XLC is the first ETF dedicated to the new communication services sector. The new ETF tracks the Communication Services Select Sector Index and “seeks to provide precise exposure to companies from the media, retailing, and software & services industries in the U.S.,” according to State Street Global Advisors (SsgA).
Last year, index providers MSCI and Standard & Poor’s announced the telecommunications sectors would be renamed communications services and would add companies from the consumer discretionary and technology sectors. Tech additions include Facebook and Google parent Alphabet Inc.
XLC includes securities of companies from diversified telecommunication services; wireless telecommunication services; media; entertainment; and interactive media & services.
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“The content of communications used to be spread across different industries and delivery networks,” said S&P Dow Jones Indices. “Today, interconnected networks deliver virtually any content to any device over any network: text, voice and video via wired, wireless or the internet, television via broadband, newspapers read via smart phones, movies via streaming while social interactions and media follow people everywhere. Content is crucial for commerce, business, finance, securities trading, and people.”
The new fund devotes almost 47% of its weight to the Internet software and services industry, 26.15% to media stocks and 11.89% to telecommunications stocks.
“Communication Services is clearly the youngest sector due to social media giants like Alphabet (Google) and Facebook. Technology is now the second youngest and dominates the 1973-99 period when Microsoft and Apple came of age. Industrials, Materials, Energy and Consumer Staples represent growth of the US economy during the first three-quarters of the last century,” according to S&P.
XLC holds 26 stocks and charges 0.13% per year, or $13 on a $10,000 investment.
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