Jake FitzGerald
5 min read
Quick Read
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SDOG beats DVY with a 25% year-to-date return versus 18%, while also paying a slightly higher 3.34% trailing yield.
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SDOG holds five stocks from each of 10 S&P 500 sectors equally, so no single industry like utilities or banks can dominate income.
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Most retirees looking for dividend income end up in one of a few big, familiar funds. A much smaller ETF has beaten the best-known high-yield option so far this year, and it does it by taking an old Wall Street screening method and running it across the whole stock market.
How the Dogs of the Dow Became a Sector Strategy
The classic Dogs of the Dow approach is simple. Each year, you buy the 10 highest-yielding stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and give each one an equal share of the money. The thinking is that a high yield often marks a solid company whose share price has temporarily fallen out of favor.
The ALPS Sector Dividend Dogs ETF (NYSEARCA:SDOG) applies that idea to the S&P 500 one sector at a time. Its index picks the five highest-yielding stocks from each of the 10 market sectors and weighs everything equally. Because of that design, no single industry can take over the income stream. In practice the fund holds five utilities, five financials, five energy names and so on, alongside telecom, health care, technology and materials stocks.
The latest filing shows how even the weights are. As of August 31, 2026, the largest position was Genuine Parts (NYSE:GPC) at 2.50% of net assets. The smallest was Edison International (NYSE:EIX) at 1.42%.
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Where SDOG Outpaces a Dividend Heavyweight
The natural benchmark is the iShares Select Dividend ETF (NASDAQ:DVY), one of the best-known high-yield funds. DVY uses a dividend-weighted index of roughly 100 stocks selected on dividend yield. Its July 31 filing listed 104 positions, with more than 20 utilities and more than 20 financial companies. Weights range widely: the largest holding was 2.21% of assets, while some positions sat below 0.4%.
