Overview
- Yield on cost compares today’s annual dividend to your original purchase price, and using VIG’s launch price near $50 and a current payout around $3.30 a share, early holders now collect about 6.6% on what they first paid.
- Morningstar’s Bryan Armour recently awarded VIG a Gold rating, praising its low fees, repeatable approach, and size-based indexing that helps keep trading turnover down.
- VIG’s headline yield is about 1.7% because it holds companies with 10 or more straight years of dividend hikes, whereas HDV pays about 3% using a higher-yield screen with financial-health checks.
- Over the past decade, VIG has returned 12.9% annualized versus 9.4% for HDV, reflecting the dividend-growth tilt’s stronger long-run mix.
- The two ETFs build very different portfolios, with VIG owning about 334 stocks versus HDV’s 75, only about 21% overlap, and VIG’s size-weighting placing low-yield mega-cap tech such as Broadcom, Apple, and Microsoft at the top.