SPMO has surged 26% year to date versus SPY's 10%, and over 10 years it has more than doubled SPY's 247% total return.
SPMO's 100-stock concentration and semi-annual rebalancing can cause sharp lag during leadership shifts and create higher capital gains distributions in taxable accounts.
Don't wait: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just revealed his top 10 AI stocks. See the full list FREE now.
The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY) is the default equity holding for tens of millions of investors, and for defensible reasons: it tracks the S&P 500 at an expense ratio of 0.0945%, offers deep liquidity, and closed at $749.17 on July 13, 2026. Yet SPY holders have quietly missed the market this year. A close cousin, still built from the same 500 stocks, is up more than two and a half times as much year-to-date. The alternative sits within the S&P family, costs about 4 basis points more, and rotates on a rules-based schedule that most SPY owners have never examined.
That fund is the Invesco S&P 500 Momentum ETF (NYSEARCA:SPMO), and the gap between the two in 2026 is the reason to look closely.
The fund works because it is boring in the best way. It owns the entire large-cap U.S. market weighted by size, so NVIDIA accounts for 7.58% of the fund, Apple for 6.66%, and Microsoft for 4.91%. Over ten years, the ETF has returned 247.11%, and over one year it is up 20.13%. Anyone building a portfolio around a single equity ticker has done fine.
The shortfall is structural. Because SPY is weighted by market cap, it always owns yesterday's winners at yesterday's prices. When leadership shifts within the index, SPY captures the move only as those names increase their share. It cannot lean into what is working now.
Don't wait: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just revealed his top 10 AI stocks. See the full list FREE now.
The momentum fund tracks the S&P 500 Momentum Index, which selects roughly the top 100 S&P 500 names, ranked by risk-adjusted price momentum, and rebalances semiannually. It is the same universe of stocks as the core S&P 500 fund, filtered to include those with the strongest recent trend. The expense ratio is 0.13%, which works out to about $13 per $10,000 invested, versus roughly $9.45 for the flagship fund.
Those extra four basis points have bought a lot this year. SPMO is up 26.03% year-to-date through July 13, 2026, compared with SPY's 9.86%. On a $50,000 position, that is roughly $13,015 of return for SPMO versus $4,930 for SPY, before the fee difference of about $18. The fee gap is a rounding error next to the performance spread.
Source: Yahoo Finance Top News — This article was automatically imported from the source. Read full article at original source →
