Making its debut on 11/01/2006, smart beta exchange traded fund Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight Financials ETF (RSPF) provides investors broad exposure to the Financials ETFs category of the market.

What Are Smart Beta ETFs?

Market cap weighted indexes were created to reflect the market, or a specific segment of the market, and the ETF industry has traditionally been dominated by products based on this strategy.

Market cap weighted indexes work great for investors who believe in market efficiency. They provide a low-cost, convenient and transparent way of replicating market returns.

However, some investors believe in the possibility of beating the market through exceptional stock selection, and choose a different type of fund that tracks non-cap weighted strategies: smart beta.

Non-cap weighted indexes try to choose stocks that have a better chance of risk-return performance, which is based on specific fundamental characteristics, or a mix of other such characteristics.

While this space offers a number of choices to investors, including simplest equal-weighting, fundamental weighting and volatility/momentum based weighting methodologies, not all these strategies have been able to deliver superior results.

Fund Sponsor & Index

Managed by Invesco, RSPF has amassed assets over $268.31 million, making it one of the average sized ETFs in the Financials ETFs. This particular fund, before fees and expenses, seeks to match the performance of the S&P 500 EQUAL WEIGHT FINANCIALS INDEX .

The S&P 500 Equal Weight Financials Index equally weights stocks in the financial sector of the S&P 500 Index.

Cost & Other Expenses

Expense ratios are an important factor in the return of an ETF and in the long-term, cheaper funds can significantly outperform their more expensive cousins, other things remaining the same.

Operating expenses on an annual basis are 0.40% for this ETF, which makes it on par with most peer products in the space.

RSPF's 12-month trailing dividend yield is 2.14%.

Sector Exposure and Top Holdings

Even though ETFs offer diversified exposure that minimizes single stock risk, investors should also look at the actual holdings inside the fund. Luckily, most ETFs are very transparent products that disclose their holdings on a daily basis.

RSPF's heaviest allocation is in the Financials sector, which is about 100% of the portfolio.

When you look at individual holdings, Franklin Resources Inc (BEN) accounts for about 1.53% of the fund's total assets, followed by Invesco Ltd (IVZ) and Blackstone Inc (BX).

The top 10 holdings account for about 14.91% of total assets under management.