6 High-Yielding Electric Utilities for Consideration

Utilities continue to offer a reasonably high yield with better protection from inflation than some other income-oriented investments, like high-quality bonds. I first addressed this issue almost a year ago and followed up in November with a list of high-yielding utilities. While the group has been facing the headwinds of rising rates, it seems to be holding up to those challenges. The SPDR Utilities ETF (XLU), which consists of a broad range of utilities beyond just electric utilities, has lagged the market but performed better than high-quality bonds, which is represented by the iShares Barclays Aggregate Index (AGG): The blue line is XLU, while the red line is AGG. As you can see, over the past year, XLU is up about 11% while AGG is hugging the flat line. These numbers are not total return - income would add about 4% to both. The performance difference over the past few... Read more