WTV is beating an index built on the value definition it dropped

WisdomTree's U.S. Value Fund entered the September 10 session with a year-to-date gain above 14%, roughly 300 basis points ahead of the S&P 500 and more than 400 ahead of the S&P 500 Value Index, the yardstick the category usually gets scored against. It turns 20 in February and reaches that anniversary without leaning on price-to-book or price-to-earnings, the two metrics it was built to replace.

Shareholder yield bundles buybacks, dividends and debt reduction into one screen, which makes WTV less a cheaper route into a value index than a different factor carrying a value label. A fund can post 400 basis points of "value" outperformance while holding companies a price-to-book screen would pass over entirely.

The macro case for the screen is plain, and the ETF Trends article makes it directly: repurchases keep outrunning dividends in dollar terms, and companies returning cash through buybacks, dividends or both have outperformed those that return nothing. Morningstar's Dan Lefkovitz supplies the tax argument for buybacks and the sharper warning—that market-level yield metrics and valuation tools counting dividends alone "could be obsolete."

The tradeoff buried in that is discretion: a dividend is a standing commitment boards cut at their peril, while a buyback is authorized and reauthorized, quarter by quarter, at whatever price the market happens to be charging. A screen that counts repurchase dollars as shareholder yield is buying management's continued willingness to pay up for its own equity, a governance wager as much as a valuation one—and one that gets tested the first time a broad repurchase cycle stalls.

Prepared as part of WisdomTree's general paid sponsorship of VettaFi | ETF Trends, the piece's figures stand on their own, and the same case is being made on the other side of the wrapper line, where Tweedy, Browne spent August pitching a century-old value process to ETF investors. Rules-based value and old-fashioned stock picking have converged on the same argument at the same moment.

Three and a half months remain for the value-growth gap to close or widen, and WTV's tilt makes its December print something close to a referendum on whether shareholder yield defines value better than book value did. The tell sits in the buyback column: as long as repurchases outrun dividends, the screen has yield to harvest, and the fund's twentieth year rests on boards keeping those authorizations open.