December.) The shareholder yield strategy is Cambria’ s largest, and is used in five of its funds, including three domestic funds( one large cap, one midsize and one small cap), as well as two international funds with separate mandates for developed and emerging markets.
The Cambria Emerging Shareholder Yield ETF( EYLD) is the focus of this article— a Morningstar four-star rated product that recently sported a 30-day SEC yield of nearly 5 %, the highest among Cambria’ s suite of shareholder-yield funds.
The fund launched in 2016, and it’ s been rated in the top quartile within Morningstar’ s diversified emerging markets category for the past three- and fiveyear periods. The fund returned nearly 4.7 % last year. It trailed in its category, but a July Morningstar report noted that the Emerging Shareholder Yield ETF had a 2.9 % annualized advantage over the MSCI Emerging Markets Index from its July 2016 inception through June 2025, with only modestly higher volatility.
Net Buybacks
Cambria introduced its first shareholder yield fund in 2013 with the Cambria Shareholder Yield ETF( SYLD), a U. S. mid-cap value fund.
Faber says the idea for the shareholder yield concept is this:“ When you look at how U. S. companies spend and distribute their cash flows, they increasingly use their cash to buy back stocks versus paying
Portfolio Statistics
Number Of Stocks 100 Average Mkt. Cap
$ 5.85 billion P / E Ratio 9.04x Std. Dev Fund / Benchmark 4.26 / 15.01 Turnover Ratio 22 % Net Expense Ratio 0.63 %
Performance, AUM and top five holdings as of 10 / 2 / 25. Portfolio stats and standard deviation( three year vs. the Morningstar EM TME NR USD Index) as of 9 / 30 / 25. Turnover as of 4 / 30 / 25. Sources: Cambria Investment Management and Morningstar.
Manager: Meb Faber Age: 48
Professional Background: He is co-founder and CEO of Cambria Investment Management, where he manages Cambria’ s ETFs and separately managed accounts. He has authored numerous white papers and books, and is a frequent speaker and writer on investment strategies.
Outside Interests: Skiing, surfing and anything beach-adventure related. He also enjoys spending time with his 8-year-old son.
dividends. Buybacks started to outpace dividends in the late’ 90s every single year.”
But it’ s the net buybacks— not just buybacks per se— that matter. Net buybacks occur when stock buybacks exceed new stock issuance, such as when companies give stock-based compensation to employees.“ You could have a company that pays a 4 % cash dividend yield and issues 5 % of their market cap a year in new stock, [ resulting in ] a negative yield,” Faber notes.“ The vernacular of shareholder yield is cash dividends plus net buybacks.
“ That was the inspiration for SYLD, and we’ ve done a lot of research on sectors and industries and ex-U. S. opportunities,” he adds.“ We found that for the most part our approach works everywhere with every style— not always, but most of the time.”
Systematic Approach
Faber is listed as the portfolio manager on all of Cambria’ s funds along with Jonathan Keetz. They’ re assisted by two analysts.
Cambria’ s investing methodology is a multi-step process that begins when the managers screen a broad universe of emerging market stocks to find companies meeting certain liquidity and price requirements. The firm then selects the stocks in the top 20 % of the universe by yield across dividends and buybacks.
Next, the managers winnow the field by filtering out companies that don’ t meet certain valuation, quality and leverage metrics. Cambria further tightens the eligibility requirement by zeroing in on companies scoring best for cash dividend payments, share repurchases and debt retirement.
Finally, Cambria uses momentum and trend indicators to position the portfolio in the strongest-performing shareholder yield stocks. This results in an equal-weighted portfolio of 100 equity holdings. All positions get a 1 % weight at each quarterly rebalancing, but Cambria lets winners float to as high as 4 % of fund weight intra-quarter.
“ We’ ll start to trim it if something goes totally nutty on the upside,” Faber says.“ But having an equal weighting has benefits on the downside where if a company does poorly we’ ll rebalance and buy more of it.” Faber says Cambria’ s in-house indexing process is rules-based and systematic. Within the shareholder yield strategy companies can get kicked out of a portfolio for a couple of reasons: If the valuation has gone up too much or if the shareholder yield is too low( in the latter case, because the company has stopped paying dividends or buying back stock, or if it started issuing a lot of stock).
The Emerging Shareholder Yield ETF portfolio’ s recent largest sector weights were financials and industrials. The largest country weights were Taiwan and China( which both saw representation in the low-20 % range), followed by South Korea, whose allocation was 17 %.
NOVEMBER 2025 | FINANCIAL ADVISOR MAGAZINE | 41