Three State Street SPDR Bond ETFs Adopt New Names on October 31

Three State Street SPDR bond exchange-traded funds are adopting new names on October 31, 2026, adding the word “Index” to identify their benchmark-tracking approach more explicitly. The funds are the Portfolio Intermediate Term Treasury ETF, Portfolio Long Term Corporate Bond ETF and Portfolio Long Term Treasury ETF, traded under the symbols SPTI, SPLB and SPTL.

The change is to the funds’ names, not an announced overhaul of their portfolios. A regulatory supplement says their investment objectives, principal investment strategies and principal investment risks will remain the same. That distinction matters because the three funds hold different types of bonds and respond differently to changes in interest rates and credit conditions.

The three fund names effective October 31

State Street disclosed the revisions in an October 16 prospectus supplement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The document directs that references to the affected funds in summary prospectuses, full prospectuses and statements of additional information be updated as of October 31.

• SPTI: State Street SPDR Portfolio Intermediate Term Treasury ETF becomes State Street SPDR Portfolio Intermediate Term Treasury Index ETF.
• SPLB: State Street SPDR Portfolio Long Term Corporate Bond ETF becomes State Street SPDR Portfolio Long Term Corporate Bond Index ETF.
• SPTL: State Street SPDR Portfolio Long Term Treasury ETF becomes State Street SPDR Portfolio Long Term Treasury Index ETF.

For each of these funds, the only change in the stated name is the insertion of “Index” immediately before “ETF.” State Street’s fund information continues to identify them by their existing ticker symbols on NYSE Arca. Shareholders looking up an existing position may therefore see a revised fund name alongside the familiar trading code.

The three revisions are not the entirety of the October 16 notice. It lists additional Portfolio bond funds receiving similar Index wording and also includes changes to two funds outside that particular naming pattern. The document covers a wider set of disclosures rather than a separate launch or restructuring of SPTI, SPLB and SPTL.

All three bond ETFs were operating well before this filing. State Street dates the inception of SPTI and SPTL to May 2007 and SPLB to March 2009. Adding a word to their names should not be confused with the introduction of a newly available fund or a new bond-investment strategy.

The portfolios still track different bond markets

SPTI follows the Bloomberg 3-10 Year U.S. Treasury Index, which represents an intermediate-maturity portion of the Treasury market. Its exposure is to U.S. government obligations rather than corporate borrowers. The three-to-ten-year range separates it from very short-term Treasury products and from funds devoted to bonds with substantially longer remaining maturities.

SPTL is also Treasury-focused, but its benchmark is the Bloomberg Long U.S. Treasury Index. The benchmark includes eligible Treasury securities with remaining maturities of at least 10 years. That longer maturity profile is an important difference: long-dated bond prices generally react more sharply to a given movement in market yields than those of shorter-maturity bonds, although the precise effect depends on portfolio duration and market conditions.

SPLB holds a different category of debt. Its benchmark, the Bloomberg U.S. Long Term Corporate Bond Index, represents longer-maturity, investment-grade corporate bonds denominated in U.S. dollars. These securities have interest-rate exposure, but their prices can also respond to changing assessments of corporate credit risk. A Treasury-only fund and a corporate-bond fund are not interchangeable simply because both have “Index” in their names.

State Street’s U.S. fund listings identify gross annual expense ratios of 0.03% for SPTI, 0.03% for SPTL and 0.04% for SPLB. Those are the published fund costs, not newly announced charges arising from the October 31 renaming. The supplement itself does not present the name revisions as an adjustment to investment fees.

The funds also differ markedly in scale. State Street’s listings showed approximately $12.06 billion in assets for SPTI, $11.56 billion for SPTL and $1.19 billion for SPLB, using figures dated October 29. Those values describe the funds before the effective date and will fluctuate with market prices and investor activity. They help put the announcement in context, but they do not imply a change in any fund’s size because of its new name.

What the added “Index” wording does and does not change

The clearest regulatory assurance is the supplement’s statement that none of the renamings changes a fund’s investment objective, principal investment strategies or principal risks. The filing does not describe a switch from active management to index tracking for the three bond ETFs. Their existing fund materials already identify benchmark indexes against which their investment results are managed and evaluated.

For investors, the extra word is primarily a description appearing in fund names and related documents. It does not mean the ETFs will deliver their benchmark returns exactly. Operating expenses, portfolio construction and trading conditions can cause fund results to differ from index performance, and ETFs can trade at prices above or below their net asset values during the trading day.

Nor does a shared naming convention make the securities suitable for the same purpose. An investor using intermediate Treasurys to manage the sensitivity of a bond allocation may have a different exposure in mind from one choosing long Treasurys. Someone buying longer-maturity corporate debt takes on issuer-related risks that are not present in the same way in direct Treasury obligations.

The effective date falls on a Saturday, when U.S. stock exchanges are closed. The next regular NYSE Arca trading session is scheduled for Monday, November 2. Fund names shown by brokerage accounts, watchlists and research platforms may reflect the updated disclosure wording as their systems incorporate it, while SPTI, SPLB and SPTL remain the identifiers investors can use to distinguish the funds.