Some ETF Research Tools

Morningstar.com is my primary resource for mutual funds and ETFs research for its authority in the fund industry. I have used their ETF tool quite extensively when I was looking for ETFs for my taxable accounts. And for all the posts on ETFs I have written (for example, the Portfolio Build with ETFs series), I got most of the fund’s data, such as expense ratio (ER), return, and investment style, from Morningstar. However, there are a couple of things I found not very convenient from their list of ETFs:

• No ER information
• No separate lists for sector funds

It shows all the returns and trading volume, but if I want to find out the cost of each fund, I will have to click on each item and go to the fund’s separate page to get the information I want, which happens to be one of the most important data when evaluating a fund.

Then I recently found a couple supplemental tools that can give me most of the information I want without checking the funds one by one.

For all-in-one-page ER data, XTF ETF Finder is the tool I am now using. ETF Finder conveniently lists all the ETFs, by sector, style, asset class, or market cap, with their ERs. One drawback, however, is that I can’t sort the funds according to their ERs.

For some new ETF offerings (those having a few months of history), neither XTF nor Morningstar reports ER information. In this case, I will have to use the fund’s prospectus to see how much the fund will charge in fees. In addition, XTF also has Advanced ETF Screener.

Since I usually pay a great deal of attention to the fund’s yield, it would be nice if I can easily get distribution data from multiple funds for easy comparison. For that, I use ETF Connect’s ETF Sorter.

Here, funds are sorted by their distribution rates, so I can easily find out the fund’s yield in a single page.

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