Access to information is only half the battle. Weeding through what information is valuable, helpful, easily navigable, and free is a task. Who wants to spend their days sorting through web pages, tirelessly seeking out that one site that will be most useful to the investor willing to take his financial life into his own hands?
Well, some of us apparently have nothing better to do.
So today you get to reap the benefit of my search for the most helpful sites for the ETF trader. I'll be the first to admit that this list is not comprehensive, and I invite any and all of you to add to the list by sharing a link below in the Comments section. But these are the sites I find myself continually going back to on a consistent basis.
I'll start with the general and spiral in toward the specific. These first few sites provide super tools for anybody.
Yahoo Finance
You've heard about Yahoo Finance here before, but if you haven't visited the Stock Research Center lately, you're probably missing out. Take a look at what they offer:
Plus they have a free stock screener and alert service. A great resource to check out is the Options Analysis Tool, where you can rate available options by risk, Greeks, ratios or stochastic volatility. And of course, as Teeka has often mentioned, they have an excellent Exchange-Traded Fund Center here. Browse the site -- you won't be disappointed.
I like the layout and look of the Google Finance site, but I have to say Yahoo blows 'em out of the water. Except for this cool little thingie (which you can add to your iGoogle page):
This gizmo gives us a representation of the movement within a sector. The dark green section of the bar is the percentage of companies that are up by more than 2%. For example, 68% of the constituent stocks in transportation are in this category. The light green is the percentage of stocks up from between 0% and 2%. The light red shows the percentage of companies that are down from 0% to 2%. And the dark red shows the percentage down more than 2%. It's a quick and dirty visual with less information that a sector Bullish Percent Index, but it's a nice quick overview, sort of like the Sector Tracker I've included in my Confessions of a Sector Hunter series.
Which brings us to our next site, the home of the Sector Tracker.
SmartMoney
The ETF Tracker here is pretty lame, but I still love this site, mainly for two reasons, and they both have to do with visual aids. If you're like me, spending too much time with numbers makes your eyes start to glaze over. A picture is still worth the proverbial thousand words, and two tools provided here are great for quickly sizing up things.
The first you may have seen before. It's a pictorial representation of the market.
This Map of the Market lets you see over 500 stocks at once. As you scroll over the map, each area will bring up a company and its change at the close of day (or for a bleak picture, choose "Show change at 52 weeks" on the control panel at the right.) The representative size is relative to market capitalization. If you click on a rectangle (as I did in the picture above), you have other options at your disposal, including a similar representation of the stock's sector.
But the sweetest visual that SmartMoney.com offers is the chance to see how an ETF is broken down. Here's a page from the site on a recent recommendation by Chris, the Singapore Index Fund, EWS:
The pie charts tell you at a glance the make-up of the ETF, and the weightings per sector -- very helpful when trying to determine if a particular ETF is a pure play in a sector.
NASDAQ
For a quick and dirty screener, comparison tool, and other cool stuff check out the NASDAQ ETF and Index Fund site. They have a snapshot of the day's top winners and losers:
On the ETF home page you'll find this menu with quick links to ETF articles and short-cuts to specific categories of ETFs:
Notice also that they have an excellent library of ETF Annual Reports, ready for the downloading.
New York Stock Exchange
The NYSE Euronext site (successor to amex.com) has a more robust ETF (and ETN) Screener that allows you to search by issuer and fund classification. This is also a great site to find the issuer of an ETF by plugging in the ticker symbol and clicking on the "Profile" tab.
wsj.com
The Wall Street Journal site has a full-featured ETF screener that is very easy to use. The criteria can be checked or left unchecked and include beta, dividend rates, P/E, to name a few. (A parallel screener can also be found here: www.marketwatch.com/tools/etfs/html-adv-screener.asp.)
ETF Screener
This site has a highly configurable screener that will keep even the most fanatical geek happy. You enter field descriptions, logic and values to sort through ETFs to your specifications. Also compare this visual of the day's best and worst with the one above:
They have little in common in terms of their picks, so further research into how they make their lists is necessary.
They also have many lists to choose from (e.g., 252-day highs and lows) plus a very cool Relative Strength Trends page that factors in a fund's performance over a year. There's no gloss and snap here -- the information is provided in a simple and lo-tech way, but it's valuable stuff.
ETF Connect
If you want to narrow in on Closed-End and Index ETFs, this is the site to search.
Stock Encyclopedia
This is a terrific site that includes lists of ETFs by category, including 19 sectors under "Industry" with bunches of subsectors. The link above is to the Comprehensive ETF Guide where you can find a whole slew of choices, from Bearish ETFs to Ethical ETFs -- tons of subcategories here that'll keep you poking around, exploring investment possibilities you didn't even know existed!
ETF Trends
This site I love. It's got relevant and insightful articles and an ETF Analyzer that provides a lot of information in a spreadsheet-like chart that is sortable by category. The report reproduced below is a top-down list of YTD results (65.8% for SKF).
And finally, when you're trying to find what ETFs hold a particular stock, www.xtf.com provides an ETF Insider module that lets you pop in a ticker symbol and pops out a listing of all ETFs that contain that security. The only irritating thing about this site is that you have to register.
That's it, but I'd really love to hear your suggestions below. There's too much out there in the electronic universe for me not to have missed something grand.
Have fun hunting.
The Big D
