Finding a holding in and ETF

September 22, 2005 8:27 AM

Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs): Is there a resource where I could search for ETFs which have a particular stock holding? For instance, could I find an ETF that held INTL quickly, rather than combing through ETFs individually? (I'm not searching for INTL, just an example)
posted by jonah to work & money (10 comments total)

Thomson Financial has a powerful database that would allow you to do that kind of search, but access costs $$$$. I'd be amazed if there were a free online search tool that did such a thing, but I'm prepared to be wrong.
posted by junkbox at 9:00 AM on September 22, 2005

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ct?s=INTC

Change the ticker in the URL as you see fit.

(or, buy a Bloomberg-- got $1,500/mo to spare?)
posted by Kwantsar at 9:08 AM on September 22, 2005

Oh, and that was Intel. But you asked for Inter-Tel, and I have no idea why you'd use that as an example, but what you claim to want is here.
posted by Kwantsar at 9:11 AM on September 22, 2005

Thanks, that was exactly what I was looking for.
posted by jonah at 9:15 AM on September 22, 2005

Very cool. Note that yahoo supports downloading stuff to CSV format, also, which makes it easy to make programs that slurp data from yahoo and massage it, and also makes it really easy to import stuff like that into excel.

Like this:
http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=INTL&f=sl1d1t1c1ohgv&e=.csv

(Look for "download to spreadsheet" on the page.
posted by RustyBrooks at 9:28 AM on September 22, 2005

Actually never mind, that just downloaded info on INTL, not exactly what was on the page.
posted by RustyBrooks at 9:29 AM on September 22, 2005

Yeah, Rusty, AFAIK, you can't get all of Yahoo!'s data, but this page shows you what you can get.
posted by Kwantsar at 9:42 AM on September 22, 2005

Kwantsar's Yahoo! link is a good one, but it just tells you which ETFs have the stock as a top ten holding. Most ETFs have many more than ten stocks, so you may be missing out on some that might otherwise interest you. You may have better luck looking at the indices (at the top of the page) and finding an ETF that follows one of them.

This may be obvious, but I thought I'd point it out in case it wasn't...
posted by kindall at 12:03 PM on September 22, 2005

kindall is right, but please note that (assuming ETFs are regulated like mutual funds-- an assumption that I cannot prove) funds are required to release their top ten holdings quarterly, and their complete holdings annually. IOW, the non-top-ten information is often dated and worthless.
posted by Kwantsar at 2:45 PM on September 22, 2005

For funds and ETFs that follow an index, they will always hold the stocks in the index, and the stocks in the index are always well-known (when the S&P 500 changes, it's news). It's true that you might not know what the smaller holdings of a non-index mutual fund or ETF are, which is why I suggested looking at the index ones to see if you might be interested in one of them.

(The index ETFs also tend to have lower management costs, for obvious reasons.)
posted by kindall at 6:09 PM on September 22, 2005