3 Cool Online Investment Tools

Every once in a while, you run into a free, easy-to-use online tool that helps you make better-informed investment decisions. In an era of fintech innovation, there seems to be an ever-growing menu of tools and apps for advisors and do-it-yourself investors.

Last year, we looked into four cool online tools that do just that—help investors invest better. We expand that list with another three tools you might want to check out:

1. ETF Stock Exposure Tool

This tool is one of my personal favorites. It’s a free tool provided by ETFdb.com.

One of the reasons ETFs are great is because they dilute single-security risk by offering various securities in one portfolio under one ticker, but that doesn’t mean investors buying ETFs might not be looking to express specific views on a single stock.

You might just want to make an allocation to a tech fund, or you might want to own specifically Apple stock in an ETF wrapper. This tool allows you to quickly find out which ETFs in the market today include a given stock you may be looking to own.

You simply type in the ticker of the stock in the box, say, AAPL for Apple, and it will return a list of the 10 ETFs with the largest allocation to Apple, and the weighting of that stock in each portfolio. The image below shows the interface. 

2. WhaleWisdom.com

When it comes to tracking what hedge funds and big money are investing in, and replicating their ideas—if that’s your thing—you could go through piles of 13F filings found on the Securities and Exchange Commission, or you could turn to WhaleWisdom, a tool that tells you who owns a particular ETF based on the most recent 13F filings available.

Typing in the ticker of the fund you are interested in will provide a detailed breakdown of how many parties held this ETF among their top 10 holdings, how many have added to their position, how many have gotten out, etc. It’s a wealth of stats that immediately tell you if the ETF is owned by only a handful of people, or by a whole lot of them.

You will also get the 13F filers who reported holding an ETF, including how many shares they own, the market value of that position and any recent changes to that allocation.

For example, if you want to see who owned the hugely popular iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Index Fund (USMV | A-76) in the first quarter of this year, you would type in the ticker at the top of the page, and find out everyone who reported owning this fund, from asset managers to insurance giant Allstate. 

3. ETF Correlation

This tool offered by ETFreplay lets you check out how correlated any pair of ETFs have been over a 10-day, 20-day, 30-day, 60-day and 120-day time period.

Say you want to know how much the SPDR Gold Trust (GLD | A-100) has correlated to the SPDR S&P 500 (SPY | A-97) over the past 60 days: You simply input the two tickers, select your time frame and you will get a correlation chart that shows you all the action, and that tells you maximum and the minimum correlation between the two funds during that period.

As we hear market experts and advisors talk about high correlations in the market today—which makes portfolio diversification that much more difficult—this tool offers a useful glimpse of how ETFs you own may be correlated to one another. 

ETF Database, WhaleWisdom and ETFreplay all have other interesting tools that investors can benefit from, and they are all very easy to use. It’s worth taking a few minutes to navigate their sites and play around with the possibilities.

If there’s an online tool you can’t invest without, we’d love to hear about it. Contact Cinthia Murphy at [email protected].