Seven free tools for picking an ETF

Choosing between similar exchange-traded funds is harder than it looks. Two funds tracking the same index can differ meaningfully in cost, risk-adjusted return, volatility, and dividend income — differences that compound into thousands of dollars over a long holding period. The ETF Comparator puts up to three funds side-by-side across eleven key metrics, so you can make an informed decision in seconds instead of digging through fund prospectuses.

Add ETF A, B, and an optional ETF C, and instantly compare:

• Overall grade and composite score — an at-a-glance quality rating
• 1-year and 3-year total returns — recent and medium-term performance
• Expense ratio — the annual fee you pay just to hold the fund
• Assets under management (AUM) — a proxy for liquidity and fund stability
• Volatility and Sharpe ratio — how bumpy the ride is, and whether you're paid for the risk
• Maximum drawdown — the worst peak-to-trough loss an investor would have suffered
• Dividend yield — trailing income as a percentage of price
• Category — so you're comparing like with like

Use it to settle common debates — VOO vs. VTI (S&P 500 vs. total US market), SCHD vs. VYM (dividend growth vs. high yield), QQQ vs. QQQM (identical exposure, different price point), or SPY vs. VOO vs. IVV (three ways to own the same 500 companies at different fee levels). All figures are pulled from today's live data so you're always comparing current numbers, not a stale snapshot from last quarter.

Expense ratios look harmless on paper — 0.03%, 0.20%, 0.75% — but fees are deducted from your returns every single year, and the compounding effect over a 20- or 30-year investment horizon can cost you tens of thousands of dollars in lost growth. A 0.75% fee doesn't just take 0.75% off your final balance; it takes 0.75% off every year's growth, which then fails to compound for every year that follows. This calculator shows the exact dollar gap between what you'd have with zero fees and what you'll actually receive after paying an ETF's annual charge.

Pick any ETF from the live rankings — low-cost options like VOO, VTI, or SCHD alongside pricier active or thematic funds — or enter a custom expense ratio to model a fund not yet in our database. Set your investment amount, assumed annual gross return, and time horizon, and the results table shows your projected balance at every 5-year checkpoint alongside the cumulative fee drag, visualised as a bar so you can watch the gap widen year by year.

It's the single most compelling argument for choosing a low-cost index fund over a high-fee active fund, and a useful sanity check before switching out of a fund purely for a marginally higher yield or a flashier strategy.

The dividend income estimator answers the two questions every income investor asks: how much will my investment pay in dividends? and how much capital do I need to hit my monthly income target? It's built for anyone planning dividend income in retirement, weighing a dividend ETF against a high-yield savings account, or simply curious what a portfolio of income-focused funds could realistically pay.

Enter an investment amount to see projected annual, monthly, and weekly dividend income at the ETF's current trailing yield. Or flip it around — enter a target monthly income figure and instantly see how much capital you'd need to invest at today's rate. ETFs are sorted by dividend yield so the highest-income options surface first, including popular income and covered-call funds like JEPI, JEPQ, SCHD, DVY, VYM, and SPYD, right alongside lower-yield, dividend-growth-oriented funds. Yields update daily alongside the rest of the rankings, so projections reflect current market prices, not outdated fund-fact-sheet numbers.

Most investors hold more than one ETF, but it's hard to know your portfolio's true blended cost, weighted return, or combined dividend yield when funds are spread across multiple accounts and bought at different times. The Portfolio Blender combines as many ETFs as you like with custom allocation percentages and instantly calculates your weighted expense ratio, blended 1-year and 3-year returns, and combined dividend yield — the same metrics a robo-advisor or financial planner would compute for a diversified portfolio, without the advisory fee.

It's ideal for modelling classic strategies: a three-fund portfolio (e.g. VTI + VXUS + BND) for broad, low-cost diversification, a core-satellite approach (e.g. 80% VOO + 20% sector ETF) for a passive core with tactical tilts, or a dividend growth portfolio (e.g. SCHD + VYM + JEPI) built around income. Adjust allocations to test rebalancing scenarios before you trade, or compare your current real-world holdings against a proposed target allocation.

The allocation bar chart makes it easy to confirm your weighting matches your intentions, and an amber warning fires if your percentages don't add up to 100%, so you can catch a typo before it skews your results.

This isn't a discounted-cash-flow model or a claim about intrinsic worth — nobody can credibly automate "true value" for a basket of hundreds of stocks. What it does is answer a narrower, useful question: how does this fund's trailing P/E and price-to-book compare to its own category peers today, and where does its price currently sit in its 52-week range. Cheap relative to peers doesn't mean it can't get cheaper, and rich doesn't mean it can't get richer — this is a valuation snapshot, not a timing signal.

Trailing P/E and price-to-book reflect the weighted average of each fund's underlying holdings, as reported by the fund itself. Bond, commodity, and most fixed-income funds don't have a meaningful P/E — there are no earnings to speak of — so those show as not applicable rather than a misleading score.

Staring at 150+ tickers and not sure where to start is the single most common reason beginners delay investing for months. This quiz asks four quick questions about your time horizon, risk tolerance, and preferences, then matches you to a beginner-appropriate starting point — pulling live grades, fees, and prices from the same dataset that powers our rankings.

There's no universally "best" first ETF — the right one depends on when you need the money and how you'd react to a real drop. Answer honestly rather than aspirationally for the most useful result.

Two ETFs with different names and different top holdings can still be almost the same bet. This tool measures three numbers from ~3 years of daily returns: correlation (-1 to +1, how tightly returns move together), R-squared (the % of one fund's daily variance explained by the other — the real "collinearity" number), and beta (how much one moves per unit move in the other).

High R-squared (roughly 85%+) means two funds are largely redundant — holding both adds cost and complexity without much real diversification benefit. Low R-squared means they're genuinely independent bets. The rolling correlation chart shows whether that relationship has been stable over the period, or has drifted.