---
title: "Watchlist ETF Screener"
description: "Free watchlist ETF screener: filter the funds you are researching by expense ratio, median bid-ask spread, tracking difference and concentration, with documented definitions."
canonical: https://www.getswoopr.com/research/screener/etfs/
source: "Swoopr Investment: https://www.getswoopr.com"
---

Research Workbench · Funds



# Watchlist ETF Screener



Filter the funds you are already researching.



Apply cost, spread, tracking, concentration and turnover criteria to a watchlist you supply. Every field has a documented definition, missing data is reported instead of assumed, and results are pass or fail descriptions, never recommendations.





        



Search guides, glossary terms, tools and answers




Search






Start screening


Research methodology






      




## Direct Answer



An ETF screener filters funds against thresholds on the figures a fund actually publishes: net expense ratio, median bid-ask spread, tracking difference, fund size, daily dollar volume, holdings count, top-ten weight and portfolio turnover. This one screens a watchlist you supply rather than a licensed universe, so every number comes from the fund's own prospectus, annual report or website. A fund missing a figure is reported as insufficient data, never scored as zero, and passing a screen describes the fund against your thresholds rather than endorsing it.





      




## Where the Data Comes From



**This screener has no live fund universe.** Swoopr does not license a bulk fund-data feed, so there is no database of thousands of ETFs behind this page and no button that fetches one. You supply the figures for the funds you are researching, and the tool applies your thresholds to them. The example dataset is four fictional placeholder funds with deliberately incomplete data, not real tickers.



That constraint is deliberate rather than a gap waiting to be filled. A screener that displayed invented expense ratios or made-up spreads would look identical to a real one and be actively harmful, so this tool does not ship numbers it cannot stand behind.



The fields were chosen because a US-listed ETF has to publish them. Under SEC Rule 6c-11, a fund relying on the rule discloses its median bid-ask spread and its daily premium or discount to net asset value on its own website. Expense ratio, portfolio turnover and holdings come from the prospectus and the annual report. So every figure this screener asks for can be filled in from primary documents, without a data vendor.








## Screen Your Fund Watchlist



Paste your funds, choose criteria or a preset, then run the screen. Nothing leaves your browser.








### 1. Your funds



Paste CSV rows: a header line with `name`, optional `ticker`, then any field columns (ids or labels from the definitions table below). Blank cells mean "not researched yet", never zero.



Fund watchlist CSV






Load example data



          


### 2. Your criteria





Preset screen




Apply preset




Presets are research starting points with round, documented thresholds. They are not recommendations; adjust them to your own objective.







Add criterion







Run screen


Export results (CSV)






        



### Results


          



| Fund | Status | Passed | Failed | Missing |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |












## What Each Preset Screen Looks For



Seven presets ship with the tool. Three of them exist to surface risk, not quality, which is the part most screeners leave out.

![Close-up of a laptop displaying stock trading software with a market chart on a wooden table.](https://www.getswoopr.com/images/accent/research-screener-etfs-accent-1.webp)
*Photo by [Joshua Mayo](https://www.pexels.com/@joshuamayo) via [Pexels](https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-shot-of-a-laptop-on-wooden-surface-5912328/)*





| Preset | What it filters for |
| --- | --- |
| Low-cost broad exposure | Cheap to own and cheap to trade, holding enough positions that no single name dominates. |
| Tradeable size | Funds large enough and traded heavily enough that an ordinary order is unlikely to be the day's main event. |
| Tight index tracking | Return that stayed close to the index in both direction and consistency, expressed as a band on tracking difference plus a cap on tracking error. |
| Concentration check | Funds where the ten largest positions carry most of the weight. A flag to investigate, not a fault: a sector fund is meant to be concentrated. |
| Closure and liquidity risk watch | Small, thinly traded funds. Small funds get liquidated, which forces a taxable exit on a timetable you did not choose. |
| Low turnover | Funds that trade their own portfolio rarely. Relevant in a taxable account. |
| Wide spread warning | Published median spreads wide enough that trading cost may swamp the expense ratio difference people usually shop on. |










## Field Definitions



Use the id in a CSV header, or the label. Every definition below states exactly which published figure the screener expects.





| Field id | Label | Unit | Definition |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| `expenseRatio` | Net Expense Ratio | % | Annual net operating expenses as a percentage of assets, after any fee waiver, from the fund prospectus fee table. |
| `medianSpread` | Median Bid-Ask Spread | % | The fund’s published median bid-ask spread over the most recent 30 calendar days, as a percentage of the midpoint. Required website disclosure under SEC Rule 6c-11. |
| `aum` | Net Assets | $M | Total net assets of the fund in millions of dollars, from the most recent published fund page or annual report. |
| `avgDollarVolume` | Avg Daily Dollar Volume | $M | Average daily shares traded multiplied by average price, in millions of dollars per day, over a stated recent window. |
| `inceptionYears` | Years Since Inception | yrs | Whole years between the fund’s inception date and today. Short histories give tracking and distribution figures less to say. |
| `trackingDifference` | Tracking Difference | % | Fund total return minus index total return over a stated period, in percentage points. Usually negative by roughly the expense ratio; a large gap either way needs explaining. |
| `trackingError` | Tracking Error | % | Annualised standard deviation of the difference between fund and index returns. Measures how consistently the fund tracks, not how closely it finished. |
| `premiumDiscount` | Premium or Discount to NAV | % | Closing market price minus net asset value, as a percentage of NAV, from the fund’s published premium/discount history. Positive is a premium. |
| `holdingsCount` | Number of Holdings | count | Count of portfolio positions in the most recent published holdings file. |
| `topTenWeight` | Top 10 Holdings Weight | % | Combined portfolio weight of the ten largest positions, as a percentage of net assets. |
| `turnover` | Portfolio Turnover | % | Annual portfolio turnover rate from the financial highlights table in the annual report. Higher turnover generally means more trading costs and more realised gains inside the fund. |
| `distributionYield` | Distribution Yield | % | Trailing twelve months of distributions divided by current share price, as a percentage. A distribution is not the same thing as a return. |










## Where This Fits in the Research Loop



Screening is the narrowing step, not the deciding step. A screen turns a long list into a short one; what happens next is the work. Take the funds that survived into the [Research Workbench](https://www.getswoopr.com/research/workbench/), where the same document holds the objective, the evidence, the thesis and the review date.

![finance business Watchlist ETF Screener where fits](https://www.getswoopr.com/images/accent/research-screener-etfs-accent-2.webp)
*Photo by [viarami](https://pixabay.com/users/viarami-13458823/) via [Pixabay](https://pixabay.com/photos/round-of-financing-startup-finance-5355811/)*



For companies rather than funds, the [Watchlist Stock Screener](https://www.getswoopr.com/research/screener/) runs the same engine over fundamental metrics. For property trusts, the [Watchlist REIT Screener](https://www.getswoopr.com/research/screener/reits/) uses FFO coverage and balance-sheet fields instead. To understand how the wrapper itself differs from a mutual fund before screening either, start at [Compare Investments](https://www.getswoopr.com/compare/) or the full [ETF vs mutual fund guide](https://www.getswoopr.com/investing-basics/etf-vs-mutual-fund/). For what an expense ratio difference costs over a holding period, use the [ETF Cost Comparison Tool](https://www.getswoopr.com/etf-investing/etf-cost-comparison-tool/).








## FAQ




### Where does this ETF screener get its data?



From you. Swoopr has no licensed bulk fund-data feed, so there is no live universe of funds behind this page. You paste in the figures for the funds you are already researching, taken from each fund's own prospectus, annual report and website disclosures. The example dataset is fictional placeholder funds, not real ones. A screener that quietly invented expense ratios would be worse than no screener.




### Which ETF metrics actually matter when comparing funds?



Cost is more than the expense ratio. The published median bid-ask spread is a real cost you pay on every trade, and for a thinly traded fund it can dwarf a few basis points of expense ratio difference. Tracking difference tells you what the fund actually delivered against its index; tracking error tells you how consistently. Fund size and daily dollar volume speak to whether the fund is likely to survive and whether your order will move it. Top-ten weight tells you how concentrated the exposure really is.




### What happens when a fund is missing one of the metrics?



It is reported as insufficient data, with the missing fields named. A blank cell is never read as zero. That distinction matters: a missing expense ratio treated as zero would make an unresearched fund look like the cheapest one on the list, which is exactly the kind of silent error that makes a screener untrustworthy.




### Does passing a screen mean a fund is a good investment?



No. A screen narrows a list against thresholds you chose. It says nothing about whether the exposure suits your portfolio, whether the index is one worth tracking, or what the fund will do next. The presets here are documented starting points with round numbers, not recommendations, and several of them exist to surface risk rather than quality.




### What is tracking difference, and how is it different from tracking error?



Tracking difference is the gap in total return between a fund and its index over a period, so it is a level: how far behind or ahead the fund ended up. Tracking error is the volatility of that gap, so it describes how consistently the fund followed the index rather than by how much it lagged. A fund can have a small tracking difference with a large tracking error, and the two answer different questions about how faithfully the index was reproduced.




### Why use the median bid-ask spread rather than the current quote?



Because a single quote captures one moment, and spreads vary through the session and across days. The median over a stated period describes what a typical trade faces, which is the figure relevant to someone deciding whether a fund is practical to buy and sell. It is also the figure funds commonly publish, which makes it comparable across products in a way that ad hoc quote snapshots are not.




### What does top-ten weight tell you that holdings count does not?



How much of the fund actually depends on its largest positions. A fund holding several hundred securities can still have a large share of its value concentrated in a handful of them, particularly where the index weights by market capitalization. Holdings count measures breadth and top-ten weight measures concentration, and only the second one describes how much of the fund's outcome rests on a few names.




### Where is portfolio turnover disclosed?



In the fund's annual report and in the financial highlights section of its prospectus, stated as a percentage for the fiscal year. It matters as a cost signal rather than as a quality one: higher turnover implies more trading inside the fund, which carries costs that do not appear in the expense ratio and, in a taxable account, can produce distributions. A figure well above what the fund's stated strategy would suggest is worth understanding before it is dismissed.




### Is the expense ratio the whole cost of owning a fund?



No. It covers the fund's own operating expenses, and several other costs sit outside it: the spread paid on each purchase and sale, any premium or discount to net asset value at the moment of trading, the trading costs the fund itself incurs inside the portfolio, and in a taxable account the tax consequences of its distributions. Two funds with identical expense ratios can therefore differ meaningfully in what they actually cost to hold.












## References



- [SEC: Exchange-Traded Funds, Release 33-10695 (Rule 6c-11)](https://www.sec.gov/files/rules/final/2019/33-10695.pdf)
- [SEC Office of Investor Education and Advocacy: Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF)](https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-basics/glossary/exchange-traded-fund-etf)
- [FINRA: Investment Products](https://www.finra.org/investors/investing/investment-products)
- [SEC Office of Investor Education and Advocacy: Index Fund](https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-basics/glossary/index-fund)








**Educational disclosure:** This material is provided for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice, a recommendation, an offer, or a solicitation to buy or sell any security. Screening results reflect user-supplied data and user-chosen thresholds; passing a screen says nothing about future returns. Investing in funds involves risk, including the possible loss of principal.






## Related Reading

- [Watchlist Stock Screener](https://www.getswoopr.com/research/screener/) the section this guide belongs to
- [Watchlist REIT Screener](https://www.getswoopr.com/research/screener/reits/) a companion guide in this cluster
- [Active vs. Index Funds: How to Decide](https://www.getswoopr.com/funds/active-vs-index-funds/) shares this topic