There’s not an investment product easier to research on your own than exchange-traded funds.
For every ETF, there’s an online fund profile with almost all the information you need to assess whether it might work in your portfolio. But not all ETF companies do an equally good job with their online fund profiles. Either they make certain key metrics hard to find, or they’re slow to update their websites with the latest data.
One of the big draws of ETF investing is the low cost, at least for traditional index-tracking funds. An investor-focused ETF company understands this and displays the management expense ratio for funds prominently in its fund profiles. Showing just management fees, as some companies do, isn’t enough. Management fees account for most of the MER, but not everything. MERs are the definitive cost metric.