ETF Research Center

What it is

ETF Research Center is the public site of AltaVista Research, a firm founded in 2004 that sells ETF research to issuers, broker-dealers and advisers, and puts the same data in front of individuals here. Its angle is the holdings: rather than ranking funds on past returns and fees, it rolls each constituent's sales, earnings, estimates and valuation up to the fund, so an ETF can be read the way a stock would be.

The tools that make it useful to someone who already knows which funds they are looking at are the ones that open a fund up. Fund Overlap takes any two equity ETFs and prints overlap by weight, the count of shared holdings, the share of each fund found in the other, the sector drift between them and the largest over- and underweights. Stock Locator runs the other way: enter a ticker and get every ETF holding it with weight and share count — Apple was in 729 funds on 7 October 2026, the top of the list being sector funds with nearly a fifth of their assets in it. TCO Comparison sets two funds side by side on expense ratio, average bid/ask spread and round-trip commission over a holding period you choose, which is the cost comparison most screeners never make. Each fund page also lists its ten closest comparables by overlap, so SPY's page leads with IVV, SPYM and VOO at about 98–99%.

Around those sit an ETF finder, an Equity Power Screener on fundamentals and valuation, a watchlist, and a Portfolio Builder that shows sector, country and valuation exposure of an all-ETF allocation against a benchmark. That last one is an allocation analyser rather than a tracker — there are weights, not transactions.

Pricing

Three levels on the subscriptions page. Basic is free with registration and unlocks the full result lists of the overlap and stock-locator tools, a watchlist and custom chart ranges. Individual is $29 a month and adds the fundamentals and valuation data the site is built on, complete holdings lists for select funds, enhanced screening and two saved portfolios. Professional is $99 a month for PDF tear sheets on every covered fund, 40 portfolios and PDF portfolio reports that take a client's name and the adviser's firm details.

Both paid plans start with a one-month free trial. No annual price is published. The terms state that subscription fees are non-refundable on termination.

Data & coverage

The finder and screener cover three universes: US-listed ETFs, Canadian-listed ETFs and UCITS funds, the last including London listings. The US equity category alone held 1,392 funds on SPY's ratings tab. Performance on fund pages was standardised as of 30 September 2026, and valuation was "based on closing prices" — this is end-of-day research, not a quote screen.

Complete holdings — searchable and exportable — are promised only for select funds, which the subscriptions page says include most equity ETFs from iShares, State Street, Vanguard, Schwab, First Trust, Invesco, Global X, ARK, Dimensional and VanEck. The overlap tool itself is limited to equity ETFs. Bid/ask spreads are averaged from NBBO observations over up to three months, with tick data credited to Nasdaq.

Integrations

None to speak of. There is no API on offer to individuals; AltaVista's about page directs data licensing enquiries to email instead. What leaves the site is PDF — tear sheets and portfolio reports on Professional — plus the holdings export for covered funds, whose file format the subscriptions page does not name.

Limitations

• A rating sits on every fund page. The ALTAR Score is AltaVista's forecast of long-term annual return, and for equity funds it is turned into one of five labels — Speculative, Overweight, Neutral, Underweight, Avoid — by quintile within the category. Fund pages also print a sell-side consensus price target. Both are model output, not facts about the fund.
• Overlap is pairwise and equity-only. Overlap across more than two funds goes through the Portfolio Builder, and bond ETFs are out of scope for the tool.
• No flows. Nothing here tracks creations, redemptions or money in and out of a fund.
• Complete holdings are not universal, even on a paid plan — they are listed for select issuers.
• End-of-day only, and no API.
• No refunds once billing starts, per the terms; the month's trial is the whole of your recourse.

Alternatives

justETF is the better screener for a European buyer choosing among UCITS funds by domicile, distribution policy and savings-plan availability, but it does not compute overlap. For backtesting an allocation of the funds you settle on, Portfolio Visualizer and Testfolio go further than the Portfolio Builder here. The general research platforms Koyfin and Stock Rover carry ETF pages beside stocks without the holdings-level valuation.