Using an ETF screener to find desired holdings
17 June 2020About a month ago I talked about why I was buying SaaS and cloud stocks during the pandemic. One of the things I wanted to be able to analyze and monitor, was the overall technical action of the cluud and SaaS stock category, similar to how one might look at the SPY or QQQ ETFs, which track the S&P500 and Nasdaq-100 indexes respectively, to get a sense of the overall market.
At first I looked up cloud stock ETFs but it was difficult to sift through the sheer number of ETFs which all seemed to contain the stocks I was interested in, along with a whole bunch of stocks I wasn’t interested in.
I soon realized that instead of looking through individual ETFs and their holdings, I could do a reverse lookup using an ETF screener to find ETFs containing the stocks I was interested in. Several of the sites I found could only filter ETFs by a single stock at a time, which wouldn’t have been very practical given that I wanted to find an ETF containing several stocks. Eventually I stumbled upon https://www.etfchannel.com/finder/ which solved my problem perfectly, allowing me to screen ETFs by up to 40 stocks.
Here’s an example query which is pretty close to what I used last month: https://www.etfchannel.com/finder/?symbol=DOCU%2CWORK%2CZM%2CCOUP%2CDDOG%2CFSLY%2CTWLO%2CSPLK%2CWDAY%2CCLDR and the corresponding search results.
The search results are sorted by the number of stocks belonging to the ETF, and then what percentage of the ETF those holdings make up. The first two ETFs, VTI and ITOT actually contain 9 out of the 10 stocks in my search query, but those stocks only make up a small percentage of the ETF, 0.50% and 0.45% respectively. The third ETF, WCLD includes 8 out of the 10 stocks, but these results make up 21.50% of the ETF, heavily weighted toward the stocks in my search, which is exactly what I am looking for.
After discovering WCLD I have been monitoring the technicals to get a sense for market sentiment and demand for cloud and SaaS stocks which has worked out wonderfully for me. Although I don’t own WCLD yet, I like this idea of being able to use an ETF screener to target a niche category of stocks, and it’s something I’ll likely use again in the future.