I'm going to quickly show you how to research an etf using the robinhood app because there's
a lot of information that they now offer that can give you a really good quick glance as to whether
or not you should be investing in that particular etf so let's hop on my phone really quick and i'll
show you exactly how to do this research okay so the first thing we need to do is just look up a
specific etf so just click the search icon on the bottom here and we are going to look for voo which
happens to be vanguard's s p 500 index because this has some really good numbers that we can look
at now the first thing robin hood's going to do is they're going to default you to the one day mark
now you can see that dot blinking right now that's because the market is actually open
and we are having a down day we're actually down 1.91 which is terrible and we have had a few
of those days the last week or so so things are looking a little bit rocky right now but that's
where they're going to default you they're going to default you on the one day now you can also
look at the one week the one month and you can go all the way to five years now the reason that this
information is good to look at is because you can see easily how the etf has been performing
over a certain amount of time now i wish that they had longer than five years but they don't
if you do want to look up that information you can easily find that somewhere like yahoo finance
but robinhood does give you five years now the other cool thing is that you can actually click
on a candlestick chart so right next to the five year we're just going to click the candlestick
and the cool thing about this is that with a five year candlestick chart you can actually run this
graph and you can see what all happened between different periods of time so if you actually
go back to march of 2020 when there is a huge correction you can see that there was a 19.92
percent decrease over that period of time now we all know that there was a huge correction in
the stock market and the cool thing is about the candlestick chart is that below the candlestick
chart you can actually see the trading volume so you can easily see when people are buying and
selling these shares based on what's happening in the market so sometimes the candlestick view
is a good way to get an indicator of what's really happening on a day to day or a week by week basis
because the longer the candlestick is whether it's green or red that indicates that there was a big
swing within that period whether it was up or down so if the goal for most investors is to buy low
sell high then obviously if you're looking at one of these basic graphs you can tell whether you're
buying high or low just based on what's actually happening when you're buying that specific etf
now if you are new to the robinhood app you can get a free random share just for signing up with
them and it can be valued all the way up to 225 bucks most of the time you're probably
not going to get that high of a value but it can happen so if you have any interest i do
have an affiliate link in the description below so check that out if you are new to the robinhood app
now let's just scroll down here and i'll show you the other information that's quite useful
now what you're going to find under an etf is called what's in this fund and this is pretty
handy as an overview because it actually tells you what's consuming the etf so in this case we're
talking about the s p 500 which is basically the top 500 us companies but they're all in different
sectors so you can see right here that technology is taking up almost 27 percent of the portfolio
health care is at 13.39 and so forth so you can see really quickly at a glance what all
is consuming that etf and then the other thing you can do is you can click on top 10 holdings
right here on the right and this will actually show you the top 10 holdings are taking up almost
30 percent of the total assets inside that etf and you can see right here that apple is almost taking
up seven percent you've got amazon at almost four percent so you can see right here it's
not like they're taking the 500 top u.s companies and distributing them evenly throughout the etf
it's actually weighted quite a bit different and you can see that right here with this basic data
now robinhood used to not offer this and that's what's pretty cool now is that you can see this
basic info now if you do want to see what's all inside the fund you are going to have to do
research outside of robinhood but this is a quick indicator to give you an idea of what's inside the
etf that you're going to be investing in now if you scroll down here we're going to look at stats
now there are a few things that i'm interested here when i'm looking at an etf one of them is
going to be the aum on the right here this stands for assets under management and this is really
important to me because i want to see how much money is actually in this fund now right here
we're talking 260 billion dollars that's obviously a ginormous fund so if anything goes south
you're probably not going to lose here but if i were looking at some random etf that only had a
million dollars in assets under management then i would be really leery of investing in the etf
because i don't feel like they would have enough money to back up anything that could go wrong with
the market now if you look below the aum you're going to see the p e ratio which honestly when it
comes to doing research on individual companies this is important because it tells you how
overvalued the stock is at a glance but this is giving you an average p e ratio of the entire s p
500 index being 25.73 which honestly isn't as high as i thought it would be but it is still pretty
high so that can tell us as a quick indicator that maybe it's still a little bit overvalued
now if you go below the p e ratio you're going to see the 30 day yield this is the dividend yield
and this is averaging a 1.21 percent right now so every share that you own you're going to get
paid back 1.21 as a dividend as of right now now this number is going to fluctuate every single day
because as the price of the etf moves every single day so is the dividend yield but as an average you
can see that it's 1.21 right now so you are going to get paid something to own this etf now the most
important thing that i'm going to be looking at when it comes to an etf is obviously their returns
but i also want to look at the expense ratio which is right here on the left side of the stats
now the expense ratio is really important to understand because this tells you how much it's
going to cost you to own that etf and .03 percent is extremely cheap and that is why i love vanguard
products as well as charles schwab products because they always have very low expense ratios
now what this is going to cost you is basically if you invest ten thousand dollars into this etf
you're going to pay a whopping three dollars a year as an expense so if you had a 10 gain in
the market then really you're going to be making a 9.97 return instead of a 10 percent return because
of that expense ratio now this is something to really consider because if you're investing a
lot of money into a specific etf you really want to watch that expense ratio because it's taking
away money that can potentially be compounding for you so for instance if you did find an etf with a
really high expense ratio like one percent or 1.5 percent that is very expensive because over time
if you have a lot of money invested you are losing out on that compounding power over time so if
you're looking at another s p 500 index let's just look up spy here so we're going to look up spy
this is the spyder s p 500 etf now if we just scroll down to the exact same thing you can
see that their expense ratio is a .09 so if you compare their returns versus vanguard's returns
then you can actually compare if that expense ratio is worth paying with them or not based on
the returns that they're getting because obviously if you're paying half a point for an expense ratio
but their returns were exceptionally better than the one with the cheap expense ratio
then it's still better to go with the expensive one but it usually doesn't work like that usually
if you're looking at an s p 500 index that's kind of the marker that everybody can at least hit
is what the s p 500 is doing on a yearly basis now back over to vanguard stats if you scroll
below the stats you're eventually going to get to the average annual return which is also handy
because you can see some real numbers here and this is also a really good way to look at these
numbers and compare different etfs based on how they've been performing over the last one to 10
years so these numbers are also helpful to look at now this is pretty much all the research you can
do on an etf using the robinhood app but at least they have a ton more information than they used to
so it's a pretty good one-stop place you can go to do some basic research on any
etfs you potentially want to invest in so thanks for watching this video hopefully
you guys learned something new about doing some basic research on etfs using the robinhood app