Data & methodology

Every number on SwapFinder comes from a named public source, with an as-of date. When we can’t source something, we show “n/a” instead of estimating.

As-of dates

Fund profile data (index, issuer, expense ratio, AUM, holdings count): collected 2026-10-16.
Prices & correlations: daily data from 2025-10-17 through 2026-10-16.
Holdings files: as of each issuer’s latest file (Vanguard publishes month-end; iShares and State Street publish daily). Exact dates appear when you hover an overlap value.

Index tracked, issuer, AUM, holdings count: public fund profiles at stockanalysis.com (which credits S&P Global Market Intelligence and Finnhub), linked from each ticker page alongside the issuer’s official fund page.
Expense ratio: taken from the issuer’s own data feed where one is public — the iShares product data feed and Vanguard’s fund profile data (112 funds) — otherwise from the public fund profile.
Prices: Yahoo Finance chart API (query1.finance.yahoo.com/v8/finance/chart/<T>?range=1y&interval=1d), dividend-adjusted closes.
Holdings overlap: official issuer holdings files that can be downloaded freely without logging in — iShares (BlackRock) CSV files, State Street SPDR daily XLSX files, and Vanguard’s public portfolio data (86 US equity funds).
Market calendar: NYSE holidays & trading hours.
Tax rules: IRC §1091, IRS Publication 550, Rev. Rul. 2008-5.

Different index: funds are compared by the name of the index they track. Funds tracking the same index are listed as “avoid”. Close variants of the same benchmark (e.g. Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate vs. its float-adjusted version) are flagged as a gray area. Actively managed funds have no index and are labeled “different strategy”.
Candidates come from the same broad asset class (US equity, international equity, taxable bonds, municipal bonds, commodities, leveraged/inverse) and are ranked by correlation; the top 8 are shown. Leveraged/inverse funds are only matched with funds of the same direction and similar leverage.
1-year correlation: Pearson correlation of daily percentage changes in adjusted close prices over the trailing year (at least 150 shared trading days).
Holdings overlap: for each stock held by both funds, take the smaller of the two portfolio weights and add them up (equity holdings only, matched by ticker, weights re-normalized to 100%).
Calendar: sale date ± 30 calendar days; earliest repurchase = sale date + 31 days; NYSE holidays are used to flag non-trading days for 2026–2028.

Holdings overlap is n/a for all bond, international, commodity and leveraged funds (not computed), and for US equity funds whose issuers don’t provide a freely downloadable holdings file: SCHB, DFAU, RSP, SCHX, QQQ, QQQM, ONEQ, SCHG, QQQJ, SCHV, SPLV, SCHM, SCHA, AVUV, SCHD, NOBL, DGRW, JEPI, JEPQ, FDVV, SPHD, FTEC, SMH, SCHH (issuers: American Century Investments, Charles Schwab, Dimensional, Fidelity, Invesco, JPMorgan Chase, ProShares, VanEck, WisdomTree).
Index names for DFAU, AVUV, JEPI, JEPQ, FBND are shown as actively managed (no index tracked).
Index names and AUM come from a public data aggregator and were not individually re-checked against each prospectus; expense ratios for non-iShares/non-Vanguard funds likewise. Always confirm on the issuer page linked from each ticker.
Where the aggregator and the issuer feed disagreed on expense ratio (e.g. EFV, FXI), we show the issuer’s figure.
SPLG was renamed SPYM; searching SPLG goes to SPYM.

Prices and correlations are refreshed weekly. If a download fails, the previous data is kept and the date above will not change.

Spotted an error? We’d rather show n/a than a wrong number. — The SwapFinder team