How can I find a list of all North American ETF's including symbols?
You can use www.etfdb.com and search on geography.
Some of the ETFs you have specified have been delisted and are no longer trading.  If you want to invest in those specific ETFs, you need to find a broker that will let you buy European equities such as those ETFs.  Since you mentioned Merrill Edge, a discount broking platform, you could also consider Interactive Brokers since they do offer trading on the London Stock Exchange.  There are plenty more though.  Beware that you are now introducing a foreign exchange risk into your investment too and that taxation of capital returns/dividends may be quite different from a standard US-listed ETF. In the US, there are no Islamic or Shariah focussed ETFs or ETNs listed.  There was an ETF (JVS) that traded from 2009-2010 but this had such little volume and interest, the fees probably didn't cover the listing expenses.  It's just not a popular theme for North American listings. Do not buy any commodity tracking ETF without reading and understanding the prospectus. Some of these things get exposure to the underlying commodity via swaps or other hocus-pocus derivatives, so you're really buying credit obligations from some bank. Others are futures based, and you need to understand your potential upside AND downside. If you think that oil prices are going to continue to rise, you should look into sector funds, or better yet individual stocks that are in the oil or associated businesses. Alternatively, look at alternative investments like natural gas producers or pipeline operators. If you have access, factset and bloomberg have this.  However, these aren't standardized due to non-existent reporting regulations, therefore each company may choose to categorize regions differently.  This makes it difficult to work with a large universe, and you'll probably end up doing a large portion manually anyways. "I think that any ETF is ""open source"" -- the company issues a prospectus and publishes the basket of stocks that make up the index. The stuff that is proprietary are trading strategies and securities or deriviatives that aren't traded on the open market. Swaps, venture funds, hedge funds and other, more ""exotic"" derivatives are the things that are closed. What do you mean by ""open source"" in this context?" "Google Docs spreadsheets have a function for filling in stock and fund prices.  You can use that data to graph (fund1 / fund2) over some time period. Syntax: =GoogleFinance(""symbol"", ""attribute"", ""start_date"", ""num_days|end_date"", ""interval"") where: This analysis won’t include dividends or distributions. Yahoo provides adjusted data, if you want to include that." "I used to use etfconnect before they went paid and started concentrating on closed end funds. These days my source of information is spread out. The primary source about the instrument (ETF) itself is etfdb, backed by information from Morningstar and Yahoo Finance. For comparison charts Google Finance can't be beat. For actual solid details about a specific ETF, would check read the prospectus from the managing firm itself. One other comment, never trust a site that ""tells you"" which securities to buy. The idea is that you need sources of solid information about financial instruments to make a decision, not a site that makes the decision for you. This is due to the fact that everyone has different strategies and goals for their money and a single site saying buy X sell Y will probably lead you to lose your money." Index funds: Some of the funds listed by US SIF are index funds. ETFs: ETFdb has a list, though it's pretty short at the moment. Bond ETFs are just another way to buy a bond mutual fund.  An ETF lets you trade mutual fund shares the way you trade stocks, in small share-size increments.  The content of this answer applies equally to both stock and bond funds. If you are intending to buy and hold these securities, your main concerns should be purchase fees and expense ratios.  Different brokerages will charge you different amounts to purchase these securities.  Some brokerages have their own mutual funds for which they charge no trading fees, but they charge trading fees for ETFs.  Brokerage A will let you buy Brokerage A's mutual funds for no trading fee but will charge a fee if you purchase Brokerage B's mutual fund in your Brokerage A account. Some brokerages have multiple classes of the same mutual fund.  For example, Vanguard for many of its mutual funds has an Investor class (minimum $3,000 initial investment), Admiral class (minimum $10,000 initial investment), and an ETF (share price as initial investment).  Investor class has the highest expense ratio (ER).  Admiral class and the ETF generally have much lower ER, usually the same number.  For example, Vanguard's Total Bond Market Index mutual fund has Investor class (symbol VBMFX) with 0.16% ER, Admiral (symbol VBTLX) with 0.06% ER, and ETF (symbol BND) with 0.06% ER (same as Admiral).  See Vanguard ETF/mutual fund comparison page.  Note that you can initially buy Investor class shares with Vanguard and Vanguard will automatically convert them to the lower-ER Admiral class shares when your investment has grown to the Admiral threshold. Choosing your broker and your funds may end up being more important than choosing the form of mutual fund versus ETF.  Some brokers charge very high purchase/redemption fees for mutual funds.  Many brokers have no ETFs that they will trade for free.  Between funds, index funds are passively managed and are just designed to track a certain index; they have lower ERs.  Actively managed funds are run by managers who try to beat the market; they have higher ERs and tend to actually fall below the performance of index funds, a double whammy. See also Vanguard's explanation of mutual funds vs. ETFs at Vanguard. See also Investopedia's explanation of mutual funds vs. ETFs in general. There is no ETF that closely tracks oil or gasoline. This is because all existing oil and gasoline ETFs hold futures contracts or other derivatives. Storing the oil and gasoline would be prohibitively costly. Futures contracts are prone to contango and backwardation, sometimes resulting in large deviations from the price of the physical commodity. Contrast oil ETFs with metal ETFs, which track nicely. EDIT: See this article about contango. The UNG chart is particularly ugly. Wikipedia has a fairly detailed explanation of ETFs.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange-traded_fund "The change is generally known as the Options Symbology Initiative (or ""OSI"") and there is a highly comprehensive guide to what occurred here. The basic gist of what occurred was a shift FROM: A coded system in which a shorter (3   to 5 letter symbol) could be used, but   the symbols required a data source to   determine what they meant. MSQ AD   used to be a MSFT Jan 20 option, but   you had to look up MSQ in a table to   know that. TO: A system in which much longer symbols   are needed, but they contain all the   information required to identify a   unique option: DELL 4.000 C 5/16/2010   isn't easy to type, but once you know   how to read it, it's easy to see that   it's an option on DELL, expiring on May 16th 2010, is a call (rather   than a put,) and has a strike price   of 4. As to why they did it, there are a number of benefits, but most important reason is this one:  they were running out of symbols.  The number of permutations of 3-5 letter symbols had been exceeded by the number of options that had been listed, resulting in the need to ""recycle"" symbols.   This meant that a current option symbol would be the same as an old one, in some cases on a different stock, which was wreaking havoc on historical data." While most all Canadian brokers allow us access to all the US stocks, the reverse is not true.  But some US brokers DO allow trading on foreign exchanges. (e.g. Interactive Brokers at which I have an account).  You have to look and be prepared to switch brokers.  Americans cannot use Canadian brokers (and vice versa). Trading of shares happens where-ever two people get together - hence the pink sheets.  These work well for Americans who want to buy-sell foreign stocks using USD without the hassle of FX conversions.  You get the same economic exposure as if the actual stock were bought.   But the exchanges are barely policed, and liquidity can dry up, and FX moves are not necessarily arbitraged away by 'the market'.  You don't have the same safety as ADRs because there is no bank holding any stash of 'actual' stocks to backstop those traded on the pink sheets. I was going to comment above, but I must have 50 reputation to comment. This is a question that vexes me, and I've given it some thought in the past. Morningstar is a good choice for simple, well-organized financial histories.   It has more info available for free than some may realize.  Enter the ticker symbol, and then click either the Financials or the Key Ratios tab, and you will get 5-10 years of some key financial stats.  (A premium subscription is $185 per year, which is not too outrageous.) The American Association of Individual Investors (AAII) provides some good histories, and a screener, for a $29 annual fee. Zacks allows you to chart a metric like EPS going back a long ways, and so you can then click the chart in order to get the specific number.  That is certainly easier than sorting through financial reports from the SEC.  (A message just popped up to say that I'm not allowed to provide more than 2 links, so my contribution to this topic will end here.  You can do a search to find the Zacks website.  I love StackExchange and usually consult it for coding advice.  It just happens to be an odd coincidence that this is my first answer.  I might even have added that aside in a comment, but again, I can't comment as of yet.) It's problem, however, that the universe of free financial information is a graveyard of good resources that no longer exist.  It seems that eventually everyone who provides this information wants to cash in on it.  littleadv, above, says that someone should be paid to organize all this information. However, think that some basic financial information, organized like normal data (and, hey, this is not rocket science, but Excel 101) should be readily available for free.  Maybe this is a project that needs to happen.  With a mission statement of not selling people out later on. The closest thing out there may be Quandl (can't link; do a search), which provides a lot of charts for free, and provides a beautiful and flexible API.  But its core US fundamental data, provided by Sharadar, costs $150 per quarter.  So, not even a basic EPS chart is available there for free. With all of the power that corporations have over our society, I think they could be tabulating this information for us, rather than providing it to us in a data-dumb format that is the equivalent of printing a SQL database as a PDF!  A company that is worth hundreds of billions on the stock market, and it can't be bothered to provide us with a basic Excel chart that summarizes its own historical earnings?  Or, with all that the government does to try to help us understand all of these investments, they cannot simply tabulate some basic financial information for us? This stuff matters a great deal to our lives, and I think that much of it could and should be available, for free, to all of us, rather than mainly to financial professionals and those creating glossy annual reports. So, I disagree that yet another entity needs to be making money off providing the BASIC transparency about something as simple as historical earnings. Thank you for indulging that tangent.  I know that SE prides itself on focused answers.  A wonderful resource that I greatly appreciate. Wikipedia is your friend: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stock_exchanges you could try [FRED](http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=HO7), or maybe try the CME and ICE's websites for some decent data.. haven't looked just suggestions - pretty sure the symbol for the Libor futures is EM, you could approximate from that so long as it's not a doctoral thesis