Which ETFs Are the Same Bet
Duplicate and overlapping ETFs, grouped by how they actually moved rather than by what they say they track. Holding three funds from one group is holding a single position three times over — the same bet under a different ticker.
Correlation data is not loaded.
How two funds get grouped
Two conditions, both required, measured from one year of daily returns:
- A correlation of 0.995 or higher. Not 0.95, which is merely “similar”. At 0.995 the two series are the same series with noise.
- Volatility within 4%. This is the half people leave out, and leaving it out is how you end up calling a fund and its own 2× leveraged version the same thing. A leveraged product tracks its underlying almost perfectly — correlation near 1.00 — while moving twice as far. Same direction, completely different holding.
Groups are then joined transitively. If A matches B and B matches C, all three are one group, because the question people actually have is “which of the things I own are the same thing”, not “list me every pair”.
What this does not say
That two funds moved identically is a statement about exposure, not about product. Everything below can differ between funds in the same group here, and some of it matters a great deal:
- Cost. Expense ratios inside one group can differ by an order of magnitude, and over a decade that is the whole difference between them. It is also the first thing to check.
- Structure. A commodity group can mix a grantor trust with a 1940-Act fund. They hold the same metal and are taxed differently.
- Tax treatment, which follows from structure and from where the fund is domiciled.
- Liquidity. The most-traded fund in a group has the tightest spread, which is why the table is ordered that way. For a large or frequent trade that gap can exceed the expense difference.
- What happens in a dislocation. Funds that track each other in an ordinary year can separate when the underlying market stops working properly.
None of those are measurable from price history, so none of them are claimed here. What is claimed is narrow and checkable: over the past year, these moved as one.
What is covered
US-listed funds trading at least a million dollars a day with three years of history. A fund too new or too thinly traded to have a year of comparable returns cannot be grouped here, so its absence is not evidence that it has no twin.
Each fund's own page is under security pages, the correlation finder answers the opposite question — what moves like this but is not the same thing — and the rest is on the Markets overview.