ETFs shouldn't be this hard.
There are over 5,300+ETFs listed in the US alone. Most of them exist to make money for the people who create them, not the people who buy them. The tools built to help you aren't much better: they dump thousands of results on you and wish you luck. Beacon is the alternative.
The problem
The ETF explosion
The ETF market was supposed to be simple: buy a broad index, pay almost nothing, get diversified exposure. That promise held for a while. Then the industry figured out you could wrap anything in an ETF wrapper (thematic bets, options strategies, single-stock leverage, buffered products) and call it “passive investing.”
The numbers tell the story: 55% of thematic ETFs created over the past 15 years have closed, and over 70% of survivors underperformed the S&P 500. Covered-call ETFs capture 84% of downside but only 65% of upside. Buffer ETFs come with protection that only works if you bought on the right day. These aren't tools for building wealth. They're products for generating fees.
The tool gap
Existing screeners organize ETFs by asset class, Morningstar category, or provider. The industry's language, not yours. They assume you already know what you're looking for. If you want to test a combination, you need a separate backtesting tool. If you want to understand what a fund actually does, you need a third resource. Nobody helps you go from “I have money to invest” to “I know exactly which ETFs to buy and why” in a single place.
What Beacon does differently
Beacon starts with a question most screeners never ask: what do you need your money to do?
Growth. Income. Inflation protection. Capital preservation. These are real investor goals, “jobs to be done.” Every ETF is hired to do one of these jobs. Beacon organizes the entire universe around them, so you see what matters to your situation first.
From there, the defaults are opinionated. Sane expense ratio limits. Minimum track records. No leveraged products sneaking into your growth bucket. You can always override, but you won't start with 5,300+funds and a blank filter bar. And when jargon appears, it gets explained inline. No Sharpe ratio without a tooltip. No “distribution yield” without context.
Independence
Beacon has no affiliates, no sponsors, and no hidden advertising. No broker pays us to recommend their platform. No ETF provider pays to rank higher.
This isn't a marketing claim. It's a founding constraint. The moment you take money from the industry you're supposed to help people make sense of, you stop being a tool and start being a channel. We'd rather build slowly and stay honest.
Who's behind this
I'm a Product Owner in tech, building Beacon as an indie side project. I'm also a passive investor who spent too many hours bouncing between screeners, spreadsheets, and forum threads trying to figure out which ETFs actually fit my goals.
I write about financial independence and pragmatic investing at FI After 40. The core belief there is the same one behind Beacon: finance should be just enough: pragmatic, transparent, and free from conflicts of interest.
Read the full philosophy at fiafter40.com