ETFs shouldn't be this hard.
5,700+ETFs trade in the US alone, and a lot of them are built to earn fees for the issuer first. The tools meant to help you aren't much better: they dump thousands of rows 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. That held for a while. Then the industry worked out you could wrap anything in an ETF (thematic bets, options strategies, single-stock leverage, buffered products) and still call it passive investing.
Morningstar found that 55% of thematic funds didn't survive the 15 years to mid-2024, and most of the survivors trailed the broad global market. A covered-call fund pays you a monthly distribution out of the upside you would have earned holding the index (Israelov and Ndong, 2023). A buffer fund's floor and cap both reset once a year, so what you get depends on where in that year you bought. All of it is legal and well marketed. The math is just easy to underestimate.
The tool gap
Existing screeners organize ETFs by asset class, Morningstar category, or provider. That's how the industry files them, and it assumes you already know what you're looking for. Testing a combination means a separate backtesting tool. Understanding what a fund does means a third resource. Nobody takes you from “I have money to invest” to “I know which ETFs to buy and why” in one place.
What Beacon does differently
Beacon starts with a question most screeners never ask: what do you need your money to do?
Grow money. Get income. Beat inflation. Stay safe. Diversify. Take a bet. Six goals, and every ETF is hired to do one of them. Beacon sorts the whole universe that way, so what fits your situation comes up first.
Pick a goal and the list arrives filtered. Leveraged and speculative funds sit under “Take a bet,” so they never turn up in the growth list. You don't start with 5,700+funds and a blank filter bar. One click narrows further to funds at 0.10% a year or less, or to the ones with five years behind them. Jargon gets explained where it appears, so there's no Sharpe ratio without a tooltip.
That position comes from the Bogleheads and Jack Bogle: low costs and patience beat clever products. So Beacon explains how a structure works and leaves the judgement to you. /learn covers what a covered-call overlay takes out of your total return and why a buffer's floor resets every year, with the sources. It's your money and your goals.
From a goal to a portfolio
A screener is where most tools stop. Beacon keeps going. Save the funds that fit to a watchlist, put two of them side by side on cost, performance and risk, then open either one to see what it holds.
When you're ready to build, the portfolio builder turns a horizon and how much loss you can stomach into one of six passive allocations, running from 20% equity to 95%. It works out how many shares to buy for the amount you're investing, so all that's left is placing the order.
Getting that choice right once is most of the work. After that, it's mostly patience: keep buying on a schedule and leave a broad, global portfolio alone. The hard part is ignoring the clever products built to talk you out of a plan that already works.
How Beacon classifies
Beacon's categories are its own. A pipeline reads each fund's prospectus and the index it tracks, then files it by the job it's built to do.
Two funds sharing a Morningstar category can land in different places here, because the classification follows what the fund does with your money.
Independence
Beacon has no affiliates and no hidden advertising. No broker pays us to recommend their platform. No ETF provider pays to rank higher.
It's a founding constraint. Take money from the industry you're supposed to help people make sense of and you become a distribution channel for it. Beacon would rather grow slowly.
Who's behind this
I'm Honoré Tomaka, 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 work out which ETFs fit my goals.
The thinking behind Beacon lives in a four-part founding series on my blog, FI After 40: setting your goals, choosing your funds, building the portfolio, and putting it to work. Beacon is that method turned into a tool, built on the same idea. Investing should be pragmatic and transparent, with no conflicts of interest.