“Only previous days’ closing NAVs are available on the ETF providers’ websites. Discount brokerages will only show the market price. So during the day there is no way that I know of to compare the two simultaneously.”

I called iShares and the fellow I talked to explained that the NAV is only established at the end of the trading day. So indeed it does not seem possible to compare the NAV with the trading value in an on-going manner while the ETF is trading.

However TD Waterhouse WebBroker makes some info available to the general public which may be useful to investors. When looking for information on a specific ETF you can find: the latest NAV available, also the trading premium or discount based on the previous day closing price.

See an example with XIC inside the Market and Research section by simply entering XIC in the upper right window under “Symbol Lookup” at:
https://www.tdwaterhouse.ca/markets/index.jsp?referer=https://www.tdcanadatrust.com/markets/index.jsp

Here’s some info that was available on the date I looked it up:

XIC:

Holding Details
Total Net Assets $1.1B
Shares Out. 55.4M
Net Asset Value (NAV) $18.49
Prem/Discount to NAV -0.03%
P/E Ratio 17.0
Dividend Yield 2.46%
Div/Share $0.46
Expected Div Date 06/25/2010
Next Dividend Payment Date 09/25/2010
Beta 0.97

It shows the previous closing price in the horizontal portion of the screen.

Thanks for the information! That helps a lot. Thank you for taking the time to respond to my questions.

Jason

However, the important point here is that if you’re thinking about buying a specific ETF, you should watch the website for several days and see how closely its market price is to its NAV over several days or weeks. (Both Claymore and iShares have NAV histories on their sites.) In big well-run ETFs, the difference will rarely be more than a cent or two. But thinly-traded ETFs sometimes trade at substantial premiums for days on end. If that’s the case, you might consider using a limit order or just finding another ETF that is more liquid.

Hope that helps.

For example I see from your post here that purchasing close to the “NAV” is a good idea. Could you help me break it down on how one would proceed to buy an ETF based on this? Is the NAV value only on the ETF providers website or can it be found in the research area of a discount brokerage? Does one look up this value for the previous day, then put in a buy limit based on this value? For simplicity, do you just put the buy limit as the NAV or do you try to get the price lower by putting the buy limit a bit lower?

I found this PDF from ishares; but it may have made things even more complex in my mind

http://us.ishares.com/content/stream.jsp?url=/content/en_us/repository/resource/valuation_terms.pdf&mimeType=application/pdf

Thanks a lot,
Jason

If I may add, you can perform stop losses ‘with limit’. So in other words, “if the share price drops to $10, create a market sell order at $10″

A regular stop loss becomes “if the share price drops to $10, sell at market”

At least two discount brokerages I know of have this option…