An investor seeking a technology mutual fund might consider, for instance, the exchanged-traded Technology Select Sector SPDR Fund and iShares Dow Jones U.S. Technology Sector Index Fund as alternatives to ordinary tech-sector funds. But investors won't find those exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, listed with traditional mutual funds in popular data sources such as the Morningstar.com Web site or the Lipper Inc. listings of fund performance available in publications including The Wall Street Journal.

It's easy to get price quotes and charts of historical price movements for these new vehicles, because they trade all day long at changing prices, just like stocks. Almost all the ETFs trade on the American Stock Exchange, and their closing prices are listed daily in newspapers. But more fund-like information, such as year-to-date total return or listings of the stocks that represent the biggest percentages of fund assets, can be tough to find.

"Because we are dealing with a relatively new product, the data and analysis infrastructure is still coming into place," says Steve Bodurtha, head of customized investments at Merrill Lynch & Co., one of the ETF sponsors.The good news for potential ETF investors is that more information is on the way. Wiesenberger, a fund-data unit of Thomson Financial, has just incorporated ETFs into its database; the ETF data will be included in the firm's software, sold primarily to financial advisers, by the end of September, says Ramy Shaalan, a senior funds analyst at Wiesenberger in Rockville, Md.

The leading fund-data firms, Morningstar Inc. and Lipper, are also working on tracking ETFs. "They are here to stay, so we are going to ... give them the attention they are due," says John Rekenthaler, Morningstar's research director. His Chicago firm will have the ETFs in its database by the end of September, although it isn't yet decided how and when those data will be included on Morningstar's Web site and in software products. Lipper will include ETFs in its database within months, says Edward Rosenbaum, director of research.

Performance tracking hasn't been a critical issue with the largest ETFs: the Standard & Poor's Depositary Receipts, or SPDRs, tracking the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index, and the Nasdaq-100 Index Tracking Stock, tracking the tech-heavy Nasdaq-100 index. After all, investors can find lots of data on the performance and composition of those widely watched market benchmarks.

Gathering fund-like data is more critical given the recent proliferation of ETFs that concentrate in specific industry sectors. Just Friday, for instance, Barclays Global Investors, a unit of Barclays PLC, is rolling out an additional 10 iShares tracking sector indexes compiled by Dow Jones & Co., which publishes The Wall Street Journal. That brings the lineup of sector iShares to 14. Other sector-specific ETFs are the Select Sector SPDRs, introduced by State Street Corp. and Merrill Lynch in late 1998, and HOLDRS securities that Merrill Lynch began rolling out in September.

Investors can get some information on the historical performance and composition of the Select Sector SPDRs and the iShares on dedicated Web sites, www.spdrindex.com (www.spdrindex.com) and www.ishares.com (www.ishares.com). Currently, those sites provide total returns and lists of portfolio weightings that are 2 1/2 months old, from March 31. Data on the HOLDRS are harder to come by, although Mr. Bodurtha says Merrill Lynch will unveil a HOLDRS Web site within weeks.

The American Stock Exchange Web site (www.amex.com) has some information about the full lineup of Amex-traded ETFs. Among other Web sites, meanwhile, www.bigcharts.com (www.bigcharts.com) allows investors to create a single chart comparing the performance of individual ETFs and traditional funds, over time periods including one year and year to date.

As the fund-data firms work to incorporate ETFs into their databases, they are dealing with some basic questions that investors are also wrestling with. To wit: What exactly are these new instruments? And to which other vehicles should they properly be compared?

Most ETFs, like ordinary index mutual funds, aim to match the performance of a market benchmark by holding all or most of the component stocks. One complication: There are some key structural differences among the ETFs. For instance, while most of the newer ETFs, including the Select Sector SPDRs and the iShares, are legally structured as ordinary "open end" mutual funds, the original SPDR and a few other ETFs are technically unit investment trusts. Then, there are the HOLDRS-"depositary receipts" that represent ownership of a mostly fixed lineup of 20 stocks each.

Wiesenberger is treating ETFs, including the HOLDRS, as a separate universe of funds, distinct from both open-end funds and from closed-end funds that also trade on stock exchanges. Lawrence Larkin, a senior vice president at the Amex, believes this is the right way to go. ETFs "are fundamentally different" from both other categories, he says.

While investors buy and sell most open-end mutual funds once a day at the calculated value of the portfolio holdings, Mr. Larkin notes that ETFs change hands during the trading day at prices that can vary somewhat from that "net asset value," or NAV. For that reason, he notes, the Securities and Exchange Commission has barred sponsors from referring to the ETFs as mutual funds, even when they technically use the mutual-fund form.

-- (The Wall Street Journal)