Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open.

Ways to get individual securities from ETF's
Assuming that the ETF is tracking an index, is there a reason for not looking at using details on the index?  Typically the exact constituents of an index are proprietary, and companies will not publish them publicly without a license.  S&P is the heavyweight in this area, and the exact details of the constituents at any one time are not listed anywhere.  They do list the methodology, and announcements as to index changes, but not a full list of actual underlying constituents. Is there a easy way to automatically (ie. through an API or something, not through just reading a prospectus) get information about an ETF's underlying securities? I have looked for this information before, and based on my own searches, in a word: no.  Index providers, and providers of APIs which provide index information, make money off of such services.  The easiest way may be to navigate to each provider and download the CSV with the full list of holdings, if one exists.  You can then drop this into your pipeline and write a program to pull the data from the CSV file.  You could drop the entire CSV into Excel and use VBA to automagically pull the data into a usable format. For example, on the page for XIU.TO on the Blackrock site, after clicking the "All Holdings" tab there is a link to "Download holdings", which will provide you with a CSV.  I am not sure if all providers look at this. Alternatively, you could write the ETF company themselves.