Methodology

ETFIQ publishes one number and the arithmetic that produced it. These four documents are the working specification for each desk: what is in scope, every source with its cadence, the formula behind each published field, the checks run every night, and an explicit account of what each desk cannot tell you.

The rules that apply everywhere

Every figure is arithmetic on a named public source

There are no estimates, no models and no proprietary scores anywhere on this site. If a figure cannot be derived from a document a reader can open, it is not published.

A figure ETFIQ computed is marked ETFIQ

Issuer figures and exchange figures are labelled as theirs. This matters most where the two sit in the same table, which on the buffer desk they always do.

Every figure carries its as-of date, in the text

Not in a footnote. A fund figure without its date is not a fact, because these figures change daily.

Nothing here is a recommendation

ETFIQ suggests no allocation and ranks nothing by merit. A ranking page is one published field sorted, with the field named in the title.

Withhold rather than approximate

Where the underlying data cannot support a figure, the figure is omitted and the page says why. A worked example: comparison pages carried no overlap figure at all while holdings books were capped at 300 rows, because an overlap computed from a truncated book understates it.

The pipeline is checked against itself, and that is not enough

A nightly census recomputes every published number from the raw sources with independent code. It can still share a blind spot with the pipeline, and once did, so each desk also tests invariants that must hold regardless of implementation.

The four desks

Independence

ETFIQ is not a fund issuer, broker-dealer or investment adviser. It takes no payment from issuers, carries no sponsored placement, and has no commercial relationship with any fund on the site. Outbound links to issuer pages exist because a figure should be checkable at its source; a link is not an endorsement.

How to check any of this

Every published figure is available as JSON at a stable address on the open data page, free to use with attribution and the as-of date. Every number is recomputed nightly from the raw sources by independent code and the result is published on the statistics page. Where ETFIQ has published a figure that turned out to be wrong, it is recorded on the corrections page rather than quietly changed.

ETFIQ is an independent publisher of exchange-traded fund data. It is not a fund issuer, broker-dealer or investment adviser, takes no payment from issuers, and makes no recommendations. A figure marked ETFIQ is one ETFIQ computed; every other figure is the issuer’s or the exchange’s, and is labelled as such on the page it appears on.