This is the working specification for the desk: what is in it, where every figure comes from, the arithmetic that produces it, what is checked every night, and what it cannot tell you. It is written to be checkable by someone who does not trust it.

Scope

The portfolio desk looks a whole portfolio of ETFs through to what it really holds, protects and pays. It draws on 629 look-through books built from the other three desks’ filings, plus the core index, bond, commodity and crypto funds people already own.

Positions are entered as weights, share counts or dollar amounts. They travel in the link and are never stored: there is no account, and ETFIQ does not receive the portfolio.

Definitions and arithmetic

Look-through

For each position of weight p_j holding security i at weight w_ij, the portfolio’s exposure to security i is Σ_j p_j · w_ij. Positions whose funds have no filed book are reported as uncovered rather than silently dropped, so the covered share is always visible.

Overlap between positions

The same Σ min(w_i, v_i) as the themes desk, applied to two holdings books. Every book now published contains every row the fund filed; it was previously capped at the largest 300 rows, which understated overlap for broad funds, and that cap has been removed.

Blended protection

Every buffer position weighted by its share of the portfolio, giving what the portfolio as a whole can still gain, how far it can fall before its buffers engage, and the protection left across all of them, with each band on one scale.

Cash by month

Twelve months of payouts for every income position: declared where a distribution has been declared, scheduled where a calendar carries it, and projected at the fund’s own cadence beyond that. Each row says which of the three it is.

Synthetic and proxy books

A fund holding mostly T-bills and options is marked synthetic, and its economic exposure stands in for its book. A fund that has not filed yet is marked proxy, and the index or stock in its name stands in. Both are labelled on the page; neither is presented as a filed holding.

What this desk cannot tell you

• It is a look-through of filings, so it inherits their lag. A book is as of its filing period.
• Blended protection is arithmetic on published terms, not a projection of what a portfolio will do.
• Projected distributions beyond the declared and scheduled ones are the fund’s own cadence carried forward, and a fund can change or stop its distribution at any time.

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.