The same five measurements the quarterly makes, over one closed month. A month rarely contains a holdings filing, so the thematic study names the age of every book it used and the page prints the range.
1,134 funds across 5 desks, measured over the whole of August 2026 and frozen at that.
Across the 187 thematic ETFs that traded the whole of August 2026 and filed a book inside it, the median had 30.8 percent of its money in companies already in the S&P 500, ranging from 0.0 percent at the tenth fund to 75.7 at the ninetieth, at a median fee of 0.50 percent that barely moves across that range.
332 of the 404 leveraged and inverse ETFs that traded the whole of August 2026 returned less than their own stated multiple implied, by a median of 0.82 percentage points.
The median of the 304 option-income ETFs that traded the whole of August 2026 paid out 1.38 percent of its own price and returned 1.27 percent in total, and 100 of them paid more cash than they made.
The median of the 44 US listed spot crypto ETPs that traded the whole of August 2026 kept 100.6 percent of what its own coin did over the same days, and 16 of them finished behind the coin they hold.
Across the 195 buffer ETFs whose outcome period ran through the whole of August 2026, the reference rose in every case and the median fund delivered 73.2 percent of that rise, with the buffer engaged on none of them.
Cite these studies. ETFIQ Monthly, five desks over one closed month. https://etfiq.com/research/monthly/ Figures do not change once published. Free to use with attribution; the underlying files are at Open data.
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