Standards

Standards and ownership

What ETFIQ is, what it publishes, and the lines it does not cross.

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Who publishes this

ETFIQ is an independent publisher of data about exchange-traded funds. It is not a fund issuer, a broker-dealer or an investment adviser, and no fund issuer owns any part of it or has any say in what appears here.

No issuer pays for placement, sees anything before it appears, or has any say in the fields, the calculations or the order. Every fund is measured the same way from the same public sources, and no ranking, ordering or wording on this site is set by hand.

What ETFIQ publishes

The same fields for every fund in a category, from every issuer. Nothing is omitted or reordered for a commercial reason. Funds that close stay in the record. Dropping them would flatter every analysis of whether a category worked.

ETFIQ decides which theme a thematic fund belongs to, from its name and holdings. That is an editorial judgment, and it is labeled as one. Holdings come from SEC filings up to sixty days old, and every card shows their date. ETFIQ computes overlap and active share from those filings.

A value from the issuer or its filings is shown as published and labeled that way. A value ETFIQ computes has a dotted column header, and its method is on the learn pages.

What ETFIQ never does

1

Recommend a security, a fund, an issuer or a strategy. Sort orders on this site are calculated from published fields and nothing more.

2

Rank funds by opinion or present any list as a selection.

3

Accept payment tied to a reader’s purchase, a fund’s placement in a ranking, or the omission of a fund.

Sponsorship

ETFIQ is free to read. It takes no payment from issuers and carries no sponsored placement.

Where the data comes from

Every figure traces to one of these sources. Issuer and SEC values are shown as published. A value ETFIQ computes has a dotted column header.

This page is the promise: who publishes this, what it never does, and where the data comes from. The methodology is the mechanism. It has one document per kind of fund, with the formula for every published field, the nightly checks, and what each one cannot tell you.

Where the data comes from
WhatSourceRefreshed
Buffer fund termsProspectus supplements filed with the SEC, and each issuer’s own product pageEvery weekday evening
Prices and total returnsExchange end-of-day data (Tiingo). Total return reinvests each distribution on its ex-dateEvery weekday evening
Distributions and payout datesNasdaq dividend history and the issuers’ own distribution schedulesEvery weekday evening
Return of capitalThe issuers’ Rule 19a-1 notices, as estimates and labeled as suchWhen an issuer posts one
Fund holdingsSEC Form N-PORT, plus issuers’ daily holdings files where they publish themWeekly, or daily where a file exists
S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 booksThe index funds’ own N-PORT filings, IVV and QQQM, used as the index for overlapWeekly
Expense ratiosThe prospectus risk and return data filed as XBRL with Form 485BPOSWeekly
Portfolio look-throughThe same filings, one book per fund, for every position enteredWeekly
Every weekday eveningWeeklyWhen an issuer posts one

Benchmarks: each income fund is measured against the index or stock it writes options on. Where that is not listed, the nearest listed ETF stands in, marked as a proxy. Issuers’ NAV-based figures can differ slightly from these price-based ones. Holdings filings become public about sixty days after a quarter ends, so every holdings figure carries its filing date.

Separate code recomputes every published number each night from the raw sources. Any figure that does not reproduce is logged and fixed. If a page ever shows sample data instead of live data, it says so.

Alerts

Follow funds and hear when something changes: alerts and the weekly note.

Corrections

Errors are corrected on the page where they appeared, with the date. Write to corrections at this domain.

The promise in one line

Every fund is measured the same way from the same public sources, and no ranking, ordering or wording on this site is set by hand.

Cite this pageCitation, APA and Markdown

ETFIQ, Standards, ownership and sources, data as of Oct 20, 2026. https://etfiq.com/standards/

Open data →

Free to use with attribution for figures ETFIQ computes; issuer data stays under its owner's terms. The underlying files are at Open data.