Standards and ownership
What ETFIQ is, what it publishes, and the lines it does not cross.
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.
ETFIQ's founder, Adam Patti, is also the chief executive of VistaShares, an ETF issuer. VistaShares issues no buffer ETFs. Its income ETFs appear on the income desk with the same fields, the same calculations and the same placement as every other fund, and nothing on this site is arranged to favour them.
What ETFIQ publishes
The same fields for every fund in a category, from every issuer, treated identically. Nothing is omitted or reordered for a commercial reason. Funds that close stay in the record, because dropping them would flatter every analysis of whether a category worked.
On the themes desk, the assignment of a fund to a theme is ETFIQ's editorial judgment from the fund's name and holdings, and is labelled as such. Holdings come from SEC filings that are up to sixty days old; every card shows their date. Overlap and active share are computed by ETFIQ from those filings.
Where a value comes from the issuer or its filings it is shown as published and labelled as such. Where ETFIQ computes a value, the column carries a dotted header and the method is stated on the learn pages.
What ETFIQ never does
- Recommend a security, a fund, an issuer or a strategy. Sort orders on this site are stated arithmetic on published fields and nothing more.
- Rank funds by opinion or present any list as a selection.
- 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. If a sponsor appears, sponsorship buys a labelled placement and never a conclusion, a ranking position, a softened number or an omission. Any sponsored placement is marked on the page where it appears.
Where the data comes from
Every figure on the site traces to one of these sources. Values published by an issuer or filed with the SEC are shown as published; where ETFIQ computes a value, the column carries a dotted header and the method sits on that desk's learn page.
| What | Source | Refreshed |
|---|---|---|
| Buffer fund terms | Prospectus supplements filed with the SEC, and each issuer’s own product page | Every weekday evening |
| Prices and total returns | Exchange end-of-day data (Tiingo). Total return reinvests each distribution on its ex-date | Every weekday evening |
| Distributions and payout dates | Nasdaq dividend history and the issuers’ own distribution schedules | Every weekday evening |
| Return of capital | The issuers’ Rule 19a-1 notices, as estimates and labelled as such | When an issuer posts one |
| Fund holdings | SEC Form N-PORT, plus issuers’ daily holdings files where they publish them | Weekly, or daily where a file exists |
| S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 books | The index funds’ own N-PORT filings, IVV and QQQM, used as the index for overlap | Weekly |
| Expense ratios | The prospectus risk and return data filed as XBRL with Form 485BPOS | Weekly |
| Portfolio look-through | The same filings, one book per fund, for every position entered | Weekly |
Benchmarks: each income fund is measured against the index or stock it writes options on. Where none is listed, the nearest listed ETF stands in and is marked as a proxy. Issuers’ own NAV-based figures can differ slightly from these price-based ones. Holdings filings are public about sixty days after a quarter ends, so every holdings figure carries its filing date.
Every published number is recomputed each night from the raw sources by separate code, and any figure that does not reproduce is listed before the site is published. If the page is ever showing sample data instead of live data, it says so on every view.
Corrections
Errors are corrected on the page where they appeared, with the date. Write to corrections at this domain.