# Standards, ownership and sources

> Who publishes ETFIQ, what it publishes, what it never does, where every figure comes from, and how a correction is handled.

Data as of Oct 20, 2026. Rebuilt every trading night.

## 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.

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

- Recommend a security, a fund, an issuer or a strategy. Sort orders on this site are calculated from 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. 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.

| 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 labeled 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 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.

### Where to next

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Source: ETFIQ, independent ETF data. Recomputed nightly from public filings and prices.
Cite: ETFIQ, Standards, ownership and sources, data as of Oct 20, 2026. https://etfiq.com/standards/
Licence: https://etfiq.com/license/ Figures ETFIQ computes are free to use with attribution: ETFIQ (etfiq.com). Issuer data stays under its owner's terms.
HTML: https://etfiq.com/standards/