Methodology

Market data — daily prices, dividend and distribution history, splits, and company fundamentals — comes from Alpha Vantage, a licensed market data provider. Price quotes are delayed at least 15 minutes; this site is built for research, not trading.

Data is stored in daily snapshots that refresh automatically on a rolling schedule — every fund we cover is re-fetched roughly once per day. Each page shows a "data as of" timestamp so you always know how current the numbers are. If a live refresh fails, we serve the most recent good snapshot rather than partial or broken data.

This matters a lot for high-yield ETFs, several of which have had reverse splits. Standard "adjusted close" prices bake dividend adjustments into the price itself — if you then reinvest dividends on top of that, you count every distribution twice and total returns come out absurdly inflated. We've seen popular funds misreported by hundreds of percentage points this way.

Instead, we start from raw closing prices and apply split adjustments only, using each fund's split coefficients. Historical prices and dividend amounts are both converted into today's share units, so a 1-for-2 reverse split doesn't show up as a fake 100% gain, and pre-split distributions are comparable to current ones. Dividends are then handled explicitly by the return engine described below.

The total return charts (including the SPY/QQQ benchmark comparisons) simulate a real hypothetical investment, bar by bar, using industry-standard rules:

• The position opens at the closing price of the first trading day in the window.
• A distribution is earned only if you owned shares before its ex-dividend date.
• With reinvestment (DRIP): each distribution buys more shares at the closing price on (or the first trading day after) the ex-date, so share count compounds.
• Without reinvestment: distributions accumulate as cash on the original share count and are included in the ending value.
• Annualized return is a true compound annual growth rate (CAGR), not a simple average, and we don't report annualized figures for periods under one month.

Every figure comes from the same engine with a suite of automated unit tests, so the total return on a ticker page, the benchmark chart, and the total return calculator can't drift apart.

We show two different yields because they answer two different questions:

• Trailing (TTM) yield — the sum of all distributions with ex-dates in the past 365 days, divided by the current price. This is what the fund actually paid, but for funds whose price and payouts have declined it can wildly overstate what a buyer today should expect.
• Forward yield — the average of the most recent distributions (up to six, all within the current payout regime), annualized by the fund's payment frequency, divided by the current price. This is the honest projection basis and is what our calculators use by default.

For example, an ETF whose NAV and payouts have both fallen 50% might show a 150% trailing yield while recent payments only annualize to 70–80%. We label which yield you're looking at everywhere both appear.

The "next dividend" dates and amounts shown on ticker pages are estimates derived from each fund's own payment history, not official announcements:

• The next ex-date is projected as the last ex-date plus the median gap between recent payments, rolled forward to a weekday. Using only recent gaps means a fund that switched from monthly to weekly payments is projected on its new schedule.
• The estimated amount is the median of the last few payments, which keeps one-off special distributions from skewing the number.
• Pay dates are projected from the fund's historical ex-date-to-pay-date gap.
• If a fund hasn't paid in roughly two scheduled periods, we flag the estimate as low-confidence — the schedule may have changed or distributions may have stopped.

The fund provider's official announcement is always authoritative. When estimates and announcements differ, trust the announcement.

• Dividend growth projections compound monthly — contributions, dividends, price changes, and reinvestment are applied month by month rather than in annual jumps. This matters for volatile funds, where annual-step math can produce impossible results (like losing more than 100% of a year's gains). Default yield and growth inputs are pre-filled from the fund's actual recent history and are fully editable.
• House money / breakeven timelines assume future distributions continue at the recent median amount — a simplification, since real payouts vary every period.
• Income goal math uses trailing 12-month distributions per share, so it reflects what the fund actually paid, not a hypothetical.
• Projections ignore taxes unless a calculator explicitly includes a tax input, and none of them account for fees, slippage, or the bid-ask spread.