Coverage and fund universe
How funds enter the database, how they are verified, and what is deliberately excluded.
Discovery
Every nightly run pulls the exchange-listed fund universe from our market-data vendor (NYSE, NYSE American and Nasdaq listings flagged as funds, not ETFs, actively trading, with non-zero average volume — mutual-fund share classes quote with zero volume and are dropped). Each ticker is mapped to its SEC Central Index Key through the SEC’s official ticker file.
Verification
A fund is verified when its SEC filing history shows registered-fund forms (N-PORT, N-CSR, N-CEN). Filers with 10-K/10-Q and no N-PORT are business development companies and are kept in a separate BDC list. Tickers with no CIK match or no fund filings remain unverified candidates: visible, never ranked. Interval and tender-offer funds that happen to be exchange-listed keep their legal structure recorded separately from their listing status.
Identity and history
Funds and securities carry internal identifiers; tickers are attributes with a dated history, so a ticker change does not create a new fund and old ticker URLs redirect. Former names are kept from SEC records.
Inactive funds
Nothing is deleted. A fund absent from three consecutive universe syncs is marked delisted with the date; merged, liquidated and converted statuses are set from corporate-action review. Inactive funds keep their pages and history.
Known gaps
The vendor screen may omit a listed CEF that it has not flagged as a fund; a periodic reconciliation against the SEC investment-company series/class dataset is planned and the coverage counter on the homepage reflects only what has actually been ingested.