Every guide on this site follows the same process. This page describes it so a reader can judge how much weight to give what they find here.

How topics are chosen

Topics come from what people search for. Before an article is written, the pages already ranking for the target term are read in full, their length and coverage are recorded, and the gaps are listed. An article gets written when there is something the existing pages leave out, which in finance is usually the number, the mechanism or the cost that the page glosses over.

Where the figures come from

Figures are taken from the organisation that produced them, not from an article quoting them. Fee averages come from the Investment Company Institute and HFR, fund performance scorecards from S&P Dow Jones Indices and Morningstar, default data from rating agencies and law firm indices, regulatory thresholds from the SEC, FINRA, NASAA and the statute itself, and academic findings from the published paper.

Each figure carries the period it covers and the body that published it, because a number without a date is unusable in finance. Where two reputable sources disagree, as they do on private credit default rates, both numbers appear with the reason for the gap rather than one being picked to sound cleaner.

What gets verified before publication

  • Every external link is opened and checked before it ships. A dead citation is treated as a broken article.
  • Every statistic is traced back to its source document, including the footnotes that qualify it, such as whether an index return is gross of fees or partly back-tested.
  • Worked examples are recomputed. When an article shows what a fee structure does to 100,000 dollars, the arithmetic is run rather than estimated.
  • Regulatory thresholds are checked against the current rule text, since they change.

How articles are updated

Finance articles age through their numbers. When a scorecard, a fee survey or a rule is revised, the affected article is updated and the date at the top changes. Corrections to errors are made in the article itself rather than appended at the end.

What this site does not do

MoneyScience publishes general information. It does not provide personalised investment advice, does not know a reader's circumstances, and does not recommend individual securities or funds. Nothing here is a solicitation to buy or sell anything. Readers who need advice should speak to a licensed professional.

The site sells no products, runs no affiliate links on the guides, and has no commercial relationship with the managers, indices or regulators it writes about.

Who writes the articles

Articles are published under the site name rather than under an individual byline. The method above, and the sources linked in each piece, are what a reader can check. If a figure here is wrong, the evidence for the correction is one click away in the citation.