Julia Santos is an accountant and the founding editor of Dividends Times, with a specialization in cryptocurrency taxation from Faculdade Trevisan (Brazil).
Julia Santos is not a registered investment adviser, broker-dealer or financial planner, and nothing on this site is a recommendation to buy or sell a security. What she does is narrower: collect the numbers income-fund issuers publish, check them against each other, and show you where each one came from.
How we calculate the numbers
Every figure on a Dividends Times data page links to the document it came from. We never publish a number that only comes from a third-party aggregator.
| Figure | Primary source | How we use it |
|---|---|---|
| Distribution per share, ex-date, pay date | The issuer’s distribution press release (GlobeNewswire / PR Newswire) and the fund page on the issuer’s website | Copied as published, to 4 decimals. If the release and the fund page disagree, the page shows pending verification until the issuer corrects it. |
| Return of capital (ROC) % | Section 19(a) notice (Rule 19a-1) published by the fund | The issuer’s estimate on the fund page is labeled estimate. When the 19(a) notice is out (often weeks later), we replace it and link the PDF. Final tax character comes from Form 1099-DIV, not from the 19(a). |
| NAV | Daily NAV published by the issuer | Used for NAV change since inception and for distribution rate. |
| Distribution rate | Calculated | Latest distribution × payments per year ÷ latest NAV. Same formula the issuers use. It is not a yield forecast. |
| Total return | Calculated | (Current NAV + all distributions paid since a start date) ÷ NAV at that date − 1. Distributions are not reinvested. Reverse splits are adjusted using the issuer’s split notice. |
| DT Safety Score (stocks) | Company filings via our data provider | Payout-ratio-based 0–100 score. Full formula: How we rate dividend safety. |
Quality checks. Before a figure goes live, it is compared against at least one independent source. If the difference is above 2% (or $0.0005 per share, whichever is larger), the figure is held as pending verification instead of published. In our test on 4 weeks of YieldMax data (232 distributions, September–October 2026), the issuer’s own fund pages had a decimal error on one quarterly distribution and a date typo on another. Those are the kinds of errors this check exists to catch.
Corrections. If we publish something wrong, we fix it within 24 hours of learning about it and note the correction at the bottom of the page with the date. Report an error: [email protected]. See our Editorial Policy.
Disclosures
Not investment advice. Dividends Times publishes educational information and data. We do not know your situation, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security. Income ETFs that pay high distributions can lose principal; a high distribution rate is not a return. Read the full disclaimer.
Affiliate links. Some links to tools and services (for example stock screeners or portfolio trackers) are affiliate links. If you sign up through them we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Affiliate relationships never change a number, a rating or which funds we cover. Sponsored placements are always labeled “Presented by” and their links carry rel="sponsored".
How we use AI. We use AI tools (including Anthropic’s Claude) to help parse issuer documents, draft first versions of some articles and check our data pipeline. Data pages are generated by code from the source documents, not written by a model. Short news summaries are produced by an automated pipeline from the linked sources and published under editorial rules set by Julia Santos, who is responsible for what is published under this name. Report any error and we will correct it.
Ownership. Dividends Times is independently owned and is not affiliated with any fund issuer.