The ETF universe
Last updated 10 September 2026.
The ETF screener covers a fixed list of funds rather than everything that trades. This page says what is on that list, what is not, and how each figure in the table is worked out.
Everything here is informational. It is not financial advice, not a prediction of future returns, and not a recommendation to buy or sell.
What is in it
London-listed UCITS funds, ranked by assets under management, plus a pinned list of US-listed funds that UK investors reference constantly.
Funds are added from a curated list that lives in the repository, not from an automatic feed. That is deliberate: it keeps the universe a set someone chose and can defend, and it means a fund cannot appear or vanish because a data provider changed its mind overnight.
The list is capped. The cap exists so the daily refresh can reach every fund in a single cycle. A larger universe that goes stale is worth less than a smaller one that is current.
What is not in it
- Funds listed only outside London and the US. UK depth first.
- Individual shares, investment trusts and REITs. Those are scored separately, and the income vehicles methodology covers them.
- Bond-fund specifics. Bond funds are in the universe, but duration, credit quality and yield to maturity are not, so the screener cannot filter on the attributes that matter most for them.
- Any fund the data provider cannot profile. A fund with no profile has no cost, no size and no quality figure, so it would be a row of dashes.
If a fund you hold is missing, that is worth telling us about. It is usually the third case.
Distributing and accumulating
This is the most important attribute a fund has for anyone investing for income, so it is a filter rather than a footnote.
A distributing fund pays its income out to holders. An accumulating fund reinvests it inside the fund, so nothing reaches the holder as cash.
An accumulating fund never shows a yield anywhere on this site. Its total return is a real thing and may be excellent. Calling any part of it yield would describe money the holder does not receive, and that is a line the product does not cross.
How the classification is made, in order:
- The fund's own name. Most UCITS funds carry
(Dist)or(Acc), and the name settles it when present. - Its distribution record. A fund with recorded distributions is distributing.
- Neither. The fund is recorded as Unknown rather than guessed at, and its yield is shown if it has one.
The second rule has a known weakness, and it has bitten: a fund whose distribution record is simply missing looks identical to one that pays nothing. Two funds were misclassified that way and had real income hidden from them. Both are corrected, and the daily refresh now raises an alert whenever a fund marked accumulating turns out to pay, so the next one surfaces in a day rather than sitting on a page.
The figures in the table
TER is the ongoing charge, shown as a percentage. It is the fund's own published figure.
AUM is in US dollars for every fund, including London listings. The data provider reports it that way regardless of the currency a fund's shares are quoted in, and the column is labelled to say so. A pound sign on that number would be wrong by roughly the exchange rate.
Yield is a trailing twelve-month figure: distributions over the last year against the current price. It is backward-looking and it is not a forecast. Accumulating funds show a dash.
The 5Y line is the fund's own price history, downsampled. It carries no benchmark and is not a total-return figure, so it excludes reinvested income.
A dash anywhere means the figure is not known, never that it is zero.
What the quality score does and does not measure
Every fund carries a 0 to 100 quality figure built from three things: cost, process (size and how long the fund has existed) and income (distribution policy, how regularly it pays, and how steady those payments have been).
Two limits are worth stating plainly.
It is descriptive, not predictive. It reads what a fund is like today. There is no backtest behind it and it does not forecast returns. The resilience scores elsewhere on this site are a different and more rigorous thing.
Accumulating funds score zero on the distribution-policy part of it, which is a large share of the income component. That is a mechanical consequence of the score being built for income investors, not a judgement that the fund is poor. A first-rate accumulating tracker will sit below a mediocre distributing one on this number. When comparing funds that do not distribute, compare them with each other and look at cost and size rather than the headline.
How current this is
Every fund is refreshed daily at 03:00 UTC. A fund the refresh has not reached yet shows dashes rather than stale figures.
Coverage grows. The screener footer states how many funds are in the universe and how many have complete data at the moment you load it.