Data sources

Three providers, and nothing else

Everything with a number on it comes from one of three places, and each one is named wherever its figure appears.

• FRED, at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis — every interest rate, index yield, spread and rate of change on the site. FRED is a distributor: the deposit series are produced by the FDIC, the Treasury series by the Federal Reserve Board, the corporate and high-yield series by ICE Data Indices, the mortgage series by Freddie Mac and the commercial property series by the International Monetary Fund. The table below names the producer of each one.
• Financial Modeling Prep — the securities universe, delayed prices, dividend and distribution histories, company profiles and trailing payout ratios. Nothing else. In particular, no rate on this site comes from FMP.
• Us — the written pages, the curated catalogs, the taxonomy, the calculators and every derived figure (yield, growth streak, CAGR, income score), computed from the two sources above by the arithmetic published on Methodology.

Scheduled jobs fetch from those providers, store the result with its observation date, and stop. A page render reads the database and never calls a provider, which is why every figure is stamped with the date it was observed rather than described as live.

Every rate series the site loads

Forty series are loaded, and these are all of them. Eleven are FDIC deposit series, seventeen come from the Federal Reserve Board's H.15 release (three Treasury bills on a discount basis, eleven constant-maturity yields, the inflation-indexed ten-year, interest on reserve balances and the monthly federal funds average), one is the New York Fed's SOFR, eight are ICE BofA index yields and spreads, two are Freddie Mac mortgage survey averages and one is an IMF commercial property series.

Each row is stored with its series identifier, its observation date, its publication cadence and its own caveat note, so any figure on any page can be looked up at the source and checked against it. Read the table as five facts per rate: which series, what it measures, who produced it, how often it is republished, and where on this site it is shown.

Four things in that table are routinely mistaken for each other, so they are labelled apart everywhere they appear: a deposit rate is interest a bank pays on cash; a bill discount rate is a Treasury convention that is not a yield; an index effective yield describes hundreds of bonds at once and cannot be bought; an option-adjusted spread is a difference between two yields, not a yield. None of them is comparable with a stock's dividend yield, which is a payment divided by a share price.

A series that stops updating is not shown as though it were current. Every rate carries its observation date, an overdue observation is flagged against the cadence in this table, and a series that has not published in over a year is dropped from the front-page strip entirely rather than sitting there looking like today's number.

Two Treasury conventions, and why the same bill reads two values

The site deliberately carries the Treasury market twice, because the two published conventions answer different questions and converting between them by hand would be exactly the kind of silent adjustment this page exists to rule out.

Discount basis — DTB4WK, DTB3, DTB6, shown on Cash Rates

A bill pays no coupon: it is sold below face value and redeems at face. The discount rate expresses that gap as a percentage of the face value, on a 360-day year. It is the convention bills are quoted in, and it is not a yield on the money actually invested.

Constant maturity, investment basis — DGS1MO through DGS30, shown on Bonds

The same market, restated as the yield an investor earns on the price actually paid, over a 365-day year, at an exact maturity interpolated across the issues trading that day. This is the basis on which a bill can be compared with a note, a bond or a certificate of deposit.

So the three-month bill legitimately shows one number on Cash Rates (DTB3) and a slightly higher one on Bonds (DGS3MO) on the same day. Neither is wrong and neither is a correction of the other: the discount convention divides by face value rather than by the smaller amount paid, and uses a shorter year, so it reads below the investment-basis equivalent. The gap widens as rates rise and as the maturity lengthens.

The rule the site follows is that the convention is always printed with the number — the bill series are labelled "(discount basis)" in their own titles — and the two are never silently averaged, blended or substituted for one another. Where a table or a ladder spans both, with short rungs priced off bills and longer rungs off notes, the rungs are close cousins rather than the same measure, and the step between them should not be read as a pure maturity spread.

Everything else on the site that quotes a Treasury number — the ten-year on Private Credit and Commercial Real Estate, the curve on the Bonds pages, the home rate strip — reads the same stored series as everywhere else. One series, one value, one observation date, on every page that shows it.

Financial Modeling Prep: the endpoints actually called

Securities data is licensed from Financial Modeling Prep. Six endpoints are used and no others; each one is listed here with what it fills in.

• company-screener — the common-stock universe. United States-listed, actively trading, funds and exchange-traded products excluded, paying a dividend, market capitalisation above $250 million. Only NYSE, Nasdaq, NYSE American and Cboe BZX listings are kept, and symbols containing a dot or a dash are dropped as second-line listings and share classes.
• stock-list — candidate preferred series. The exchange master carries roughly ninety thousand symbols, including every series ever redeemed, so a candidate is stored only if a live quote comes back above fifty cents. Preferred series are stored as their own security kind and never enter the common-stock universe.
• batch-quote — delayed prices, twenty-five symbols per call: price, change, volume, market capitalisation, the fifty-two-week range and the quote timestamp. This endpoint carries no average daily volume, so that field is left empty rather than estimated.
• profile — company identity: name, sector, industry, exchange, country, currency and the business description, used to fill in rows that a curated catalog seeded with only a ticker.
• dividends — payment history, one call per symbol: amount, split-adjusted amount, stated frequency, and the declaration, ex-dividend, record and payment dates. An already-declared future payment arrives in the same history, and that is where a "next ex-dividend date" on a security page comes from — the site loads no separate dividend calendar.
• ratios-ttm — one field, the trailing-twelve-month dividend payout ratio, for a bounded featured set rather than for every security. A value outside 0 to 300 per cent is discarded as an artefact of a small or negative denominator rather than printed as a payout ratio.

Prices are delayed. They are refreshed on a schedule, they are not trading quotes, and their only job on this site is to be the denominator of a yield. A stale price produces a wrong yield, which is why the observation date is printed beside the number.

The Treasury curve on the Bonds pages does not come from FMP. It is the FRED constant-maturity series listed in the table above. FMP does publish a Treasury endpoint on this plan and the site does not call it, precisely so that one benchmark cannot end up with two different values on two pages.

Exchange-traded debt is classified out of the equity universe. Baby bonds — $25 notes and debentures that list and trade like shares — are detected from the security name and stored as their own kind, so they cannot appear in a dividend-stock screen, drag a sector yield median upward, or be compared with common equity. Preferred shares are handled the same way. Both have their own sections.

What this site does not have, and therefore never shows

The absences are as much a part of the sourcing as the sources. None of the following is licensed, loaded or estimated here, and no page fills the gap with a guess.

• No options chains. No strikes, premiums, implied volatility, greeks or open interest. The options income pages explain the mechanics and let you compute an illustration from inputs you supply.
• No individual bond pricing. There is no CUSIP-level quote, no bid-ask and no executable price anywhere on the site. Corporate and high-yield figures are ICE BofA index effective yields describing hundreds of bonds at once; a price for one bond comes from a broker.
• No SEC 30-day standardised yields. Fund figures here are distribution rates computed from payments actually made, which is a different measure with a different denominator. Where a fund sponsor publishes a 30-day SEC yield, it will not match, and the two should not be compared.
• No private-market marks. Syndications, private credit funds, farmland, small-business stakes and similar assets have no daily price and none is invented. Those pages describe structure, fees, lock-ups and failure modes and quote no valuation.
• No real-time quotes. Nothing on the site updates while you look at it, and nothing here should be used to time a transaction.
• No credit ratings, forecasts or performance figures. No agency rating, no price target, no expected return, no back-test and no total-return series. The rating letters in the ICE index names describe the composition of an index, not an opinion on any issuer.

Attribution and citation

Several of the series above are produced by one body and redistributed by another, and both have to be named for a citation to be checkable. Where a figure from this site is quoted elsewhere, cite the underlying series in FRED's own form — producer, series title, series identifier in square brackets, retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, with the retrieval date — rather than citing this page.

• Deposit rates: Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, National Rates and Rate Caps, retrieved from FRED. A United States government publication.
• Treasury bills, the constant-maturity curve, the inflation-indexed ten-year, interest on reserve balances and the federal funds average: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (US), H.15 Selected Interest Rates, computed from United States Treasury market quotations, retrieved from FRED.
• SOFR: Federal Reserve Bank of New York, retrieved from FRED.
• Corporate and high-yield index yields and spreads: ICE Data Indices, LLC, used with permission and provided on an "as is" basis, retrieved from FRED. ICE and BofA are trademarks of their respective owners and are used here only to identify the series. Nothing on this site is a product based on those indices.
• Mortgage rates: Freddie Mac, Primary Mortgage Market Survey, retrieved from FRED.
• Commercial property prices: International Monetary Fund, Financial Soundness Indicators, retrieved from FRED.
• Securities data: market data provided by Financial Modeling Prep.

Neither the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, nor any original producer, nor Financial Modeling Prep endorses this site, is affiliated with it, or has reviewed anything published on it. Errors in what appears here are ours, and the fastest way to have one fixed is the contact form.

The editorial library

The written pages are produced in-house. Nothing is licensed from a content provider, syndicated, or reprinted from anywhere.

The Learn library is generated by a language model from an editor-approved outline: a human-authored specification for each topic sets the headings and what each one must cover, and the model expands that outline into prose under a system prompt that forbids advice and forbids stating any current rate, yield, price or market size. Enduring structural facts are permitted — how a REIT qualifies for its tax treatment, what deposit insurance covers, what a covered call gives up. Today's numbers are not, and are injected from the database at render time instead. The identifier of the model that wrote each page is stored with the page.

The course, the quiz, the curated catalogs, the calculators and the section explainers are maintained as editorial source in the repository under the same rules and the same review. The process, the review step and the correction route are set out on Editorial Policy.

Public and primary sources

Where a page states a rule rather than a number — a tax threshold, a distribution requirement, an insurance limit, a filing obligation — the underlying authority is a primary public source: the Internal Revenue Code and IRS publications, Securities and Exchange Commission rules and filings, FDIC and NCUA insurance rules, and the issuing agency for anything governmental.

Rules change, and they change without our being told. Where the exact figure matters to a decision, the primary source and a professional who knows your situation both outrank this site.

What we do not use

No scraped brokerage data, no screen-scraped competitor tables, no rate copied from another website, no user-submitted holdings, no data purchased from a broker about its customers, and no data set whose producer we cannot name on this page.

We also publish no figure that arrives without an observation date. A number with no date cannot be checked, and an uncheckable number is indistinguishable from an invented one.

Using our pages elsewhere

Short quotations with attribution and a link back are welcome, and the citation forms above are there to be used. Bulk copying of tables, systematic extraction of the underlying data and redistribution of the licensed market and index data behind the site are not — those are the providers' terms as much as ours. The full position is in the Terms of Use.