About
Editorial policy
How pages are written, reviewed and corrected, why no page ever gives advice, and the wall between the advertising on this site and the content.
What this policy covers
This policy applies to everything written on the site: the Learn library, the course, the section pages, the curated catalogs, the risk notes and the FAQs. It sets out how a page is made, what it is forbidden from saying, how mistakes are fixed, and the wall between the commercial side of the site and the editorial side.
How a page is built
Pages are written specification-first, in four steps.
- Specification. A human-authored outline for each topic sets what the page must cover: the mechanism (who pays whom, out of what, under what contract), the capital and effort required, the liquidity, the costs, the United States tax treatment, the failure modes, and the questions a newcomer actually asks.
- Expansion. A large language model (Anthropic's Claude) turns that outline into prose under a system prompt that forbids advice, forbids recommendation language, and forbids stating any current rate, yield, price or market size. Enduring structural facts are allowed; today's numbers are not.
- Review. Output is read before publication against the same checklist: is the mechanism described before any number, is the risk given in the same breath as the return, is there any advice language, is there any figure that should have come from the database, does every named concept link to its reference page.
- Publication. The page goes live with its live figures injected from the database at render time, each carrying its own observation date.
The use of a language model is disclosed here rather than hidden, because a reader deciding how much weight to give a page is entitled to know how it was made. It does not lower the standard the page is held to, and it does not move responsibility for what is published away from us.
Numbers never come from the model
This is the hardest line in the policy and the one most worth stating plainly: no rate, yield, price, dollar figure, market size or historical statistic is ever written by a language model. Language models produce fluent, plausible, wrong numbers, and a fluent wrong number is more dangerous than an obvious one.
Every live figure on the site is read from the database at render time and shown with its observation date. Where a page needs an example, the example is computed on the page from inputs the reader can see and change, and it is labelled as an illustration. The arithmetic behind every derived figure is published on Methodology.
The no-advice rule
No page on this site recommends buying, selling, holding or allocating, and no page is tailored to any individual's circumstances. In practice that means specific constructions never appear in a page: "you should", "we recommend", "the best investment", "a great buy", "consider adding", and their relatives.
Ranked tables are ordered by a published rule and labelled as research screens. Screens have no opinion: they sort on measurable inputs, and a security at the top of one is not thereby a good idea. Where a screen could be mistaken for a verdict — the income score most of all — the limitation is printed with it rather than buried in a policy page.
We publish no price targets, no return forecasts, no back-tested performance, no model portfolios and no signals. Where an income stream carries a risk of losing more than the amount committed, or of being illiquid for years, the page says so in a risk callout rather than in a footnote.
Advertising is separate from content
Advertising slots are filled by third-party ad networks. We decide where a slot sits on the page; we do not select the individual advertisement, and an advertiser cannot reach the editorial process through it. Advertisements are kept out of data tables and are not styled to look like content.
No advertiser or affiliate partner sees a page before it is published, comments on a draft, or has any right of reply built into the process. No commercial relationship has ever changed a figure, a ranking, a score or a risk paragraph, and the day one does the arrangement will be ended rather than the sentence changed.
We do not accept sponsored articles, paid guest posts, paid links inside body text, paid inclusion in a ranked table, or payment to remove or soften criticism.
Affiliate links
Some outbound links to brokers, banks and platforms are affiliate links, and we may be paid a commission if you open an account through one, at no extra cost to you. Every affiliate link is marked "Sponsored" and routed through a labelled redirect.
Partner slots are chosen editorially and are placed on pages where the reader is likely to need an account of that type, not on every page indiscriminately. A partner cannot buy a ranking, a score, a mention or a place in any table of securities. Where no affiliate programme exists — most of the site today — the link is a plain outbound link, earns nothing, and carries no badge.
Corrections
Report a suspected error through Contact, with the page address and the figure or sentence in question. Reports about a wrong number are handled ahead of everything else in the inbox.
- A reported figure is checked against the source before anything changes. If the source is wrong, we correct the page and note the discrepancy rather than silently adopting a different number.
- A factual error in written content is corrected in place, and where the error was material the page carries a note saying what was changed.
- A derived figure that was wrong because of a formula rather than a data point is fixed in the calculation, which corrects it everywhere it appears, and the change is reflected on Methodology.
- Typographical and link fixes are made without a note.
We do not remove a correction to make an advertiser or a company more comfortable, and being asked to do so is itself grounds for ending the relationship.
Updates and dating
Live figures carry the date they were observed. Written pages are revised when the mechanics, the rules or the tax treatment they describe change, and policy documents carry a last-reviewed date at the top.
An old observation date on a figure is a real signal about the data, and it is left visible on purpose. Refresh cadence is published on Methodology.
Sources and linking
Pages cite the primary source where a rule is stated, and name the data provider where a number is shown; the full list is on Data Sources. Every concept a page names links to its reference page in the Learn library, so a reader can leave a page they are lost on rather than push through it.
Outbound links to institutions are editorial. We do not sell links, and a link out is not an endorsement of the destination or of anything on it.
Complaints
If a page reads as advice, reads as promotional, or misstates something about a company or product, say so through Contact. Complaints about the wording of a page are read by the same people who write them, and the standard applied is this document, not the preferences of whoever complained.