The Retail Investor Report is a working terminal for income investors — every income ETF on the market, every distribution on its real date, and a backtester that shows what a fund actually did to your money. Not what the headline yield promised.
Ten shares of $MSTY, bought at inception in February 2024 — $211.92 in. Over the next 861 days the share price fell 87%. Your brokerage calls that a disaster and stays quiet about the rest.
The rest: the fund paid $468.13 in cash along the way. Add the $27.16 of shares still standing and the position is up 133% on the money in. That gap — between the red line and the real outcome — is the single biggest reason this platform exists.
Not a recommendation. $MSTY is one fund — plenty of others bled out with no cash to catch you, and low yield never meant low risk. That's the point: run the fund before you buy it. Historical data, not advice — full disclaimer.
Run your ticker — free, no card →
Everything below comes with a free account. Not free-trial free — free. If the tools are good, you'll stick around; the data does the selling.
Every income ETF in one sortable table.
You're one person — no human holds 394 income funds in their head. Filter by strategy, payout frequency, underlying and issuer. Sort by AUM so the $2-million ghost funds stop hiding next to the $44-billion giants. And the board never goes stale — new funds get added as soon as they launch.
Open the Income Board
What did the fund actually do to your money?
Pick a fund, a date, an amount — the Performance Backtester replays real history, every distribution on its actual date. And it cuts both ways: run $PLTY from its first day and you get $744.95 in cash on $514.28 in — total value $1,049.85, up 104% in 632 days while the share price fell 40%. Some funds really do pay the rent. This shows you which.
Run a backtest
Pull the full file on any stock.
Revenue, margins, cash flow, EPS, balance sheet, valuation, growth and dividends — a timeline x-ray on one page. Works on any ticker, not just income funds, so you can check the engine before you buy the wrapper that sells its options.
Pull a dossier
See your portfolio as a paycheck machine.
Most people can name their tickers. Very few can see what those holdings are actually doing together as a system. Upload a CSV — or connect your brokerage — and watch your factory light up floor by floor: what's paying, what's next, and how far you are from your income goal.
Build your factory
Where the income money is flowing — live universe AUM, weekly net flows, and price-vs-assets divergences that show who's quietly accumulating.
Watch the flows →Annotated macro and sector charts with plain-spoken trading notes, updated as the market moves. The free seat at the desk.
Pull up a chart →The income architects, side by side — who runs how many funds, how much money they manage, and which shops keep shipping ghost towns.
Browse the issuers →One account. No card. Every tool above.
Same underlying, different engine — $NFLY sells covered calls on Netflix, $NFLW runs leverage on it. Head-to-Head stacks up to ten funds on one chart with cash generated, NAV drift and total value in one table. Same “income fund” label. Completely different machine.
| Ticker | NAV drift | Cash generated | Total value |
|---|---|---|---|
| $NFLY | −55.85% | $2,608.12 | $7,023.49 |
| $NFLW | −66.10% | $2,651.14 | $6,041.42 |
$10,000 in each, 07/03/2025 → 07/03/2026. Both paid roughly $2,600 in cash. Neither cash pile saved the total — and the leveraged wrapper lost a thousand dollars more. The backtest told you that in four seconds, before you bought. Low yield did not mean low risk. It just meant less cash to catch you.
Stage your own duel →I'm Lenny. A retail investor who got tired of doing income-fund homework across six tabs and a spreadsheet, so I built the terminal I wanted. Every tool on this platform exists because I hit a wall doing my own research.
“The proof it's working is that it keeps handing me — the guy who built it — funds I didn't know were on the menu.”— Lenny, in the Sunday Report
The curated income-ETF dataset behind the platform — live yields, AUM, distributions, payout cadence and classification for every fund we track. Humans browse free; programmatic access is paid.
AI agent? Point it at the MCP endpoint — rir-api…/mcp — and it can discover the dataset before signing up.
Fund launches, closures, the quiet AUM moves nobody press-releases — with the receipts to check my work. No spam, no “partner offers,” unsubscribe anytime.
The free Sunday edition — one income-market story a week.
Yes. A free account gets the entire toolset — the Income Board, the High Yield Terminal and Head-to-Head, The Dossier, your own Income Factory, AUM Watch, all of it. Not a demo, not a trial.
No catch. The tools are free because the data should do the selling. The Data API is paid for builders who want programmatic access — the site is not funded by selling your attention or your email.
Real price history plus every actual distribution on its real date, with splits and reverse splits handled the way your brokerage would have handled them. You see price erosion and cash collected side by side — the full outcome, not the headline yield.
You can upload a CSV into the Income Factory for free and get the full picture. Brokerage sync via SnapTrade is on the roadmap as the live layer matures.
No. Everything on the platform is education and disclosure. My Trade Log is a journal — real trades, wins next to losses — not a signal service. Do your own research; the tools exist so you actually can. Full details on the legal page.
Market data vendors, SEC EDGAR filings, and issuer disclosures — cross-checked nightly. AUM is validated against shares outstanding × price, because vendor AUM goes stale and we'd rather catch it than repeat it.
Yes. The Data API serves the curated income-ETF dataset: free key for basic access, Pro at $39/month for all fields and 10,000 calls a day, Enterprise for bulk licensing. There's an MCP endpoint too, so AI agents can discover and query the dataset directly.
That's the whole point — don't take anyone's word for it, not even mine. The entire toolset is one free account away.
Create a free account →