Plan: Fund · Credits: 1 per call; the screen facets endpoint that counts funds per tier is free
The Nine ETF Wrapper Tiers
plain_beta — an unlevered fund whose holdings are the exposure. The large majority of the US-listed universe.
leveraged_inverse — the fund’s daily return is a multiple (positive or negative) of an underlying’s daily return, delivered through swaps or futures. These funds reset daily and reverse-split routinely; see ETF Splits.
structured_outcome — defined-outcome (“buffer”) funds that shape the payoff of an underlying with option spreads: capped upside in exchange for a downside buffer, over a stated outcome period.
option_income — funds that hold an underlying (or synthetic exposure to it) and sell options against it to generate distributable premium — covered-call and put-write funds.
physical_commodity — the fund holds the metal or commodity itself in vaults (gold, silver trusts).
futures_commodity — commodity exposure held through futures contracts rather than the physical, with the roll mechanics that implies.
crypto — funds whose exposure is a digital asset, whether held spot or through futures.
currency — funds whose exposure is foreign exchange.
alternative — hedge-fund-style wrappers that fit none of the above: managed futures, market neutral, merger arbitrage and similar strategies in an ETF.
The exposure_hidden Flag
Alongside the tier, every fund carriesexposure_hidden. When it is true, the market values in the fund’s holdings are margin or option premium rather than economic exposure — the holdings of a 3x fund sum to roughly flat, and a buffer fund’s book is a stack of option legs. On such funds, exposure analysis must read notional_value, and summing market_value as “the portfolio” is wrong by construction. Leveraged/inverse, structured-outcome and option-income funds are where this flag concentrates.
Wrapper Tier Versus the Holdings Taxonomy
The two label systems answer different questions and are stored side by side, never merged. The wrapper tier says what kind of thing the fund is; the four-level taxonomy says what its holdings show. A 2x semiconductor fund isleveraged_inverse on the wrapper axis and equity.leveraged_inverse.sector_technology on the taxonomy axis. Filtering on one axis says nothing about the other, and ETF Screening accepts both at once.
ETF Wrapper Tier Sources
The wrapper tier is derived by FocusAlpha from the fund’s filed structure — the prospectus objective, the filed leveraged/inverse and index flags — and from the shape of its holdings. It is recomputed on the same monthly cadence as the taxonomy; the fund’s label-change history dates every switch.Query ETF Wrapper Tiers
A fund’s tier is returned in thelabels block of the ETF profile. To select funds by tier, pass tier to the ETF screen as a comma-separated list — see Screen ETFs by Wrapper and Structure.