Fund factsheet

Definition

A fund factsheet is a one- or two-page summary that a fund house publishes for each share class, typically every month. It normally contains the investment objective, key facts (ISIN, currency, inception date, fund size, distribution policy, benchmark), top ten holdings, sector and country breakdowns, calendar-year and cumulative performance against the benchmark, risk statistics, and the ongoing charges figure. Unlike the KID, it is a marketing communication rather than a regulated pre-contractual document, so layouts and content vary between fund houses.

Why it matters

The factsheet is the document advisers, analysts and end investors actually read, and it is the primary source for most of the numbers that appear in fund comparison tools and client reports. Its weakness is format: thousands of PDFs, each laid out differently and published two to three weeks after month end, are hard to consume programmatically.

In the API

FundFacts API reads each factsheet, together with the KID and holdings files, and returns the content as one JSON object. dataAsOf records the reference date printed on the source document. Example values:

json
{
  "dataAsOf": "2026-07-31",
  "keyFacts": { "assetClass": "Equity", "inception": "2009-09-25", "manager": "Example AM" },
  "topHoldings": [{ "name": "Example Inc", "weight": 4.8 }],
  "headlineMetrics": { "ter": 0.20, "volatility3y": 14.2 }
}

Common pitfalls

Factsheet data lags the market; always show dataAsOf. Sections differ by asset class: bond factsheets carry duration and credit tables, equity factsheets carry sector tables. Numbers on a factsheet are for one share class, so do not attach them to a sibling class with a different ISIN. See the client reporting use case.