Fund Health Check

Looking for more Snowballing funds to add? The payout statistics board ranks every fund we track by raises and cuts — the raise leaders there are where the next ▲ Snowballing badges come from. Or type any ticker above to test it on the spot.

Each fund is measured only against itself — no fund is compared to another, and nothing here is a prediction. Snowballing is the top mark — our word for a fund that’s genuinely growing: it paid meaningfully more per share across its last year's worth of checks than the year's worth before — the raise pattern behind names like Coca-Cola, and it takes at least two full years of record to earn. A Snowballing fund shows its annual-payout staircase, and one whose yearly payout has risen five or more calendar years running also earns a gold ★ raise streak badge — dividend-aristocrat territory, counted conservatively from our own records. Because not all snowballs are equal, each one also gets a grade from B to A+ — the size of the yearly increase (capped, so one freak year can't outrank decades) plus the length of the raise streak. Your snowballs are sorted by snowball size: the dollar result on each card, biggest first — just mind the window each card states, since a young fund's number covers fewer years. Each card also runs the crisis check: what the payout actually did in the 2020 crash, the 2022 bear, and the 2024 bull. Each Snowballing card also shows the snowball itself in dollars: what $1,000 a month, with every payout rolled back in, would have become over the fund's last 3, 5, or 10 years — computed from real monthly prices with payouts reinvested. It's a record, not a promise, and it's before taxes. The grade and the dollar total can disagree, and that's information, not a glitch: the grade scores how reliably the payout itself grows, while the dollars also include what the share price happened to do over that stretch — a cyclical stock can out-earn a Dividend King across one lucky decade and badly trail it across another. When the two point different ways, the card says why. Steady means the newest distribution is roughly in line with the fund's own recent median and payments are arriving on schedule. Watch means something is drifting: a mild decline versus the recent median, a four-payment average that's slipped, or several smaller checks in a row. Needs a look means the newest check came in 20%+ below the fund's recent median, the four-payment trend has dropped hard, or an expected payment date has come and gone with nothing declared. (A check 20%+ above the recent median shows as Raised, and a fund with almost no record yet says so instead of pretending to a verdict.)

A single small check isn't a crisis and a single big one isn't a promise — distribution sizes on option-income and leveraged funds move with markets by design. The verdicts tell you where to look first, and each fund links to its full chart so you can judge the whole record yourself. For whether you're actually ahead on a position, that's the house money calculator.