Investment research methodology

This is the full editorial method behind every company profile, ETF page, and category guide on the site — what gets classified how, what counts as a source, and what we refuse to publish at all.

What this investment research methodology is for

This investment research methodology exists so a reader can audit our work instead of trusting it. Defense-drone coverage is unusually easy to get wrong: the sector mixes consumer brands, industrial-inspection vendors, venture-backed startups, and prime contractors under one word, and most retail coverage flattens all four into a single "drone stock" list.

Our answer is a set of rules that constrain what we can say. Every classification below is reproducible — a reader with the same filings and award notices should reach the same bucket. Where the primary record is silent, we say so rather than filling the gap with an estimate.

How companies get classified

Every company in the company directory carries exactly one of three roles, assigned from disclosed revenue structure rather than from marketing language. The distinction is the single most load-bearing thing on the site, because it determines how much a drone headline should move the reader's view of the business.

Two rules keep this honest. First, the label follows the filing, not the sector narrative: a company that describes itself as a drone company but discloses most revenue elsewhere is not a pure-play here. Second, a company can be reclassified — AeroVironment, Kratos, Red Cat, Ondas, and Unusual Machines sit in different buckets and can move between them after an acquisition or a segment restructure. Private firms such as Anduril are classified the same way but flagged as not investable in public markets, which is the distinction most "drone stock" lists erase.

What counts as a primary source — and what we reject

A primary source is the document created by the party with direct knowledge of the fact. In practice that means four categories: issuer filings on SEC EDGAR, government award and program announcements such as DoD contract announcements, regulator publications from bodies such as the FAA, the FCC, and DHS Science and Technology, and the vendor's or agency's own program page — including research organizations like DARPA and DIU.

We reject financial aggregators, stock screeners, encyclopedia entries, newsletter roundups, and republished press-release wires as sources. This is stricter than it sounds: a wire release from the company itself is acceptable as evidence of what the company claimed, but never as evidence that the claim is true. When only a wire exists, the page says a claim is company-stated and unverified rather than presenting it as fact.

The failure mode this rule prevents is source laundering — an aggregator republishes an unsourced number, a second outlet cites the aggregator, and a figure with no origin acquires three citations. If we cannot trace a number to the document that created it, the number does not appear.

How program-of-record claims get verified

A program of record is a funded, named acquisition program with a service sponsor — not a demonstration, an OTA prototype, an evaluation unit, or a booth appearance. Retail coverage collapses these constantly, and the collapse is where most drone-stock disappointment comes from.

• Name the program. A claim without a program name is not verifiable and is written as unverified.
• Find the sponsor. The service or agency must have published something — an award announcement, a program page, a budget line — that names the effort.
• Separate the vehicle from the award. An IDIQ ceiling, a prototype OTA, and a production order are three different things. We describe which one the record shows rather than treating a ceiling as revenue.
• Check for a sustainment tail. Spares, training, and services determine whether the award is recurring or one-time. If the record is silent, we say the record is silent.

When a claim survives all four checks, the page states it plainly and links to the sponsor document. When it fails one, the page describes the evidence gap explicitly. Category pages such as best drone stocks and counter-UAS are built from claims that cleared this filter.

How ETF pages are built from issuer documents

Every page in the ETF section is constructed from the issuer's own prospectus, factsheet, and holdings file — never from a fund-comparison site. Issuer documents are the only place where the fund's index methodology, its stated exposure, and its current holdings are authoritative and dated.

Three checks run on every fund page. We read the index methodology before the fund name, because a "drone" label and a modern-warfare index can describe very different baskets, as the difference between the REX Drone ETF factsheet and the Defiance Drone & Modern Warfare ETF shows. We check overlap between funds before describing either as diversification. And we verify the fund still trades — the AdvisorShares Drone Technology ETF is the standing example of a ticker that keeps ranking in search long after the fund stopped trading, which is exactly the kind of stale artifact aggregator pages preserve.

What we deliberately exclude

The exclusions are as much a part of the method as the inclusions. We publish no price targets, no buy/sell/hold ratings, no valuation calls, no revenue or earnings forecasts, and no model portfolios. We do not rank securities by expected return, and we do not describe any security as undervalued or overvalued.

This is not caution for its own sake. A price target is a forecast that cannot be sourced to a primary document, which means it would break the sourcing rule the rest of the site runs on. Where a reader wants a number we cannot source, the page gives the framework instead: which filing to open, which line item to read, and how to interpret it. On this site, "best" always means best to research, never best to buy.

Review cadence, corrections, and conflicts

Pages carry a named author and a review stamp in the header byline, and the underlying claims are re-checked against their primary sources on a rolling schedule — sooner when a covered company files, restructures a segment, or wins or loses a named program, and whenever a regulator changes a rule the page relies on. Company and ETF pages are re-verified against issuer documents before any structural rewrite.

Corrections are made in place, and a claim that can no longer be traced to a primary source is removed rather than softened. On conflicts: we hold no positions in covered securities, accept no compensation from issuers or fund sponsors in exchange for coverage, and no company or fund appears in a list because of a commercial relationship. Full author, disclosure, and contact detail sits on the about and method page, and the site-wide terms are on the disclaimer page.