Editorial Process

First published: 28 May 2026 (v1.0) — Substantively updated: 21 August 2026 (v1.1).

This page explains exactly how articles on Financial Expert Class get researched, written, fact-checked, updated, and corrected. If you are going to act on what you read here, you deserve to know where the numbers come from and who stands behind them. My editorial process is deliberately boring: source-driven, traceable, and written down. Any reader, journalist, regulator, or potential partner can audit how I work.

The site is operated by Aurum Digital Marketing LTD, a company registered in England & Wales, Companies House number 15203665, registered office Flat 18 Block N Peabody Buildings, Wild Street, London, WC2B 4BX. Trading as Financial Expert Class. The named author and editorial owner is Kestutis Balciunas — full bio on the About Me page, or reach the editorial desk via Contacts. Important reading alongside this page: the Affiliate Disclosure, the Privacy Policy, the Terms and Conditions, and the Help & FAQ.

Important YMYL notice. Financial Expert Class is educational publishing. Nothing on this site is personalised financial, tax, or legal advice. I am not authorised by the FCA (UK Financial Conduct Authority), BaFin (Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority), CySEC (Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission), KNF (Polish Financial Supervision Authority), or any other regulator to give regulated investment advice, and I do not hold myself out as doing so. Before acting on anything you read here, please consult a licensed adviser regulated in your country of tax residence.

Who actually writes the content

Every article currently published on this site is written personally by me, Kestutis Balciunas. I am 37, based in Europe, a husband and father, and I have been a self-directed dividend and ETF investor for more than eleven years on the road to financial independence (FIRE). I bought my first UCITS ETF in 2014 through a European retail broker and have been continuously invested since — through the 2015 Greek crisis, the 2018 Q4 drawdown, the March 2020 COVID crash, the 2022 bond rout, and the 2023-2024 rate-hike cycle. I am self-taught in the Bogleheads tradition — heavily shaped by John Bogle, JL Collins (The Simple Path to Wealth), Lars Kroijer (Investing Demystified), and ongoing discussion on the Bogleheads forum. I am not a licensed financial advisor, I do not hold a CFA or CFP charter, and I do not pretend otherwise.

There are currently no other authors, no freelance ghostwriters, and no anonymous bylines on Financial Expert Class. The masthead is honestly one person. If that ever changes — for example, if I commission a guest contribution from a CFA charterholder on UCITS taxation — that piece will carry the guest’s own name, a short bio, and a clear note that the piece was guest-written. Guest contributors are welcome on the same conditions I hold myself to: real expertise, real disclosure of conflicts, and willingness to be fact-checked. Pitches go to [email protected] with the subject line “Guest pitch:”. Include a one-paragraph bio, the topic you want to cover, and any conflicts of interest.

My deeper, paid analysis lives on Substack at getdividends.net, which follows the same editorial standards described on this page. Selected essays are also republished to Medium, and shorter notes go out via LinkedIn and X.

AI usage policy

Generative AI tools — including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini — are used in my workflow, and I think readers deserve to know exactly how. My rules are:

  • AI is allowed for: brainstorming article outlines, summarising long regulatory PDFs to find the section I need to read myself, suggesting alternative phrasings, generating first drafts of routine structures (e.g. a comparison table skeleton), spell-check, and translation aid between English and other European languages.
  • AI is never used for: inventing or quoting broker fees, ETF performance figures, AUM (Assets Under Management), TER (Total Expense Ratio) values, dividend yields, regulator decisions, court cases, or any statistic. AI is never used to fabricate quotations or to invent endorsements. AI is never used to pretend a piece was written by a CFA, lawyer, or other credentialed expert when it was not.
  • Human-in-the-loop is mandatory. Every published article is reviewed line-by-line by me before it goes live. Every factual claim is checked against a primary source by a human (me) — not by an AI agent. Hallucinations from AI are treated the same as any other fact-check failure: the claim either gets verified to a primary source or it gets cut.
  • No autogenerated bulk pages. I do not run programmatic AI pipelines that publish posts without human review. The publishing cadence below is intentionally slow enough to allow human checking.

As the EU AI Act (the European Union’s law on artificial intelligence, in force since 1 August 2024 with staggered application dates through 2026-2027) brings further transparency requirements into effect, and as Google updates its content guidance, this page will be updated and individual articles will carry any required AI disclosure.

By content type, the split works like this. Long-form guides and reviews: drafting and outlining may be AI-assisted; every figure is human-verified against a primary source and the final line edit is mine. Data pages and interactive tools: figures are compiled from primary sources by scripts I write and spot-check by hand; AI never supplies a number. Hero and illustrative images: AI-generated artwork, never presented as screenshots or my own account imagery. Short updates: same human fact-check, shorter pipeline. The rule that does not bend: nothing publishes without my line-by-line review.

Sources hierarchy

Not every source is equal. In plain English: this is where my numbers come from. I work down a strict three-tier hierarchy, and I prefer the highest tier available for any given claim.

Tier 1 — Primary sources (preferred for every factual claim).

Tier 2 — Secondary sources (used when primary is unavailable, always credited).

  • Morningstar for historical performance attribution and analyst commentary.
  • justETF and ETF.com for screener, overlap and listing data.
  • Bogleheads forum and Boglehead wiki for community-tested explanations of UCITS (Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities), withholding tax and asset-allocation theory.

Tier 3 — Tertiary sources (used sparingly and always cross-referenced to Tier 1 or 2).

  • Financial news outlets such as Bloomberg, Reuters, the Financial Times and Handelsblatt.
  • Reputable analyst commentary on X/Twitter, LinkedIn or YouTube — used as a pointer to a primary source, never as the source itself.

When you see a number on this site, the citation in the article should make it obvious which tier it came from. If you ever see a single Tier 3 source cited without backup, that is a bug — please flag it.

Fact-checking checklist

Every long-form article on Financial Expert Class is run through this checklist before publish, and again on every quarterly review. The checklist lives in my editorial template:

  1. TER and ongoing charges: every TER cited matches the latest issuer factsheet or KID, dated within the last 90 days. The date of the factsheet is recorded in the article footer.
  2. AUM and fund size: every AUM figure is within 7 days of the issuer or justETF source, with the snapshot date stated in the text.
  3. Regulatory claims: every claim about broker authorisation, UCITS rules, PRIIPs, MiFID II (Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II), or withholding tax links to the regulator’s own page or to the relevant primary law text — not to a blog summary.
  4. Broker fees: every commission, FX spread, custody fee, inactivity fee, or withdrawal fee is cross-checked against the broker’s own pricing page on the day of publication.
  5. Personal claims: every “I opened”, “I funded”, “I bought”, “I withdrew” claim corresponds to something I have personally done. Where it adds value and does not breach my own privacy, a redacted screenshot is included as proof.
  6. Risk language: every article mentioning specific securities includes a visible risk warning and a reminder that past performance does not predict future returns.
  7. Links: every external link is opened and checked on the day of publication and on every quarterly review; broken links are fixed or removed.
  8. Affiliate transparency: any link that is monetised is either marked inline or covered by the global notice that points to the Affiliate Disclosure.

A failed item on this checklist blocks publication. There is no “we will fix it in a follow-up”.

How first-hand testing is done

I do not review brokers I have never used. For each of the five brokers covered with affiliate links, I currently hold (or have previously held) a personally funded live account: Interactive Brokers (opened 2018), XTB (opened 2020), Nexo (opened 2021), Freedom24 (opened 2022), and Trade Republic (opened 2022). For every broker covered on Financial Expert Class — affiliate or not — I have personally:

  1. Opened an account from a European address, completing KYC (Know Your Customer identity verification) with my own ID documents.
  2. Funded the account with my own money — usually a small live deposit (a few hundred euros) to exercise the real workflow rather than a demo account.
  3. Placed at least one real ETF buy order, recording the order ticket, the executed price, and any FX conversion.
  4. Held the position long enough to observe at least one dividend, corporate action, or statement cycle where possible.
  5. Tested at least one withdrawal back to my own SEPA bank account, including any FX leg.
  6. Screenshotted the broker UI at each step — order entry, fee breakdown, dividend credit, withdrawal confirmation — with personal data redacted.
  7. Written down any friction in plain English: failed deposits, slow KYC, confusing fees, unclear tax documents.

This is why screenshots on the site show real account screens rather than stock marketing imagery. If you ever spot a screenshot that looks generic or staged, please flag it — that is not the standard.

Publishing cadence and content mix

Financial Expert Class currently publishes roughly 4-8 long-form articles per month plus updates to existing posts. The split is approximately:

  • Cornerstone content (around 20%): the deep, evergreen pillar pieces — “Best [Issuer] UCITS ETFs for European Investors” guides, broker reviews of the five active brokers, dividend-strategy explainers. These are the pages that earn most of the search traffic and are reviewed most aggressively.
  • Cluster content (around 60%): supporting articles that compare two specific ETFs, walk through a single tax concept, or answer a single broker question. These link up to the relevant cornerstone piece.
  • News and commentary (around 20%): shorter posts reacting to ECB decisions, new ETF launches, broker policy changes, or regulator announcements.

Across 183+ published posts and 14+ pages, the goal is depth over volume. I would rather refresh a strong existing guide than publish a thin new one.

Update and freshness policy

Markets, fund fees, and broker terms change constantly. To keep the site useful rather than letting it ossify, I follow this cadence:

  • Top-ranked and high-traffic posts: re-verified on a rolling, priority-first basis. A visible Reviewed date appears only when that re-verification actually happened and was logged — see “What a Reviewed date means” below.
  • Urgent updates within 14 days: when a broker changes regulatory status, an ETF closes or merges, a TER changes, a tax treatment changes, or a regulator publishes new guidance, the affected articles are updated within 14 calendar days of the change being confirmed.
  • Evergreen explainers: reviewed at minimum once per year, sooner if the underlying rules (PRIIPs, MiFID II, UCITS, withholding tax treaties) move.
  • Visible labelling: every refreshed article displays “Updated [date]” prominently near the top so you do not have to guess whether you are reading 2024 or 2026 information.

What a “Reviewed” date means (the review log)

Since August 2026 the site runs an internal review log. When I genuinely re-verify an article’s figures against their primary sources, a log entry records the date, the reviewer (me) and the scope. The visible “Reviewed [date]” badge renders only from that log — no entry, no badge. Every other article shows its honest “Published” date, or “Updated” after a substantive edit; mechanical maintenance (link fixes, formatting) deliberately does not advance any date. Until August 2026 every article showed a “Last reviewed” date regardless — that practice is over, and the change is recorded on the public Corrections page.

Verification steps before publishing

  1. Trace every figure to a primary source (issuer document, regulator, tax authority, broker pricing page) and record its “as of” date.
  2. Cross-check high-stakes numbers against a second independent source.
  3. Run the fact-checking checklist above — a failed item blocks publication.
  4. Check that internal links resolve and external citations are live.
  5. Validate schema and metadata before go-live.

How they apply per content type is documented in three methodology pages: how I rate brokers, how I compare ETFs, and how I compute tax examples.

Corrections policy

I get things wrong sometimes. When that happens — whether I spot it myself or a reader points it out — the correction is made as soon as I can verify the right answer. Every material correction is logged with the date and a one-line description of what changed, in an “Updates” section at the bottom of the article. The template I use looks like this:

Updates (illustrative format only — not a real correction log)
[Date]: [One-line description of the change, the source it was verified against, and the corrected figure or claim.]
[Date]: [Next entry — newest at the top.]

Material corrections include any change to fees, yields, regulatory status, broker rankings, or recommendations. Cosmetic fixes (typos, broken links, image swaps) are made silently because logging them would bury the corrections that actually matter. Since August 2026, every material correction is also logged centrally on the public Corrections page — dated, sourced, newest first.

How readers can flag errors

If you spot a wrong number, a stale fee, a broken link, or a claim that does not match the source — please tell me. Email [email protected] with the subject line beginning “Correction:” followed by the article URL. A useful correction email includes:

  • The exact URL of the article.
  • The sentence or figure you believe is wrong.
  • A link to the primary source you believe is correct (issuer factsheet, regulator page, broker pricing page).

My service level for corrections:

  • Within 3 working days: the reporter receives a personal acknowledgement that the correction is being investigated.
  • Within 7 working days: if the correction is confirmed against a primary source, the article is updated and an entry is added to the “Updates” log at the bottom of that article.
  • If I cannot confirm or decline to change: the reporter gets a written reply explaining why, with the source I relied on.

Conflict of interest and affiliate handling

Five brokers covered on this site — Freedom24 (CySEC-regulated), Interactive Brokers/IBKR (multi-jurisdictional, including SEC and FCA), XTB (KNF-regulated), Nexo (multi-jurisdictional crypto), and Trade Republic (BaFin-regulated) — operate affiliate programmes that may pay Aurum Digital Marketing LTD a commission when a reader opens and funds an account through a tracked link. That commercial relationship never changes which brokers I cover, what I say about them, or where they rank in a comparison. If a broker I am affiliated with has a weakness, the article says so plainly.

Full details on which links are affiliate links, the standard rates, how the commissions are received, and how editorial decisions are kept separate from commercial ones are on the Affiliate Disclosure page. There are no paid placements, no sponsored “reviews”, and no pay-to-rank arrangements. Ever.

Editorial board and reviewer roadmap

For transparency: there is currently no separate editorial board. The editorial process is owned by me, Kestutis Balciunas, as sole author and publisher. That is a single-person operation and I will not dress it up as something larger.

I would like to add a named, credentialed editorial reviewer — ideally a CFA charterholder or a qualified European tax adviser — to sign off on YMYL pieces covering taxation and regulated products. If you are such a person and the project interests you, please reach out to [email protected] with the subject line “Editorial reviewer enquiry”. When a reviewer joins, this page will name them, link to their professional profile, and explain which categories of article they review.

Style guide and formatting conventions

Articles follow a plain-English house style designed for European retail investors:

  • Short sentences. First person where I am sharing my own experience; impersonal voice where I am explaining rules.
  • Numbers: by default I use English-style decimal points throughout the site (e.g. €1,250.00, a TER of 0.20%, a yield of 3.5%) because this matches the issuer factsheets, regulator publications and broker pricing pages I am citing. When I quote directly from a continental-European source that uses comma decimals (e.g. €1.250,00), I keep that source’s format and name the currency. Currency is named explicitly (EUR, USD, GBP) on first use in every article.
  • Ticker symbols: ETF ticker symbols are italicised (e.g. VWCE, IWDA, SXR8). ISIN codes are written in full when first introduced.
  • Dates: day-month-year format (28 May 2026), to match European convention and avoid US/EU ambiguity.
  • Acronyms: spelled out on first use (e.g. “Total Expense Ratio (TER)”, “Key Information Document (KID)”).
  • No clickbait headlines and no fake urgency. If a headline implies a comparison, the comparison must actually be in the article.

Outdated content handling

If an article has not been reviewed in 18 months, it automatically receives a visible banner at the top:

This article was last updated [date]. Broker fees, ETF specifications, tax rules and regulatory status change frequently. Please verify current details on the broker’s or issuer’s official pages before acting on any figure below. If you spot something out of date, email the correction desk.

If on review I conclude that an article can no longer be reasonably maintained — for example, a broker no longer serves European clients — the article is either rewritten in full, redirected to the most relevant current page, or unpublished. I do not leave zombie content live.

Review schedule and document control

This editorial process page is itself treated as a living document and reviewed at least every six months. The version history:

  • 21 August 2026 — v1.1: added the review-log explainer, pre-publication verification steps, per-content-type AI detail, methodology-page links, and the central public corrections log.
  • 28 May 2026 — v1.0: first publication of the deep E-E-A-T editorial process page, superseding the short policy that previously lived on the About Me page. Covers AI usage policy, sources hierarchy with tiers, numbered fact-checking checklist, first-hand testing protocol, correction service levels, editorial board status, style guide, and outdated content banner policy.

Next scheduled review: 28 November 2026. Reviewer of record: Kestutis Balciunas. If you have feedback on the editorial process itself — not on a specific article — please email [email protected] with the subject line “Editorial process feedback”.

For the legal framing around all of this, see the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy. Nothing on Financial Expert Class is personalised financial advice — it is educational content from one European investor sharing how he actually invests, and how he keeps the work honest.

Selected research from Financial Expert Class

In-depth guides our readers are using right now:

Affiliate disclosure: some links in this article are affiliate links to brokers I have a relationship with. If you open an account through one, I may earn a commission — at no cost to you — and it never affects my assessment. See my full Affiliate Disclosure for how I keep editorial decisions independent.
Risk disclaimer: Investing always involves the risk of losing your capital. Past performance and predictions do not guarantee future results. Do your own research and consider consulting a qualified financial advisor before making any investment decisions.