Charting the 2 in Commsec shows SELF outperforming XJO by 1%...

Charting the 2 in Commsec shows SELF outperforming XJO by 1% since it listed, so it's hardly a problem that it has backtracked. And it's meant to outperform over 1-5 years, not really 1 month. I own a fair bit of SELF, by the way.

They have infographics and more thorough documents explaining the process here - https://etf.selfwealth.com.au/

It's like - picking 50 companies from the ASX200 which they expect to be above the average of the whole ASX200, based on them being held by the better performing SMSF funds. It does sound backward looking, but the fund is rebalanced every 3 months, and seemed to outperform in about 5 of 7 years of its backtested history. If it was actually horrible and backward looking, then you'd expect consistent under-performance for most of those 3 month periods. Though that period didn't include a bear market, so who knows how it would perform then.

The ETF has gone from $100m to $106m FUM, so right now they're on track for $3x,000 fees from the ETF, though that should only increase from here.

And it's not only the clients of the trading site used as data, but more-so the SMSFs in their database, which are actually sourced externally. Though the recently released advisor platform will likely provide them with more of their own SMSF client data to use, to not be so reliant on the outsider data sharing agreement.