ITAN
Sparkline Intangible Value ETF
EA Series Trust
ETF
Expense ratio1
0.50%
Net assets2
$73.15M
Holdings2
153
Category
US Equity
2025 return3
20.27%

Investment objective & strategy

As of Sept. 24, 2025 · prospectus

Objective. The Sparkline Intangible Value ETF (the Fund) seeks long-term capital appreciation.

Strategy. The Fund is an actively-managed exchange-traded fund (ETF). The Fund will invest in U.S.-listed equity securities that Sparkline Capital LP (the Sub-Adviser) believes are attractive relative to its proprietary measure of intangible-augmented intrinsic value. Unlike most traditional quantitative value strategies, the Sub-Advisers definition of intrinsic value (i.e. intangible-augmented intrinsic value) includes an assessment of both tangible assets and intangible value. Including a measurement of a companys intangible value is a crucial part of the Sub-Advisers investment process. The Sub-Adviser believes intangible value is growing increasingly important as the economy shifts from industrial to information-based. The Sub-Adviser focuses on four pillars of intangible value: (1) human capital, (2) brand equity, (3) intellectual property, and (4) network effects, each of which are … The Fund is an actively-managed exchange-traded fund (ETF). The Fund will invest in U.S.-listed equity securities that Sparkline Capital LP (the Sub-Adviser) believes are attractive relative to its proprietary measure of intangible-augmented intrinsic value. Unlike most traditional quantitative value strategies, the Sub-Advisers definition of intrinsic value (i.e. intangible-augmented intrinsic value) includes an assessment of both tangible assets and intangible value. Including a measurement of a companys intangible value is a crucial part of the Sub-Advisers investment process. The Sub-Adviser believes intangible value is growing increasingly important as the economy shifts from industrial to information-based. The Sub-Adviser focuses on four pillars of intangible value: (1) human capital, (2) brand equity, (3) intellectual property, and (4) network effects, each of which are described more below. 1. Human capital : Human capital is the value embodied by human beings. In the modern economy, the ability to attract and retain top talent can be an important source of competitive advantage, as are company cultures that motivate and nurture workers. 2. Brand equity : Well-known brand names are often able to generate sales simply due to strong consumer recognition and loyalty. Companies may invest considerable resources in building their brands, which can constitute a large component of their market value. 3. Intellectual property : Intellectual property encompasses creations of the human intellect. It includes both legally-protected patents and proprietary trade secrets. As science and technology plays a larger role in human society, intellectual property has increasingly become the primary source of value for many companies. 4. Network effects : Network effects are a phenomenon by which users of a product or service derive incremental value from the addition of other users to the network. This can make it challenging for new entrants to unseat firms with dominant market positions. As globalization and the internet increase the potential scale of networks, network effects are becoming an important type of moat. The Sub-Adviser employs a proprietary quantitative methodology to determine an estimated value of the foregoing four pillars for each company as well as to determine an estimated value of each companys tangible assets the fifth pillar. The assessment of a companys tangible and intangible value together determine its intangible-augmented intrinsic value. The Sub-Advisers valuation process does not necessarily favor a companys intangible value over its tangible value but due to four of the five pillars considered for determining a companys value involving intangible value, it is generally expected that intangible will have a higher weight than tangible value. However, the weighting of individual pillars is expected to fluctuate over time. The Sub-Adviser uses, among other sources, companies public accounting disclosures to analyze tangible assets. However, the Sub-Adviser has concluded that most companies accounting disclosures omit or give only cursory mention to their intangible value. The technical accounting definition of intangible assets is quite specific and captures only a narrow subset of the Sub-Advisers broader concept of intangible value. As a result, a key component of the Sub-Advisers process is its use of alternative data to measure intangible value. Alternative data refers to non-traditional data sources beyond conventional financial, accounting and stock price information. Examples of alternative data may include the narratives in corporate reports, patent and trademark grants, employee reviews, and social media. These examples are for illustrative purposes only; the Fund may choose to use some or none of these datasets, as well as other datasets not listed above. In general, such metrics are quite varied because each intangible pillar must be measured differently. Because alternative data is often unstructured (e.g., text, images, audio) and very large, the Sub-Adviser uses natural language processing (NLP) (a form of machine learning) in addition to traditional quantitative investment techniques to incorporate the data into its investment process. NLP is specifically designed to deal with unstructured text. The Sub-Adviser generally uses a combination of third-party and open-source NLP frameworks, which are widely used and vetted, and adapts them to the unique use case of investing. Open-source NLP frameworks are publicly available code libraries that allow users to freely perform standard NLP tasks, such as named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, and summarization. Third-party NLP frameworks refer to services that, while not fully transparent or free of cost, are accessible to public users to perform NLP tasks such as those mentioned above. This investment process is applied to a starting investment universe of the approximately largest 1,000 publicly listed U.S. securities (by market capitalization). The Sub-Adviser may remove companies from the universe if the Sub-Adviser determines they do not have a meaningful quantity of intangible value. For each company in the investment universe, the Sub-Adviser considers multiple metrics for the companys attractiveness according to each of the five pillars, and then averages those metrics to produce a score for each of the five pillars. This is because the Sub-Adviser believes that no one data source or metric is infallible and that by combining many metrics, a better result can be obtained. Finally, the composite score is created by summing across the five pillars. The Fund will then generally seek to hold the securities of the companies with the highest total scores. In determining the weighting of each stock, the Sub-Adviser may take into account various factors, including but not limited to value, market capitalization and liquidity. The Sub-Adviser is not constrained by the number of portfolio holdings, except that the Fund will generally hold at least 50 securities. The Funds investments will primarily include common stocks and may include investments in Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). Although the Fund will not concentrate its investments in a particular industry, the Sub-Adviser expects that Fund will have significant exposure to companies in the information technology sector. The Sub-Adviser will seek to continually improve its valuation models used for the Fund as new datasets, methodologies and research become available. The Sub-Adviser will also employ active risk management techniques. As a result and because the Fund seeks to be fully invested at all times, the Sub-Adviser may recommend changes to the Funds individual positions during dynamic market conditions.

Top holdings

As of Feb. 27, 2026 · N-PORT
SecurityTickerValue% of fund
AMAZON.COM INC $2.88M 3.94%
ALPHABET INC CL A $1.65M 2.26%
ALPHABET INC CL C $1.64M 2.25%
AT&T INC $1.25M 1.71%
INTEL CORP $1.24M 1.70%
CISCO SYSTEMS INC $1.24M 1.70%
INTL BUS MACH CORP $1.20M 1.64%
MERCK & CO $1.19M 1.62%
PFIZER INC $1.16M 1.59%
MICRON TECHNOLOGY INC $1.14M 1.56%
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Allocation by sector

As of February 27, 2026 · N-PORT
View portfolio breakdown →

Portfolio moves

Nov 28, 2025 → Feb 27, 2026
Opened
12
Exited
16
Increased
124
Decreased
18
Unchanged
0

How many positions this fund opened, exited, grew, trimmed, or left unchanged between its two most recent N-PORT snapshots — net changes between point-in-time reports, not a trade log.

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LSV Conservative Value Equity Fund · LSVVX, LVAVX 34% 0.35%
LSV Value Equity Fund · LSVEX, LVAEX 33% 0.67%
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Advisers

As of May 31, 2025 · N-CEN
FirmRole
Empowered Funds, LLC d/b/a EA Advisers Adviser
Sparkline Capital LP Sub-adviser

Footnotes

  1. Expense ratio as of September 24, 2025, from the fund's prospectus.
  2. Net assets and holdings count as of February 27, 2026, from the fund's N-PORT filing.
  3. Total return for calendar year 2025, before tax and after fund expenses. Computed by compounding the twelve monthly total returns the fund reported in its SEC N-PORT filings for 2025 (the latest prospectus does not yet chart this year).

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