Money Enthusiast Agent Smith 404 OP : Distribution are based on the funds expected taxable income for the year. They must distribute a large percent of their taxable income to avoid taxes on the funds gains. To some extent they do control this by estimating their expected remaining taxable income that they need to distribute for the year and dividing it by the remaining distributions for the year and then distributing that portion. I'm not saying if it is or isn't sketchy but that's the process.

Money Enthusiast Agent Smith 404 OP : It can definitely be confusing, here's an example that could help explain it. Assume there's 10 distributions with $100 in estimated taxable income at the end of the year, you would distribute $10 since that's 1/10th the total estimate. if the next month there's a revision and you only expect 90 for the year, the previous distribution now should have been 9 instead of 10 so now the following 9 distributions need to be 1 dollar/9 months less to make up for the excess distribution resulting in around a 8.9ish distribution instead of a 9 dollar distribution. So past distributions can cause future distributions to be less in the event of a loss.