The Ruler We Measure With

How Every Call Gets Graded

An accuracy number means nothing without the ruler behind it. This page is the ruler: exactly how a sent alert becomes a win, a miss, or an exclusion on the public track record. Every threshold below is read from the same code that does the scoring, so this page cannot say one thing while the scorer does another.

The short version: we grade the direction we called, from the price when we sent it, over a window matched to the kind of event, and we publish every result.

What gets graded

Every alert that made a directional call, bullish or bearish, is graded. No sampling, no curation: if we sent it with a direction, it is on the record. Informational alerts that made no direction call have nothing to grade and are not counted either way.

Once graded, a call is locked. A miss that later turns around stays a miss. The one thing we never do is reopen old grades, because regrading history is how services in this category manufacture their numbers.

The entry price

Scoring starts from the live market price at the moment the alert was sent, not that day's close. A close-to-close measurement can hide the move that happened between our alert and the bell; measuring from the send price reflects what a subscriber acting on the alert could actually have captured. (Early records from before we stored the send price use the first close on or after the alert instead.)

The window

Different catalysts price in at different speeds, so each event class gets its own grading window, in trading days:

A tariff announcement is priced in within a session or two; insider buying is a weeks-long signal in the academic literature and gets a trading month. Grading both on the same next-day close would call working signals random.

Win, miss, or neither

Inside the window we use a first-touch read, the "triple barrier" method from quant research: a target, a stop, and a time limit. Each stock gets a symmetric price band scaled to its own daily volatility, floored at 2% and capped at 25%, so a decisive move means the same thing on a mega-cap and a micro-cap. Then, walking the daily closes:

• →If the first band touched is in the direction we called, the call is a win.
• →If the first band touched is against us, it is a miss.
• →If neither band is touched, the call is graded on the window's final close: a win only if the stock still finished in the called direction by at least 0.5%.

Everything is measured on daily closes. No intraday peaks, no cherry-picked highs: the reported move is an exit a person could actually have taken. Until a band is touched or the window ends, the call shows as developing rather than being graded early.

What gets excluded, and why

• →Moves smaller than 0.5% are recorded but not counted as a win or a miss. A stock that barely moved is not a clean read on whether the direction was right.
• →Stocks trading under $2 million a day in dollar volume are recorded but kept out of the hit rate. A move nobody could trade cleanly should not pad the number, in either direction.
• →A stock that gets halted or delisted right after an alert is marked excluded rather than silently dropped. Dropping those quietly would remove exactly the biggest wins and worst blowups from the record.

Exclusions are shown in the ledger with their reasons. They are not deletions.

When the rules change

We tighten our sending rules as the record teaches us what works. When that happens, old calls stay graded exactly as they were sent, under the rules of their day. Separately, the track record shows a clearly labeled backtest of how the ledger performs under the current rules. The two numbers are never merged, because a single number that quietly benefits from hindsight is the exact thing this page exists to rule out.

After the window closes

A window is a judgment about how long a catalyst takes to play out, and it can be wrong. So after a call is graded, we keep watching the stock and record where it stood about 30 days after the alert, in a separate internal field. If an event class keeps playing out after its window closes, that shows up in this data, and the fix is a longer window for future calls of that class.

What we never do with that data is flip old grades. A miss that came good in week three stays a miss on the record, because the version of us that sent the alert was still wrong about the timing, and the record grades the alert we sent, not the alert we wish we had sent.